[Salon] The 2018 National Defense Strategy: Continuity and Competition, from Strategic Studies Quarterly ♦ Summer 2018

"Instead of reflecting on the strategic blunders of the past 16 years, the administration embraces the mistaken notion that a more muscular approach to American foreign policy improves our relative power position. The NDS depicts the emerging security environment as “more complex and volatile than any we have experienced in recent memory” and warns the “long-standing rules-based international order” is under severe threat. Both China and Russia are building militaries to com- pete with the United States, North Korea has acquired nuclear weapons, Iran has grown more aggressive across the Middle East, and operations continue unabated against jihadist terrorists. Given the United States has been the single most powerful state in that global order, could it be that the militarized and forward-leading foreign policy of the last two decades contributed to these worrisome trends?

"Regardless, this NDS advances the same self-defeating, unnecessary, and costly strategic prescriptions as the Clinton, Bush, and Obama ad- ministrations. It characterizes the past 16-plus years as “a period of strategic atrophy” when it has been anything but. The US has not suffered from an absence of strategy but has instead pursued a consistent strategy of primacy since the end of the Cold War. From the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to military interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo, Libya, and Syria as well as counterterrorism worldwide and freedom-of-navigation operations in the Persian Gulf and the Pacific, the US has consistently sought to remain the strongest military power in the world and shown a willingness to use military force to shape the global order.

"Unfortunately, this muscular strategic approach has been largely unsuccessful. Strategic activism has generated predictable pushback from

6 Strategic Studies Quarterly ♦ Summer 2018

The 2018 National Defense Strategy: Continuity and Competition

other states and nonstate actors. Together with the National Security Strategy, this NDS adheres to the same grand strategy of primacy as practiced for nearly 30 years, supported by a massive increase in defense spending. But more of the same is likely only to reproduce the same pat- tern of strategic frustration that the US has experienced since the end of the Cold War: irremediable disorder and self-generated threats.

"What is the United States to do? For most academic realists, the answer is clear: focus a more restrained grand strategy on preventing Chinese dominance of the Indo-Pacific region. Since the US is relatively secure and therefore faces few threats to its safety, it need not engage in un- necessary, risky, and costly military activities in a fruitless attempt to preserve American global primacy. History attests repeatedly to the self- defeating nature of great power ambitions and warns against the risks of actively pursuing power-maximizing strategies. For the past 30 years, the American hegemonic project has proved both unsustainably expensive and strategically illusory."