Sewall's Strategy of 'Conservation'

A shout out to my colleague Sherle Schwenninger who reminded me that Harvard's Sarah Sewall has a new national security strategy paper making the rounds.

Sewall was the deputy assistant secretary of defense for peacekeeping and humanitarian assistance and is now director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard. I met Sarah ten years ago when she was at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences up in Cambridge. I was a grad student doing research on conflict prevention and she was leading a program on the International Criminal Court. Sewall, of course, is in the inner circles of two important people right now. One is General David Petraeus, the other is Senator Barack Obama. It's an extremely important relationship that the intense partisanship of the last two years has threatened in a dangerous way. But I digress.

Sarah's paper was commissioned by the Center for a New American Security as part of its American Grand Strategy Solarium Project. I called CNAS out a few weeks ago for having a panel on grand strategy without offering any grand strategies. So I was really pleased to see that Sarah calls her strategy not grand, but of the more typical garden variety, an every-day national security strategy.

I hope to someday soon post the full e-mail exchange I had with G. John Ikenberry, another contributor to CNAS' Solarium project, but in it I define a grand strategy in the following two ways:

"...the tests I put on US grand strategy are these:

• Does it identify the main challenge facing the United States in the coming/current era?
• Does it identify a singular goal that responds to that main challenge?
• Does it orchestrate all our national means to achieve that goal?
• Can it engender durable political consensus for the term of the strategy?

Put another way, I define U.S. grand strategy as the correlation of our economic engine and our national security strategy to achieve our most important goal in the context of the current era.

While I made those comments to Ikenberry because I felt his strategy focusing on the nature of the international order amounted to less than a grand strategy, I find in Sarah Sewall's paper something closer to the opposite.

While very much focused, like Ikenberry, on stability in an international order dominated by states and their shifting capabilities and strategic interests, deep within is hiding a little grand strategy crying for attention:

The second component of strategic flexibility aims to create greater room for political maneuver and credibility for global leadership through new policy initiatives that reshape relations with key states, rebuild alliances, and create new partnerships with rising powers – with the aim of marginalizing new or aspiring nuclear states and hostile non-state actors that challenge the stability of the international system. These steps should ameliorate hostility toward the United States and increase U.S. leverage to launch new and far-reaching initiatives. In some cases these policies are an exponential expansion of current efforts. In other cases, they represent significant departures from current U.S. policy.

In line with this mission, the government should require greater U.S. energy conservation through fuel efficiency standards and energy taxes and significantly increase funding for alternative energy development. This must be a presidential challenge, akin to putting a man on the moon, and will entail a populist educational effort, such as the national anti-smoking campaign. Such progress will signal a change in American attitudes; enable the United States to lead collective approaches to controlling climate change; and move the nation closer toward greater energy independence, which would fundamentally reshape strategic perceptions and options. This is essentially a call for national sacrifice and service, requiring large dislocations in the short term for a potentially game-changing strategic payoff.

Game-changing strategic payoff indeed. Sewall recognizes the incredible strategic advantages to be had by reducing the profile of energy security within the U.S. strategic portfolio. Her analysis that this "would fundamentally reshape strategic perceptions and options," is spot on.

This is the essence of American grand strategy. This is what Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower were all able to understand when they designed the last two grand strategies, for World War II and the Cold War. The problem is Washington's perception of itself. Washington just does not think of itself as capable of designing grand strategy.

That may be changing. Today, here at NAF we had an incredible presentation by Leo Hindery and Tom Gallagher on a more near-term issue dealing with energy, the price of oil. Along the way, Gallagher, the senior managing director of the International Strategy and Investment Group, asserted his belief that the United States is on the verge of the reversal of the small-government Reagan policies of the 1980s. The pendulum has swung out too far and Americans want more, and better government, not less.

But can Washington, the White House and the Congress, really come to an understanding of their role in the same fashion as did FDR, Harry, and Ike? Can they see the real strategic advantage described by Sewall?

All three mid-century presidents understood that the government creates markets through regulation and therefore has a responsibility to shape those markets so they do our strategic heavy lifting. In World War II, this went so far as complete industrial control. But Truman and Eisenhower demobilized the economy in such a way as to ensure the economic engine was still doing the heavy lifting. The G.I. Bill and Eisenhower's investment in the national highway infrastructure were key to unlocking the economic boom of suburbia and at the time were major interventions in the domestic economy. The Federal mortgage deduction and the loan guarantees of Fannie Mae, not to mention the Carter Doctrine of protecting our access to Persian Gulf energy supplies were all part of that same Cold War grand strategy.

So, I think Sewall's analysis is dead on. We do need to focus the President's attention on how economic transformation can provide strategic advantage. I would say, however, that the Apollo analogy is too small a scale. This is about a much more pervasive re-design of our markets and investment in new kinds of energy, transportation, and metropolitan infrastructure to send price signals across the country and the world such that our economy is not only giving us better policy options, but doing the strategic heavy lifting.