Yesterday I went to a 2 hour discussion on the new National Security Strategy... the guys doing the talking have incredible bios, and work just down the hall. ;-)
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http://www.defensenews.com/story.php?F=1634301&C=america
“It’s a good document. I like it,” said Daalder, who served on President Bill Clinton’s National Security Council.
The new strategy, released by the White House in mid March, represents a step backward, and that’s good, Daalder contends.
“It’s very pre-Bush. It’s Clinton redux,” he said at the Brookings Institution, whence he retreated after serving Clinton for two years.The new strategy means “the Bush revolution is over,” Daalder declared March 21.
The revolution began in 2002, when Bush issued his first national security strategy and announced the U.S. policy of preemptive use of military force.
The new strategy doesn’t renounce preemptive military strikes, but downplays them. And in contrast to the 2002 document, it stresses cooperating with allies and friends.
There’s more emphasis on building democracies around the world and less on simply replacing disliked regimes.
Not all of Daalder’s Brookings colleagues are so reassured.
The strategy reiterates Bush’s earlier commitment to spreading democracy, and it “plunges ahead” with little acknowledgement of the difficulties encountered in efforts to spread democracy, said Martin Indyk, U.S. ambassador to Israel during Clinton’s presidency.
The new strategy “argues for taking the long view” that democracy will take root and conditions will improve over the next 50 years, Indyk said. But “in the long term, we’ll all be dead, starting with a lot of people in the Middle East,” he said.
In a departure from policies followed by Presidents Clinton, George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, Bush’s strategy and policies have abandoned the goal of maintaining stability in the Middle East, Indyk said.
Even on democratization, the Bush administration is getting it wrong, Indyk said. “Democratization has morphed into an almost mindless pursuit of elections.”
The problem is that in some cases, like Palestine, terrorists win the elections. The very forces the United States seeks to defeat through democracy are using democracy to come to power, he said.
A former Bush aide, Richard Falkenrath, said that making the promotion of democracy “the centerpiece” of the national security strategy creates “tension” in instances where the United States must turn for assistance to nondemocratic nations.
In the war on terrorism, for example, the United States depends on help from Jordan and Saudi Arabia, both monarchies. To promote democracy there would be to destabilize the governments of needed allies, he said. Falkenrath is a former deputy assistant to Bush.