G. Stewart has kindly pointed me in the direction of the final report
of the Princeton Project on National Security. The significance of this report, as
journalist Jim Lobe notes below, is not limited to its policy recommendations
that differ with the Bush 43 administration, but the broad consensus implied by
its sizeable task force, co-chaired by former Reagan Sec. of State George
Schultz and Carter Policy Planning Director and Clinton foreign policy advisor,
Dr. Anthony Lake.
The question is, will this intelligentsia report create, generate or
revive a return to more balanced foreign policy and domestic priorities? Is
this the pendulum swinging back from the largely secretive but highly
influential neoconservative and hawkish, ‘Project for a New American Century’
with its outlines for an assertive American empire?
Here is the link to audio at the Princeton Project website. http://www.wws.princeton.edu/ppns/aboutus.html.
Silly me, I tried to attach the PDF of the final report for your convenience, and
belatedly realized it was much too large for the FW filter but the Executive
Summary is a mere 5 pages if you download. Below, I made two formatting changes
for reading clarity from Lobe’s useful summary. KwC
Executive Summary opens with:
Objectives
1.
A secure homeland, including protection
against attacks on our people and infrastructure and against fatal epidemics;
2.
A healthy global economy, which is
essential for our own prosperity and security;
3.
A benign international environment,
grounded in security cooperation among nations and the spread of liberal
democracy.
Criteria needed to
achieve these 21st Century strategic goals must be:
1.
Multidimensional, operating like a Swiss
Army knife able to deploy different tools for different situations;
2.
Integrated, fusing hard power with soft
power;
3.
Interest-based rather than threat-based;
4.
Grounded in hope rather than fear;
5.
Pursued inside-out, strengthening
domestic capacity, integrity and accountability of other governments [towards]
international order and capacity;
6.
Adapted to the information age, enabling
fast and flexible response, whether for time-limited small responses or broader
plans against terrorist attack.
An alternative way forward for the US
By Jim Lobe, in Asia
Times, Sept. 29, 2006
WASHINGTON - After
two years of consultations with more than 400 members of the US foreign-policy
elite, a project
headed by two leading international-relations academics is calling for the
adoption of a new grand strategy designed to address multiple threats and
strengthen Washington's commitment to a reformed and reinvigorated multilateral
order.
In a wide-ranging report released in Washington on Wednesday, the Princeton Project on National Security suggested that the policies pursued by President GW Bush
since September 11, 2001, had been simplistic - even counter-productive - for
the challenges facing the United States in the 21st century.
To be effective, according to the report, US policy needed to rely less on
military power and more on other tools of diplomacy; less on its own strength
exercised unilaterally and more on cooperation with other democratic states;
and less on rapid democratization based on popular elections and more on
building what it called "popular, accountable, rights-regarding [PAR]
governments".
The report also calls for performing "radical surgery" on the
international institutions created in the aftermath of World War II, including significantly increasing
membership in the United Nations Security Council and developing a
"Concert of Democracies" that would provide an alternative forum for
collective action, including the use of force.
On more specific issues, it calls for Washington to "take the lead in
doing everything possible" to achieve a comprehensive two-state solution
to the Israel-Palestine conflict; to offer Iran security assurances in exchange
for its agreement not to develop a nuclear-weapons capacity; and to neither
"block or contain" China, but rather to "help it achieve its
legitimate ambitions within the current international order".
The project and its
90-page report, "Forging a World of Liberty Under Law:
US National Security in the 21st Century", was co-directed by the head of Princeton University's Woodrow
Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Anne-Marie Slaughter, and John Ikenberry, a prominent international-relations
scholar at the school.
Of greater significance, however, is the high-level and bipartisan cast of its participants. Honorary co-chairs of the project
included George Shultz, who served as secretary of state under the late president
Ronald Reagan and is considered particularly influential with the current
secretary, Condoleezza Rice, and Anthony Lake, national security adviser under
president Bill Clinton.
The project's 13 steering committee members and seven task forces that
addressed different aspects of national security were also drawn from experts
from or identified with both major political parties, while institutional
co-sponsors included the major centrist think-tanks, ranging from the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace and the Brookings Institution on the left to the Hoover Institution on the right.
