The Post-Post-9/11 Era and Strategic Initiative Posted by Bill R. French

This post was coauthored with Lauren Haigler

Tonight, the Democratic National Convention will highlight national security policy. While it’s unclear the extent to which national security will gain attention in an election preoccupied by economic concerns, a transformation of U.S. foreign policy is underway that deserves careful thought. Senator John Kerry captured that transformation in a recent article in Foreign Policy when he wrote, “we are entering a post-9/11 era full of unchartered waters.” While the statement may appear innocuous, its content effectively implies the essential structure of the challenges and opportunities facing the United States in the coming period: as we free ourselves from the entanglements of the past decade, how should policy makers seize the strategic initiative and to what end?

The Post-Post-9/11 Era

The coming era is not “post-9/11” in the same sense President Bush had in mind when that phrase was meant to inspire paranoia or fear. Instead, we live in a post-9/11 era in the sense that the most immediate and consuming – but by no means all – of the security challenges associated with the September 11 attacks and the Bush Administration’s response to them are coming to an end. The war in Iraq has concluded. Regular combat forces are on course to withdraw from Afghanistan by 2014. Osama bin Laden is dead. Since May 2011, 22 senior operatives in the Al Qaeda network have been killed or captured and successful attacks by Al Qaeda have dropped by 16%. It is therefore credible when President Obama and Secretary of Defense Panetta claim that the defeat of Al Qaeda is “within reach.”

As a result, the United States has the opportunity to more fully regain the strategic initiative and set a forward looking national security agenda. While Senator Kerry is correct to refer to this opportunity as “uncharted waters,” there are first draft maps and plans already in motion to consider. In its efforts to capitalize on this opportunity, the administration has charted a course of strategic rebalancing, whereby the United States has shifted focus from the Middle East and Central Asia – including the two massive stability operations there over the past decade – to challenges that have gone underdressed as the international environment has evolved over the past decade.

Rebalancing Where and What

A renewed focus on the Asia-Pacific has thus far been the flagship of this initiative. While this blog has previously written on the hard power components of American Pacific power, the deployment of other aspects of U.S national power should not be ignored. For example, the State Department has bolstered its institutional engagement with ASEAN as part of a broader strategy of shaping the region in a way that is consistent with American interests and made accession into the Trans Pacific Partnership a top priority to increase American exports.

But strategic rebalancing should be regarded as involving broader changes in American national security focus. It is not just ‘where’ American focus is shifting, but also to ‘what.’ That is, rebalancing is both geographic and functional. Here, cybersecurity is an illuminating case.  Like the rising significance of the Asia-Pacific, cyberspace had gone underdressed despite its increasing value and demonstrated vulnerabilities. In a step in the right direction, the administration has released the first comprehensive International Cyber Strategy, an agenda for cybersecurity initiatives and increased efforts to generate military cyber power. President Obama also forcefully supported the Cybersecurity Act, portions of which may now be implemented by executive order.

In both above illustrative cases, the United States has achieved much but more is needed.

Continuing to Seize the Strategic Initiative

How the next administration should build on the groundwork for ‘charting the waters’ ahead? This is an open question. However, the most basic answer is that the next administration should continue the transformation to our ‘post-9/11 era’ already underway and identify what opportunities are best addressed – and what challenges are best met – by continuing to seize and apply the strategic initiative.

In this sense, possessing the initiative may be regarded as acting on states of affairs in the world while their outcome is still in question – i.e., acting on events before they develop sufficiently to  ‘act on you’ or ‘shaping events’ in the language common to National Security Strategies. In selecting which events to shape, those associated with trends that will have a greater consequence on the structure of the international system should be preferred. By focusing on such affective events and trends, initiative is directed strategically in that its consequences feedback into structural changes of the system, thereby effecting the future events within the system that may impact American interests in the future. 

The administration’s rebalancing towards cybersecurity and the Asia-Pacific are both early examples of what a foreign policy agenda driven by seizing the strategic initiative might look like. Yet how to set that agenda more fully is a matter to be determined. Fortunately today we have the breathing room for its consideration – a real opportunity.

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