Obama to Unveil National Security Strategy
Obama to Unveil National Security Strategy
Voice of America
President Barack Obama is set to present his plan to deal with foreign policy concerns, ranging from the Islamic State to the rise of China, in a report to lawmakers.
No major policy changes are expected to be unveiled Friday in the 33-page National Security Strategy document.
Some Republican lawmakers have criticized Obama for what they feel is an insufficient response to global threats, including the Islamic State group and Russia's actions in Ukraine.
In a brief introduction to the report, President Obama defended his policies. "In a complex world, many of the security problems we face do not lend themselves to quick and easy fixes," he said.
Obama's introduction affirmed the importance of American leadership in the 21st century and said the U.S. will continue to fight extremists. But he also warned against "the overreach that comes when we make decisions based on fear."
Under a 1986 law, the president is required to submit a National Security Strategy to Congress every year, though in practice this is usually only done periodically.
The president last submitted the strategy document in 2010. Since then, he has pulled U.S. troops from Iraq and begun to wind down the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan.
But Obama now faces the question of how to deal with Islamic State extremists that have taken over large parts of Iraq and Syria and committed mass atrocities there.
White House officials are also considering providing weapons to the Ukrainian government to help in Kyiv's battle against pro-Russia separatists.
Such concerns have overshadowed President Obama's attempt to focus U.S. diplomatic, security and economic attention on Asia, where the rise of China has rattled many U.S. allies.
White House National Security Adviser Susan Rice will deliver a speech in Washington Friday that is expected to lay out the president's foreign policy plans for his final two years in office.
The first link takes you to a NSS fact sheet. Highlights follow the link.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/02/06/fact-sheet-2015-national-security-strategy
The strategy sets out the principles and priorities that describe how America will lead the world toward greater peace and a new prosperity.
We will lead with purpose, guided by our enduring national interests and values and committed to advancing a balanced portfolio of priorities worthy of a great power.
•We will lead with strength, harnessing a resurgent economy, increased energy security, an unrivaled military, and the talent and diversity of the American people.
•We will lead by example, upholding our values at home and our obligations abroad.
•We will lead with capable partners, mobilizing collective action and building partner capacity to address global challenges.
•We will lead with all instruments of U.S. power, leveraging our strategic advantages in diplomacy, development, defense, intelligence, science and technology, and more.
•We will lead with a long-term perspective, influencing the trajectory of major shifts in the security landscape today in order to secure our national interests in the future.
It addresses the four enduring NSS interests:
We will advance the security of the United States, its citizens, and U.S. allies and partners by: . . . .
We will advance a strong, innovative, and growing U.S. economy in an open international economic system that promotes opportunity and prosperity by: . . . .
We will advance respect for universal values at home and around the world by: . . . .
We will advance an international order that promotes peace, security, and opportunity through stronger cooperation to meet global challenges by: . . . .
The following link takes you to the actual strategy.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/2015_national_security_strategy_2.pdf
But a strategy it is not as it somehow misses the reality of the world around us in the 21st century.
Recommended: Obama’s new 2015 National Security Strategy bears very little relation to reality, says @elilake http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-02-06/obama-s-middle-east-fantasy-in-the-national-security-strategy …
War in Ukraine Direct Result of Russia’s Turn to Fascism, Eidman Says http://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2015/02/war-in-ukraine-direct-result-of-russias.html …
Well worth the read as it concerns our strategy failures in the Ukraine.
As he alludes as I do often here will NATO actually pull the Article 5 trigger when a bunch of Russian speakers roam the streets of Riga complaining about the Russian language and their culture being discriminated against—and they will not pull the trigger.
http://20committee.com/2015/02/08/is-this-the-end-of-nato/
Taken from the article:
To be fair to Europe, Washington, DC, has hardly been telegraphing resolve either. My proposal to send Ukraine defensive weaponry, which looked like it might be in the offing, by this weekend looked dead, though this White House sends so many mixed messages one can never be exactly sure. Late this week, the Obama administration unveiled its new National Security Strategy, amid less than fanfare, with the execrable Susan Rice explaining in “remain calm, all is well!” fashion that things are really much better globally than they look. This White House’s new foreign policy mantra is Strategic Patience, which seems to be the been-to-grad-school version of “don’t do stupid shit.” Since nobody inside the Beltway is taking this eleventh-hour effort to articulate Obama’s security strategy seriously, it’s doubtful anyone abroad, much less in Moscow, will either.
