The National Interest

IN THE early months of the Obama presidency, the national-security debate has focused heavily on two areas: personality and process. To many, the third vital component—policy—had largely been addressed and in broad terms resolved during the presidential campaign—Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran. Yet thus far, the personality discussion has been simultaneously overblown and misdirected, the process discussion has been largely technical and misguided, and the policy discussion has failed to address the most important concerns confronting the United States. In short, after the worst eight years in modern U.S. foreign-policy history, we may be setting the stage for potentially even-bigger mistakes to come.

ALL GOOD stories are about people not just because they give the reader something to relate to, but because ultimately the interplay between personalities is a prime driver—often the most important one—of how governments function. There is a perfectly understandable aspiration that decisions be made dispassionately, on the merits. But that seldom happens, and the relationships between and among policy stakeholders—political leaders, policy makers and their multiple constituencies—are often hugely influential, even if they are disdained and ignored by academic analysts (many of whom entered academia precisely because their people skills were so lacking).

So coverage of the transition and the early days of the Obama presidency that has focused on whether Hillary Clinton can get along with the president or whether the Clinton people will get along with the Obama people or how Vice President Joe Biden will react to being locked in his office may seem superficial and titillating, but it matters. Because history teaches us a few things about the central role personality plays in shaping how the U.S. national-security apparatus works.

First, carefully considered policies aside, each administration is tested by unexpected crises that define it, and the interaction among the president and his senior advisers is shaped as much by individual characters, their different experiences and the nature of the relationships between them as by anything else. Whether this means the inexperienced but intuitive Bush deferring to the dominant and ideologically influenced team of Cheney and Rumsfeld after 9/11, or the inexperienced and hesitant Clinton turning to his inexperienced and hesitant team during Rwanda, or the highly effective, well-trained and collegial team of Bush 41 rising to the challenges of the fall of Communism, the “who” of each administration is central to determining its fate . . . and ours.

Second, human nature being what it is, rifts and tensions always emerge in collaborations among powerful people. The character of the president’s team determines whether those become toxic—as in the case of famous battles between Powell and Rumsfeld, or between Weinberger and Shultz, or between Brzezinski and Vance—or whether they are handled constructively, giving the president real choices through the well-managed processes of the Eisenhower, Bush 41 or later Clinton years.

Third, because the U.S. policy apparatus is essentially designed to serve one individual—the president—and to reflect his or her needs and vision, relationships with, and access to, the president determine very much who has influence and who does not, which perspectives will gain traction and which will not, and therefore what the outcomes will be. It doesn’t always feel good to be close to the president. But it is the clearest and most dependable path to real policymaking power in the executive branch of the U.S. government.

Several core stories emerged about the formation of the Obama administration’s national-security team, none more dramatic in the eyes of the media than the incoming president’s decision to offer the job of secretary of state to Hillary Clinton. The appeal of the story lay in the idea that perhaps these once-fierce rivals on the stump would not get along as colleagues in the executive branch. A particularly common angle was whether Clinton, who was portrayed as being somewhere between a strong-willed, independent-minded woman and a conniving megalomaniac (depending on the political bent or objectives of the commentator), would put her team or Obama first.

Based on events to date, it seems these fears were overplayed, probably in an effort to sell newspapers (apparently without success) or perhaps copies of historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book Team of Rivals, whose title became the cliché of the transition (even though its premise—that Lincoln’s team was somehow unique in the degree of rivalry among strong figures with national constituencies—just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny).

Clinton has kept her head down, has not upstaged the president in any way, has implemented his agenda and has focused on outreach to foreign governments and on repairing the damage done to U.S. international relationships during the Bush years. Clinton and Obama have very similar personalities. Both are serious-minded, studious people who are wonks down to the very fiber of their being. They approach issues the same way, in precisely the same manner you might expect of former “best students in the class.”

BUT THE relationship has remained just where Obama and most of his supporters want it because the president built a national-security team in which even a powerful political figure like Clinton is counterbalanced by other powerful, self-confident and highly capable people in other senior positions. Particularly important in this mix are White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, National Security Adviser James Jones, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Vice President Joseph Biden, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, UN Ambassador Susan Rice, CIA Director Leon Panetta and others on the White House staff who are sometimes involved in debate—including White House Counsel Greg Craig and political advisers like David Axelrod. There are also second-tier but still very important players, like close Obama aides Denis McDonough and Mark Lippert, who play senior roles in the National Security Council (NSC). They are made more influential through their personal relationships with the president. One well-plugged-in observer said that closeness made them “as deadly as the sharpshooters on the White House roof.”

