When It Comes to Foreign Policy, Hope Is Not a Strategy
The Trump administration’s budget priorities, and the president’s rhetoric, imply that defense is the only thing that matters in foreign policy.
Christopher A. Preble [2]
On Friday morning, I attended the unveiling of the National Defense Strategy (NDS) by Secretary of Defense James Mattis. It was his first public address of 2018, and the secretary and his staff were justifiably proud of having completed their work ahead of schedule, and less than a month after the public release of the National Security Strategy (NSS). In that sense, the timing was impressive.
Given the choice, however, I suspect that DoD officials would have preferred not to release the new strategy, the first issued in the last ten years, on the same day that Washington was rife with talk of a government shutdown. The several hundred in attendance at the event held at Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) chuckled knowingly when, in response to a question about whether “a government shutdown [would] have serious ramifications on military operations? And, if so, what are your plans for mitigation?â€
Source URL (retrieved on January 26, 2018):
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-skeptics/when-it-comes-foreign-policy-hope-not-strategy-24176