It’s therefore unsurprising that European leaders are in full-panic mode about what Putin will do next. The serious possibility that the Chekist-in-Charge in the Kremlin will seek more provocations, and possibly a major war, to achieve his strategic aim of establishing Russian control over the former Soviet space and therefore dominance over Eastern Europe, is reducing weak-willed Western leaders like Merkel and Hollande to political incoherence.
It seems to have never occurred to them, nor Obama and his national security staff either, that crushing the Russian economy with sanctions might bring more, not less, aggression from Putin, even though that was an obvious possibility. Jaws dropped this week when Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who until recently was NATO’s civilian head, stated that it is highly likely that Russia will soon stage a violent provocation against a Baltic state, which being NATO countries, will cause a crisis over the Alliance’s Article 5 provision for collective self-defense. Rasmussen merely said what all defense experts who understand Putin already know, but this was not the sort of reality-based assessment that Western politicians are used to hearing.
When the White House published its previous NSS in 2010, “Gulliver” at the Ink Spots blog published a post entitled “The 2010 National Security Strategy sucks, and I’m gonna tell you why“. The author argued that because the White House had presented virtually every element of its domestic agenda as being endemic to national security, the 2010 NSS didn’t actually amount to much. Having looked through the fact sheet, my impression is that one could make precisely the same observations today that “Gulliver” elucidated five years ago. As with the prior edition, this document appears to be primarily for domestic consumption, rather than serving as a coherent outline of desired ends from whence to define corresponding ways and allocate corresponding means.
Just a side comment do a word search on Islam and you might if lucky find it mentioned just 2 or 3 times in the entire section referencing IS then do a word such on the standard US “feel good” words and there must be about 80-120 mentioned in the entire NSS.
While it is say a high level document intended to state say an overview while everything else on implementation is “hidden” my and others complaints are even the high view is totally weak and does not actually address the serious security concerns of say the last two years reference IS and Russia.
There should have been also a stronger nuclear weapons section as that is staring us in the face with a 380B modernization bill as our nuclear capabilities are aging far more than this WH wants us to know. currently the new Russian weapons are far more advanced and they have removed MAD from the table–noticed nothing about that in the NSS.
If one goes back to say the NSS from 2010—just barely a paragraph on Russia and what we are seeing was already in gear from the Russians starting in 2008—ever wonder why.
Sounds strange but a hardcore Democrat who bashed Bush for years stated the other day during a meeting–that this has been for the last six years a disaster at the NSC/WH levels and even Bush was more focused.
Notice how even in this thread we seem to ignored the just what the heck is “strategic patience”?
But if we see that this WH tends to “wait out problems” then just maybe “strategic patience” means if we wait long enough the problem will simply disappear—let’s just focus on the massive Syrian failure as a great example of this “patience” and the lack of serious attention.
260K killed, 2M refugees outside Syria, 1M internal on the move, Assad still in power, red lines in the sand, chemical gas used on civilians and still being used, barrel bombs and countless air strikes on civilians—so exactly what has been achieved by this WH?
Then go back into the document and one finds it is just a “buzz word”. or “feel good” word.
I can take this list further.
So after reading the Russian portion of he NSS does the WH and the NSC now have to rewrite it after the below.
Seems as if Russia is not adhering to the from them signed Minsk Agreement which states publicly for all to see Ukraine is to regain control over the Russian Ukrainian border and the check points.
So since we seem to have thought it was a Russian incursion instead of an invasion is this then the Russian annexation of eastern Ukraine and what about the threat that have been growing for the Baltics in the last months?
#Lavrov says #Ukraine trying to restore full control over border with #Russia is ‘unrealistic’ as condition for peace deal -Reuters
So what it is to be more talk that has led to nothing or finally defensive weapons in order to simply defend one’s sovereignty?
When one reads the NSS concerning Russia and then reads the various items below one really does wonder exactly what world the NSC lives in.
With the President’s remark it is even more interesting simply because if one has been following first the Soviet Union from say 1990 onwards and then Russia –it has always been expansionist especially in the period of 1990-1993 when it put down various East Bloc nation moves to leave the SU.
If one reads the 1990 article then you actually do see when compared to current events a “plan” that Putin is working one AND if you fully have read and understood Dugin their chief ideologue’s Russian fascism articles he has written over the years AND if you are fully aware of Russian support for the ultra right wing nationalist parties in all of Europe then why would the current Russian activities have been a “surprise” to anyone in the NSC.
It has been over the last six years amazing just how little this NSC understands both the ME and Russia.
