February 3, 2021
No Substitute for Strategy: What’s Wrong with “Defending Forwardâ€
The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies' latest report promises a restoration of the worst foreign policy ideas since the end of the Cold War. It should be ignored.
by Gil Barndollar Justin Logan
President Joe Biden has entered office promising reform at home and restoration abroad. But American foreign policy needs new thinking, not a return to the past. Despite the serial incompetence of the Trump administration and the poison pills it left behind, the two decades preceding Donald Trump were a time of massive American overreach, and yes, “endless wars.†As the fight to shape Biden’s foreign policy begins, the administration should pause before just pressing the reset button.
For the past twenty years, U.S. foreign policy has been dominated by a group of hawkish, Middle East-centric scholars and officials. The results have been disastrous. Since the September 11 attacks, the United States has squandered more than $6 trillion on wars in the Greater Middle East. It has won none of them. Now, under the auspices of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), many of those same scholars have written a monograph urging the continuation of these policies.
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/no-substitute-strategy-what%E2%80%99s-wrong-%E2%80%9Cdefending-forward%E2%80%9D-177579
