This Is the Problem With President Trump's National Security Strategy
http://time.com/5071547/donald-trump-national-security-strategy-2/
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A few problems:
One, if, as the strategy document asserts, the president wants to promote U.S. values and expand U.S. influence around the world, he’s going to need help. U.S. rivals are stronger than they used to be, and U.S. influence has diminished as the Cold War recedes into history. To pressure
North Korea,
press China on trade, beat back
challenges from Russia, exert more influence in the Middle East and battle terrorism, he’s going to need allies. The Middle East is only becoming more combustible.
ISIS is defeated in Iraq and Syria, but its fighters are returning home and posing new threats, and the group’s influence continues in cyberspace. These are not battles that should be fought without friends.
Two, the first time the president tweets something that appears to contradict the new strategy, how should the world understand the contradiction? Does Trump believe his own strategy? How does the principle of
“America First” square with plans to promote democracy in other countries? How much will the administration expect taxpayers to invest in the democracy promotion project? The strategy doesn’t answer these questions, and the distance between Trump’s rhetoric and some of the more high-minded, values-based principles in the document obscure more than they reveal. In fact, the speech Trump used to introduce the document had plenty of contradictions of its own. He would have done better to simply release the strategy.
Three, leaders lead by example. Everyone in the world can see that the United States has become a bitterly divided country, and that there is no longer any pretense that “politics stops at the water’s edge.” There is as much petty partisan bickering over foreign policy as over domestic policy. In that sense, the Cold War era is well and truly finished. Add the president’s indifference to rule of law in the United States, and there is little chance that the governments and citizens of other countries will welcome Washington’s advice on how to build a healthy democracy.
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Trump’s National Security Strategy Deserves to Be Ignored
https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/12/18/trumps-national-security-strategy-deserves-to-be-ignored/
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This disconnect between the careful formulation of policy guidance and actual policymaking is worth keeping in mind when reading the Trump administration’s own
NSS, which was released today. The NSS is intended to provide strategic yet prioritized guidance from which national security agencies base their own guidance documents, budgets, directives, and policies.
In reality, however, every NSS published since Congress mandated them under the Goldwater-Nichols defense reorganization legislation of 1986 was either quickly forgotten or never implemented in any meaningful way in the first place. Foreign policy always proceeds at its own idiosyncratic pace: Wars of choice are chosen, alleged allies go their own way, unforeseen threats emerge, and congressional appropriators refuse to provide predictable funding — and nobody consults the NSS along the way.....
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