Notice that in fact Russia is in the actual process of militarily annexing eastern Ukraine and yet this WH and this NSC somehow ignores using the “word annexation via the Russian Army” when it talks about Putin or the Russian Army activities inside the Ukraine.
Assume Putin is running off of Eduard Volodin’s 1990 proposal: what then? pic.twitter.com/OayDqHlD3Y
US Army Europe comdr Ben Hodges: Russian troops intervening directly in fighting in Debaltseve http://m.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/ukraine-peace-talks/article22906976/?service=mobile … pic.twitter.com/E3Wl9dY4DH
Obama says a weak Russian economy is bad for the US because it could make Russia “revert to old expansionist ideas.” http://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/buzzfeed-news-interview-president-obama?utm_term=.ffeZPKOrX …
Russia is carrying out what increasingly resembles a full-scale military occupation of sovereign Ukrainian territory http://edition.cnn.com/2015/02/11/politics/ukraine-disconnect/index.html …
Regarding the “domestic” focus of the 2010 and 2015 NSSs — as discussed by “thedrosophil” below — should we see the decision by Obama to use this approach through the following lens; which seems to emphasize persuasion by “example” rather than coercion via force:
“This did not mean that the United States had to dominate the world in order to be secure in it. Both Eisenhower and Dulles saw the capacity to tolerate diversity as a strength, one not shared by the Russians. ‘We do not assume that we have any mandate to run the world,’ the Secretary of State insisted. ‘Nothing indeed would be less in keeping with our traditions and our ideals.’ Eisenhower was particularly sensitive to the possibility that the United States might become too overbearing in its dealings with other countries. ‘We are so proud of our guarantees of freedom in thought and speech and worship,’ he wrote in a note to himself early in 1954, ‘that, unconsciously, we are guilty of one of the greatest errors that ignorance can make — we assume that our standard of values is shared by all other humans in the world.’ Later that year, he resorted to a military analogy to make the same point: ‘A platoon leader doesn’t get his platoon to go that way by getting up and saying, ‘I am smarter, I am bigger, I am stronger, I am the leader.’ He gets men to go with him because they want to do it for him, because they believe in him.”
(From page 130 of the paperback edition of John Lewis Gaddis’ “Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar [WWII] American National Security Policy,” Oxford University Press 1982.)
Thus, the distinction between (a) the NSSs offered by earlier post-Cold War presidents and (b) the 2010 and present national security strategies offered by President Obama being that:
a. The former presidents’ approach were characterized by such (self-defeating?) ideas as (1) a mandate to run the world, (2) chest thumping accordingly and (3) a non-tolerance of diversity; all of which Eisenhower and Dulles associated with the Soviet Union and its strategy of “expansion.” While,
b. The latter (Obama’s NSSs) being more in-line with a tolerance of diversity, a view that one had no need — or implied right — to “run” the world and that, accordingly, “leadership by example” (the platoon leader approach) was, thus, the right way to go. (Thus, ideas and concepts favored by Eisenhower.)
These such ideas (see “b” immediately above) causing Obama to determine that our/his national security strategies must be focused more on getting our own house (rather than someone else’s) in order. Thus, the “domestic” focus/emphasis?
To sum up: Desired ends? To be able to achieve what we want in the world (peace, prosperity, security, maintaining, expanding and improving our way of life); this, by leading from the front and, this, by leading by example.
Check the NSS for comments on Iran and now this–often the US leadership seems to forget that Khomeini drove the Green Crescent and Revolutionary Islam.
Tehran sources: Iran sending military advisory mission to Sanaa.
“Yemen is a forward post of Islamic Revoltion”, says Gen Suleimani.
One of the reasons the NSS got it wrong on Russia—some see it as well as I do–we are in fact already at war with Russia and the US leadership seems to have “missed it”.
Remember war in the 21st century has and does take many different forms and does not have to be tank on tank as is in the Ukraine. That simple fact got lost in the diffuse debate on what is or is not a hybrid war.
If one goes back and reviews articles and various comments on “hybrid warfare” just how many of those articles and or comments do in fact point to specific phases of the Russian UW strategy to support their arguments?–no one does that but yet to discuss “hybrid warfare” it requires an intense understanding of those eight phases and how they support each other which allows then an extremely effective political warfare to unfold.
‘The West and Russia are already at war’. An interview with NYU’s Mark Galeotti https://meduza.io/en/feature/2015/02/13/the-west-and-russia-are-already-at-war …