Smart Strategy Initiative

Is America in decline? Is our global influence waning?

Expect that question to get plenty of airtime as the presidential campaign heats up. According to the Republicans, President Obama's fundamental foreign policy problem is that he thinks America is a fading power and all we can hope for is to "manage the decline."

Having absorbed the adulation from writers such as Parag Khanna, as well as condemnations from critics of contemporary capitalism such as Noam Chomsky, I will provide my own observations of spending a very full five days immersed from 7am to midnight ...

Does the United States have a grand strategy? If so, what is it?

If you rummage around on the White House's website, you'll eventually stumble across something called The National Security Strategy of the United States. In fact, you'll find more than half a dozen National Security Strategy documents, since they're congressionally mandated. (Of course, in time-honored executive-branch tradition, they're generally submitted a year or two after the deadline).

The modern economy experiences two types of cyclical debt cycles: the short-term business cycle that produces the familiar oscillation between expansion and recession, bull and bear; and the long-term debt cycle that we are experiencing now. During the 75-year period of these cycles, the debt-to-income profile of the entire economy gradually builds up a stock of household, corporate, and government debt that income is insufficient to service. The credit reset from indebtedness to balance is called a deleveraging.

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Patrick C. Doherty, a national-security expert at the New America Foundation, doesn't consider himself a "doomer," a label applied to Heinberg and some of his colleagues. But he does think the nation needs a new way of organizing itself. He is working with Orr and Mykleby on a "national sustainable communities coalition" that will attempt to replicate the Oberlin Project in other parts of the country -- possibly around military bases that are striving for sustainability. ...

Aruban Prime Minister Michiel "Mike" Eman and the New America Foundation's Patrick Doherty, director of the Smart Strategy Initiative, finalized a partnership agreement today to pursue a national roadmap to sustainability, integrating renewable energy, smart growth, and new approaches to sustainable tourism for this island nation of 101,000.

... In the 10 years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, there has been no shortage of books exploring the effect the events had on our lives. There are books about the effect on our laws, politics and culture, but which ones best explore the post-9/11 world? For an answer, we asked five experts: Richard K. Betts, Columbia University political science professor and director of the Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies; Michael Doyle, Columbia Law School foreign and security policy professor; Patrick Doherty, deputy director of the New America Foundation’s national security studies program; ...