By Gil Barndollar
The Biden administration released its delayed National Security Strategy (NSS) this month.
The NSS, to be followed by a National Defense Strategy and a National Military Strategy, is the first holistic strategy document from the administration since its initial Interim National Security Strategic Guidance, issued two months after the president's inauguration in January 2021.
The new NSS covers a laundry list of challenges, threats, and responses in its 48 unclassified pages. This "Christmas tree" approach is perhaps inevitable in a public-facing national security document from a superpower.
In language befitting an inaugural address or a campaign debate, the NSS declares of America: "There is nothing beyond our capacity." This language could be quickly dismissed as boilerplate but for the fact that the entire NSS is suffused with an inability to accept the clear and growing limits to American power.
The brief moment of post-Cold War American hyperpower is long gone, a victim of both natural power dynamics and three decades of incessant American foreign policy hubris and error. But most of the principals who signed off on the NSS were beginning their rise up the Washington national security totem pole during the blissful '90s, and the new strategy only intermittently recognizes how different the world is today.
This piece was originally published in Business Insider on October 25, 2022. Read more HERE.