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| 1 |
ID:
155257
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| Summary/Abstract |
A change in U.S. administrations can often result in significant policy shifts. However, in the case of South Asia, with marked exceptions, U.S. policy has been mostly consistent. That said, the new administration will confront important challenges at global, regional, and bilateral levels that involve South Asia. To that end, the administration will have to deal with questions of climate change, global trade, and transnational terror. It will also have to confront the nettlesome question of the future of Afghanistan as well as the growing religious intolerance and conflict in the overall region. Finally, given India’s significance to the region and beyond, it will need to devise policies designed to place the bilateral relationship on a more secure footing.
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| 2 |
ID:
155259
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| Summary/Abstract |
This essay, written before Donald J. Trump’s election as 45th President of the United States, sought to divine a “Trump doctrine” on national security and foreign policy, based on what Mr. Trump himself said and wrote over the preceding decades. It shows Mr. Trump’s sympathy for a unilateralist (but not the pejorative isolationist of which some charge him) approach to defining American interests and for strategic ambiguity in dealing with America’s adversaries. There, in fact, is a sizeable body of material from which to discern the contours of his thinking in these areas, much of it quite prescient. What some find disorientating is that Mr. Trump never felt compelled to synthesize it into a definitive “Trump doctrine,” or at least not one that satisfied the orthodoxy.
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| 3 |
ID:
155253
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The next president should elevate the role of U.S. defense strategy and planning in the next administration toward the goal of developing a new strategic framework that assumes a long-term defense competition with both Russia and China. This goal will require a thorough overhaul of the resource assumptions of the Obama defense budget and future years defense program. The next Administration should also seek the removal of the resource constraints imposed by the Budget Control Act of 2011. To support a new strategic framework, the United States will have to sustain defense spending at a higher, yet affordable level, for the long term.
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| 4 |
ID:
155260
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“Those who consider the matter for a minute or two,” writes Philip Zelikow, a former official in the George W. Bush State Department and now professor of History at the University of Virginia, “realize that historical reasoning is as common in public affairs as oxygen is in water.” And yet, as the contributors to The Power of the Past agree, in institutional terms, the relationship between history and policy is “intimate but frequently dysfunctional.” The dysfunction is not for lack of awareness or trying. The craft of bringing historical knowledge to bear on contemporary policy problems has long been the aim of astute decision makers and has produced no shortage of corresponding academic volumes. Perhaps, the most notable of these—Ernest May and Richard Neustadt’s Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decisionmakers (1986)—is an explicit influence on the editors and contributors here.
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| 5 |
ID:
155250
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| Summary/Abstract |
Donald Trump’s unexpected victory in the 2016 U.S. presidential election will bring to the Oval Office a person with no past political experience. Having run on a foreign policy platform that, at times, challenged the established bipartisan orthodoxy in Washington, he must also deal with a Congress which, although nominally dominated by his own political party, is more likely to wish to exercise a close check on the new administration. Given the chill between the Republican party’s foreign policy establishment and the President-elect and with the proviso that the new Chief Executive will need to get Senatorial confirmation for his nominees to the top echelons of the executive branch departments, it raises the possibility that the new team will continue with trends already noticeable in the last three presidential administrations: to shift the focal point of decision-making away from the national security bureaucracy and the Cabinet in favor of the “palace” of advisors and White House staff surrounding the president.
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| 6 |
ID:
155255
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Past Chinese policy has proved deficient in managing the Sino-American relationship. Your administration should break with past assumptions, cease allowing China to set the agenda, be aware of specious Chinese claims based on distortions of history, avoid using meaningless or misleading terms in speaking of the relationship, be cognizant of the tendency of some China specialists to self-censor, establish clear guidelines for the limits of U.S. tolerance of Chinese behavior, and be prepared to respond forcefully if they are transgressed Be aware that failure to do so will be regarded as acquiescence to Chinese claims and an invitation to advance future claims.