In that respect, the report appeared to be an effort to forge a consensus
framework for the mainly Republican "realist" and mainly Democratic
"liberal internationalist" schools that dominated US
foreign-policy-making in the post-World War II era until the September 11
attacks when nationalist and neo-conservative hawks in the Bush administration
launched their "global war on terror".
Thus, at the report's official Capitol Hill launch, sponsored by the
"radical centrist"
New America
Foundation, the two keynote speakers were high-level
political symbols of both schools - Republican realist Senator Chuck Hagel and Democratic internationalist Senator Joseph Biden - both sharp critics of the administration's conduct of
the "war on terror". (KwC: both of these men are likely 2008
presidential candidates)
Indeed, conspicuously
missing among the institutional sponsors of the project were two key
think-tanks - the neo-conservative American
Enterprise Institute and the right-wing Heritage Foundation -
that have been most closely associated with the Bush administration's more
radical policies, including its 2002 National Security Strategy, as well as the
invasion of Iraq.
A few prominent neo-conservatives and aggressive nationalists, such as Weekly
Standard editor Bill Kristol and
Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, were among the individuals who participated in the
project's consultations.
While Slaughter stressed that the final report and recommendations did not
represent a formal consensus of all participants or even necessarily of the two
honorary co-chairs, she said, "There was agreement across the political
spectrum on a comprehensive approach." Most participants, she said, would
agree with most of the analysis and recommendations.
Three specific aims - securing the
homeland against hostile attacks or fatal epidemics, building a healthy global
economy, and promoting a "benign international environment, grounded in
security cooperation among nations and the spread of liberal democracy" -
should constitute Washington's basic objectives, according to the report.
To achieve those objectives, the report offers a number of general and specific
recommendations, many of which contain implicit criticisms of the Bush
administration. It calls, for example, for
Ø
"fusing hard power - the power to coerce -
and soft power - the power to attract"; and
Ø
"building frameworks of cooperation centered
on common interests with other nations rather than insisting that they accept
our prioritization of common threats".
While it applauds Bush's advocacy of democratization in principle, the
report calls for greater efforts to bring non-democratic governments "up
to PAR" - that is, "a much more sophisticated strategy of creating
the deeper conditions for successful liberal democracy - preconditions that
extend far beyond the simple holding of elections".
Similarly, with respect to military power and
the use of force, "Instead of insisting on a doctrine of
primacy, the United States should aim to sustain the military predominance of
liberal democracies and encourage the development of military capabilities of
like-minded democracies in a way that is consistent with their security
interests."
While endorsing Bush's position that "preventive strikes represent a
necessary tool in fighting terror networks ... they should be proportionate and
based on intelligence that adheres to strict standards". Similarly, the preventive use of force
against states "should be very rare, employed only as a last resort and
authorized by a multilateral institution - preferably a reformed Security
Council".
In addition to specifically
calling for
Ø
greater US effort and balance in promoting an Israeli-Palestinian peace
settlement and
Ø
offering security guarantees to Iran, the report urges Washington to
Ø
reduce its ambitions in Iraq from full
democratization to PAR, ( Popular, Accountable and Rights-regarding government)
Ø
redeploy US troops in ways that would encourage Iraqis to take more
responsibility, and,
Ø
in the event of civil war, contain its regional impact. At the same
time, Washington should
Ø
promote the construction of regional institutions modeled on the
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
The report also assails administration efforts at "framing the struggle against terrorism as a
war similar to World War II or the Cold War" because "it lends
legitimacy and respect to an enemy that deserves neither; the result is to
strengthen, not degrade our adversary". Instead of a "global war on
terror", Washington should employ a "global counterinsurgency" strategy that focuses on global law enforcement, intelligence and
special operations.
To combat radicalization in the Islamic world, Washington should also make
clear that it is willing to work with "Islamic governments and
Islamic/Islamist movements, including fundamentalists, as long as they disavow
terrorism". "It is time to unite our country and our allies, while
dividing our enemies - rather than the other way around," said Ikenberry.
On energy, the project called for
going much further than the administration has proposed to reduce US reliance
on Middle East oil by adopting a tax on gasoline that would begin at 50 cents
per gallon (about 13 cents a liter) and increase by 20 cents per year for each
of the next years. It also called for stricter automobile fuel-efficiency
standards and for US leadership in devising new ways to reduce emissions of
greenhouse gases.
