Sandy Berger Reviews New Obama Strategy

Sandy Berger is weighing in with a review of the new Obama National Security Strategy.

In Obama's case, his sober and comprehensive 52-page strategy incorporates the new realities and breaks with past strategies in several key respects. But it also reflects an understanding that we face enduring challenges -- nuclear proliferation, terrorism and regional conflicts -- for which the best response is a return to fundamentals.

One such fundamental is economic strength. At a time when the financial crisis and the fiscal burden of two long wars have raised fears of an overextended America, the administration makes a case for economic and technological renewal as a crucial underpinning of U.S. security. Obama also argued this point in a West Point speech last weekend. "At no time in human history," he said, "has a nation of diminished economic vitality maintained its military and political primacy."

Another fundamental challenge is arms control and nuclear proliferation. By seeking strategic arms cuts with Russia, the president has returned to a long bipartisan tradition that languished during the prior administration. And by convening an international summit on securing nuclear material this spring, Obama has given new urgency and global purchase to the effort started in 1991 when Sens. Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar initiated a program to lock down nuclear materials.

On terrorism, the strategy builds on the past but breaks with it where necessary. Presidents Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama each have deployed many of America's tools: military power, homeland defense, law enforcement, sanctions, intelligence and vigorous efforts to cut off terrorist financing. But the critical difference in the Obama strategy is its rejection of the "global war on terror" lens through which the prior administration viewed the challenge. "This is not a global war against a tactic -- terrorism -- or a religion -- Islam," the new strategy says. "We are at war with a specific network, al-Qaeda, and its terrorist affiliates."

This sharper focus avoids alienating many in the Muslim world, ensures the support of key allies who never accepted the broader construct and prevents the overreactions that led us to forsake the fight against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and turn our efforts to the unrelated threat from Saddam Hussein.

In perhaps the most dramatic departure from the strategy of its predecessor, the Obama administration has restored a less provocative policy on the use of military force. In the 2002 national security strategy, Bush articulated the rationale for preemptive war just weeks before seeking a U.N. resolution to invade Iraq. The new strategy endorses the principles that have guided administrations for decades: The use of force should be a last resort, should weigh all the costs and benefits and should have as much international support as possible. The administration reserves the right to act unilaterally -- against al-Qaeda and its allies, for example -- but resurrects the principle that Clinton described as "together when possible, alone when necessary."

By: Brant