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| 7 |
ID:
155248
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The most important national security challenge for the next president will be rebuilding a domestic consensus on America’s role in the world. Unless the president can answer fundamental questions voters are asking, she or he will be hobbled in foreign policy. Only having done that can our next president proceed to adopt policies and develop strategies that manage a rising China and a declining Russia, organize countries with common interests to stanch the wildfires burning in the Middle East, and reclaim for our country the international stature that fosters our security and prosperity.
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| 8 |
ID:
155254
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Russia has proved a confounding counterpart to American political leaders over the past decade. To the veritable Rubik’s Cube that is today’s complex international security environment, American leaders too often react with simplism. Some seem unable or unwilling to articulate a contemporary doctrine to guide U.S. foreign policy vis-à-vis Russia, the resurgence of ethno-nationalism, and other contemporary challenges. Faith in the directional march of capital “H” History or the curative effect of Globalism and like nostrums is a poor substitute for a well explicated statement of American geopolitical interests.
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| 9 |
ID:
155256
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America’s next president must embrace risk to cope with rising Chinese sea power. The incoming administration should pivot to the Asia-Pacific more boldly than the Obama administration has. As it does so, Washington must accept risk to its interests and forces to uphold freedom of the sea, and it must impress upon Beijing that infringing on freedom of the sea in the South China Sea or elsewhere carries unacceptable risks for China’s interests and forces. Rediscovering the art of imposing risk will let the incoming administration hold that which China treasures at risk, should China persist with its belligerence.
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| 10 |
ID:
155251
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Although the recent presidential campaign did not focus on foreign policy, the new President will confront major international challenges and be expected both to make difficult decisions about ongoing conflicts and chart a course for the future. This essay sketches the international situation at the end of the Obama Administration and suggests a course of realistic engagement that recognizes the limits of American power in defense of national interests.
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| 11 |
ID:
155258
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One of Donald Trump’s stated priorities when he becomes President is to kill the Nuclear Deal with Iran, one of the key legacies President Barack Obama wishes to leave. This article develops a memorandum for President Obama to consider sending to his successor that proposes a series of steps to be taken, with the support of our negotiating partners, on how to make the deal more supportive of the nation’s security interests, avoiding the difficult and dramatic step of pulling out of the agreement. A four-part scenario, triggered by an assumed Iranian abrogation of the deal, is employed as a means of gaining insights for drafting this memo.
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| 12 |
ID:
155261
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The post-Cold War world defined by the spread of Euro-Atlantic institutions, practices, and values across the rest of the world has come to an end. Russia’s projections of military force abroad, Western populations voting to assert national sovereignty over transnational integration, and the economic powerhouses of Asia, China and India, delivering enviable growth rates all demonstrate that a new political order is in the making.
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| 13 |
ID:
155252
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| Summary/Abstract |
To guide the development of the armed forces’ future, the incoming president will want to offer guidance to the Pentagon on grand strategy and the supporting principles and planning framework to size and shape the joint warfighting force. This strategic direction will be a critical aspect of the initial national security planning effort and will provide guidance as to the number of kinds of wars that the Pentagon must be prepared to deter or win should deterrence fail. This article offers options and guidance for two major components of U.S. defense policy. These are Design Principles and alternative Force Design Constructs. These force constructs are not the strategy itself, but they are the requisite building blocks and guidance which defense policymakers use to shape the desired force and explain that force in its requests for the funding required from the American people.
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| 14 |
ID:
155249
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| Summary/Abstract |
The 2016 presidential election demonstrated the rise of a “restraint constituency” in American politics that openly questions Washington’s bipartisan post-Cold War pursuit of a grand strategy of primacy or liberal hegemony. This constituency has been animated by the return of the Jacksonian tradition of American foreign policy, most notably in the candidacy of Donald Trump, which directly questions the benefits of alliance relationships as well as U.S. underwriting of an open global economic system. It also stresses the need for the United States to act unilaterally in defense of its core foreign policy interests. The resurgence of the Jacksonian tradition will make it difficult for the next President to reestablish a foreign policy consensus and combat perceptions of American decline.
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