- How American “Strategy” Went Astray
To ensure that America remains the world’s strongest, richest, most powerful, and most successful country for decades to come, our country needs a coherent, focused strategy for how we interact with the world. And to get that right, all Americans need to know what, exactly, it is we are trying to do and why. - A “strategy” is a concrete, realistic plan that explains the essential connection between ends and means: it begins from an accurate assessment of what is desired and what tools are available, or can realistically be created, to achieve the desired outcomes.
- A strategy must evaluate, sort, and prioritize. Not every country, region, issue, or cause—however worthy—can be the focus of American strategy. The purpose of foreign policy is the protection of core national interests; that is the sole focus of this strategy. American strategies since the end of the Cold War have fallen short—they have been laundry lists of wishes or desired end states; have not clearly defined what we want but instead stated vague platitudes; and have often misjudged what we should want.
- After the end of the Cold War, American foreign policy elites convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country. Yet the affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests.
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Competence and Merit – American prosperity and security depend on the development and promotion of competence. Competence and merit are among our greatest civilizational advantages: where the best Americans are hired, promoted, and honored, innovation and prosperity follow. Should competence be destroyed or systematically discouraged, complex systems that we take for granted—from infrastructure to national security to education and research—will cease to function. Should merit be smothered, America’s historic advantages in science, technology, industry, defense, and innovation will evaporate. The success of radical ideologies that seek to replace competence and merit with favored group status would render America unrecognizable and unable to defend itself. At the same time, we cannot allow meritocracy to be used as a justification to open America’s labor market to the world in the name of finding “global talent” that undercuts American workers. In our every principle and action, America and Americans must always come first.
Building up the healthy nations of Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe through commercial ties, weapons sales, political collaboration, and cultural and educational exchanges
David Lloyd Dusenbury and Philip Pilkington:
With harmony, slight things grow to greatness. With discord, great things shrivel and fail.
—Matteo Ricci, 15961
In 1989, Francis Fukuyama caused a stir by publishing an article in the National Interest titled “The End of History?”. A State Department and Rand Corporation analyst at the time, Fukuyama confessed that he was feeling something out of the ordinary. “We may be witnessing,” he said, “not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such.” Did this fill him with dread? Not really. Post-history was not brought on by catastrophe but, fortunately, by the apotheosis of what he called “the Western idea.” And apparently, liberal democracy is the Western idea. The “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” had not, therefore, come like a thief in the night, but rather, like a liberal technocrat.2
Not everyone was convinced. In fact, Fukuyama’s 1992 book in the same vein, The End of History and the Last Man, was negatively reviewed; Perry Anderson, a historian of the Left, was struck by “the virtual universality of the rejection” of Fukuyama’s thesis: “For once,” he observed, “most of the Right, Centre, and Left were united in their reaction.”3
It is telling, though, that Fukuyama made his move by channeling a feeling. For whatever his critics said, his idea matched the Western mood circa 1990, which could accurately be called euphoria. What Fukuyama hailed as the preordained triumph of liberal democracy quickly became an axiom. His sense that liberal ideology had not just outlasted Soviet communism but had transcended the whole realm of “ideological struggle” took root in Washington, and then in London and Berlin. His notion that “we have already emerged on the other side of history” spread rapidly in Western policy circles.4 Many liberals, especially in the up-and-coming Boomer generation, felt that they had truly won the great game of history.