FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
October 12, 2022
Contact: press@defensepriorities.org
WASHINGTON, DC—Today, the White House released the Biden administration’s National Security Strategy. Defense Priorities Policy Director Benjamin H. Friedman issued the following statement in response:
“Strategy is prioritization among competing goods, a guide to choice in resource allocation and threats. By that definition, the Biden administration’s new National Security Strategy is no strategy at all. It is instead long list of nice things—clean energy and air, diversity, uncorrupt government, gay and other rights, food production, democracy—of course—and nearly everything which it insists the U.S. must promote in every corner of the world to be ‘secure.’ A notable exception is free trade, which the strategy cannot quite endorse, except when criticizing China for trade-restricting policies it elsewhere suggests we emulate.
“The only gesture at prioritization is a call to ‘eschew grand designs’ and regime-change wars in the Middle East. This welcome gesture would be more meaningful were it accompanied by some talk of removing U.S. forces from Syria and Iraq, let alone the region more broadly, rather than insistence the U.S. will continue to address terrorism’s ‘root causes’ by fixing up governments.
“The strategy is mostly an elaborate endorsement of the status quo and updated guide to the administration’s preferred rhetoric (‘foreign policy for the middle class’ has been abandoned, for example). But it is potentially harmful in its continuation of efforts to divide humanity between autocracies and democracies plus ‘like-minded states’ (an appendage seemingly designed to assure Gulf kingdoms they are trusted partners) and its aim to reify this division with new global or regional institutions. This division may be a useful rallying tool for the administration, but it violates the common-sense dictum that one should minimize enemies. Greater focus on real sources of U.S. insecurity will have to wait.”
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