It is highly flattering to be offered this opportunity to offer thoughts on a new grand strategy for the United States. I must admit, however, to certain reservations about the utility of such exercises. Having entered public service at the beginning of the Vietnam war and continued through the rest of the Cold War, the short lived New World Order, and the opening campaign of the War on Terror, I have become persuaded that the United States has enduring interests, friends, and values, all of which militate for a high degree of consistency in our behavior and continuity in our policies. Observation of the war in Iraq has only reinforced this view.
The contemporary schools of foreign policy – realism, Wilsonianism and neo-conservatism – provide pundits and political scientists with useful instruments for analysis but afford poor guides for future conduct. Wise presidents and legislators will pick and choose among these alternative efforts to describe and prescribe for a world that defies easy categorization, worrying less about ideological coherence and more about incremental progress toward long-term national goals which do not and should not, in the main, change from one Administration to the next.
Of course we need a national strategy, and of course it must evolve with changing circumstances, but I doubt we need a new strategy every year, or even every four or eight years. Rather than use my brief time here to lay out an entirely new and fully developed strategic construct, therefore, I feel I can better serve the Committee by explaining how our existing national security strategy should be modified in light of recent experience and changing circumstances.
