Pivot Point? Not Yet.

As the Weekly Standard editor, Bill Kristol, just joked, today's Pivot Point conference hosted by the Center for a New American Security is the greatest gathering of strategic firepower since Richard Holbrooke dined alone.

Billed as a conversation about American grand strategy, the first panel, entitled, "A New U.S. Grand Strategy" amounted to not the presentation of a new grand strategy but, an admission that these panelists hold little hope for finding one. The message of this panel, from Harvard's Joe Nye to Bill Kristol and all the speakers in between is that the world is complex and that here is no obvious singular organizing principle like we had in the Cold War. Therefore, says CNAS President and Co-Founder Michele Flournoy, the best we can do is to set out an attractive vision of the world we seek and deal with the complexity in the world out there.

While I would have loved to have had this incredible collection of strategic thinkers lay out a new grand strategy for the United States, the first panel still managed to provide Washington and arguably, the nation, a real service in holding this panel in this conference. It is clear that CNAS CEO Kurt Campbell and Michele Flournoy are convinced that the United States needs a new grand strategy and one that is both durable and bi-partisan. So it was important that Flournoy called for the next president of the United States, whether John McCain or Barack Obama, to hold a new Solarium Exercise. At that point, the Pivot Point conference title shifted in meaning from the simplistic, the end of the Bush Administration national security strategy and towards a real pivot point for America's role in the world.

It's not that they are the first. Steve Clemons and my predecessors at the New America Foundation, back in 2005, held an event called, The New Solarium Project On U.S. Foreign Policy, held in the Senate and featuring national security luminaries like Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski. This has been a long time coming.

But I digress. To explain the significance of these calls for a new grand strategy, we need to know what Solarium refers to. The original Solarium Exercise, conducted by Dwight Eisenhower after he took office, was an effort to end the partisan and intra-partisan debate over the U.S. grand strategy for the Cold War. Truman's doctrine, Containment, was the existing grand strategy, but the Republican party held strong voices arguing for grand strategies of roll back and even isolationism. Eisenhower divided the strategy directorate of his NSC into three teams, each to argue one of three alternatives. After the three teams made their case in front of Eisenhower over a long weekend in the White House Solarium, Eisenhower gave everyone a lesson in strategy and then pronounced his support for a version of Containment that was more globally pervasive than George Kennan, the author of the original concept, ever envisaged.

So in calling for the next president to hold another Solarium, Flournoy is calling for a high-level, official debate about U.S. grand strategy in the next administration. This is essential, even if CNAS, by its own admission, has yet to come up with a grand strategy. And it is important because of one reason that William and Mary's Mitchell Reiss identified, which might have been the keenest insight in this entire conference: one of the primary obstacles to coming up with a new U.S. grand strategy is that there has been little to no demand for such for at least a decade, since Bill Clinton gave up looking for the big idea and started managing the crises all around him. With no demand, most think tanks in Washington, with a few notable exceptions like New America and CNAS, have focused on day-to-day crisis management and incrementalism.

Looking at the rest of the conference line-up, the remainder of the day will be about discussing some of the main elements of U.S. national security strategy. Iraq is up now, Iran is not far behind, Asia, global warming, and others in the very familiar litany of atomized, discrete challenges facing the nation. As such, the rest of the conference is really about CNAS getting out front and framing these issues for the next administration.

Ironically, that kind of follow-up deadens the call for a new grand strategy, so well done in the first panel. There is much work to do and I'm glad that a lot more folks, like us here at the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation, are looking at generating real grand strategic options for the next administration.