Emanuel, who as chief of staff has what is often characterized as the second-most important job in government, is a constant presence in virtually all big issues and has such a strong, often abrasive, personality that references to it have already become a stock joke for the president and on the Washington banquet circuit. Jones, who would be intimidating enough at six-foot-six, is a retired U.S. Marine four-star general whose last job had the words “supreme” and “commander” in the title. Gates is perhaps the most seasoned, successful and highly regarded national-security professional the U.S. government has produced over the past several decades. Biden, as former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, expects to be involved in all national-security deliberations and, to date, has been an important voice in a number of them (even though his views regarding getting too deep into the potential quagmire of AfPak were overruled). Blair is another retired four-star flag officer, a former Rhodes Scholar, and one of the smartest and canniest individuals around. Rice was Obama’s closest national-security adviser during the campaign and such relationships are not to be underestimated, even if one of the big postelection stories was about how many former Obama-campaign-team members didn’t end up with the big roles in the administration they had expected. Panetta’s last high-profile job was as White House chief of staff, and he and Emanuel are the only ones to have held senior congressional leadership positions as well. White House Counsel Craig is a former head of policy planning at State, had reportedly hoped to be deputy secretary of state and has had himself written in as a regular participant in all formal NSC meetings.

While all the above facts are well-known, it is important to see that the Obama national-security team is extraordinarily impressive in terms of its experience, background and the strength of its personalities. Interestingly, and perhaps unsettlingly given the times, this is somewhat less the case in terms of Obama’s economic-policy team. Centered on National Economic Council (NEC) head Larry Summers and his former subordinate, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, what is actually striking about the economic team is that other than Summers and Geithner, none of the other top officials or deputies has held prominent national economic leadership roles before. The U.S. trade representative, Ron Kirk, is a former mayor of Dallas and attorney with very little trade experience. The commerce secretary, Gary Locke, is a former governor of Washington and attorney who has promoted trade and managed budgets but who is not—at least in these early days—seen as a potential policy rival to anyone in the White House. And most of the core advisers to Geithner and Summers used to be their or Robert Rubin’s staffers. So, they are already being seen by those in cabinet departments who have to work with them as an insular group that seems to be reverting to old hierarchical relationships. Further, such ideologically and experientially homogeneous groups are also—as the George W. Bush White House demonstrated—especially susceptible to groupthink, that particularly insidious Washington disease that leads policy makers to reinforce each others’ perceptions of the world and of the merits of a particular policy approach, shutting out other views.

In fact, to choose one example, frustrations have been brewing within the Paul Volcker–led group of graybeards supposedly tasked with advising on the recovery. They feel their perspectives are not exactly being eagerly sought out. So while the national-security team at least to some degree lives up to the Team of Rivals hype, the economic-policy team is seen by frustrated colleagues within the administration as a cluster of like-thinking pals, orbiting around the undeniably brilliant Summers and the talented Geithner (who gradually seems to be getting his sea legs). All that said, however, the economic team has faced the more daunting array of challenges, and the team closest to Summers and Geithner have used their knowledge of one another to work together effectively under great pressure—and we are only in the formative stages of the administration. There is certainly room for roles and relationships to evolve.

The NSC-NEC comparison is relevant on several levels. First, the primary driver of international relations at the moment, and for the foreseeable future, is the global economic crisis. Second, the principle national-security tools of the United States have an important economic component to them. This requires coordination between the two teams if policy is going to work. Third, one of the most important sets of national-security concerns we have right now is energy policy—and many of those issues, and related climate policies, are being handled through the NEC and not the NSC.

WHEREAS IT seems clear from early decisions and actions that National Security Adviser Jones intends to attempt to run the NSC process using the playbook of two-time NSA Brent Scowcroft—the acknowledged gold standard in the job—one senior economic official described Summers as employing more of the Kissinger model, which is to say he is the dominant figure. Summers is arguably as powerful as head of the NEC as the prior high-water mark in the position, Rubin. But unlike the soft-spoken Rubin, famed as a good listener, Summers can sometimes seem brusque and disinterested in others’ views. He has yet to establish a reputation with the leadership in other agencies as an honest broker who is focused on successfully managing the interagency process to promote a wide diversity of opinions. Further, Emanuel and Axelrod and other White House staff have been very involved in key economic decisions, which skews the whole policy process to be very White House–centric.

Not that the national-security process is being played out absent the White House. Quite the contrary. It is just somewhat more balanced at the senior level, likely to produce the kind of broad variety of views and policy options that feed the most successful NSC processes. The general trend in recent years has been to increase the importance of the NSC versus individual agencies (notably State), largely because in the modern world virtually all foreign-policy decisions are covered in real time and thus produce political consequences in real time. Since the White House is the only part of the executive branch that can manage the president’s political interests directly, it becomes important to involve it in real time as well.

Furthering the White House–centric foreign-policy model are the reports that when President Obama and General Jones discussed whether he would accept the NSA job, Jones was explicit that he wanted to be a strong player in the Scowcroft mold and that he was not interested otherwise. As is often the case, this impulse was institutionalized when the first directive signed by the president established an NSC structure that was heavily weighted toward White House participation (including mandating the participation of Emanuel, Craig, the vice president, the VP’s National Security Adviser Antony Blinken, the Deputy National Security Adviser Thomas Donilon and others from the White House at key junctures). In addition, Rice was given full-cabinet status. This was seen by some former Obama-campaign staffers on the foreign-policy side as a direct counterbalance to Clinton. Also, it is clear that the national-security adviser will chair all key processes and his second in command will chair the vital deputies discussions—where most real policy debate takes place.

Yet, the single biggest factor in determining how powerful the national-security adviser is in the NSC process is how deeply involved the president is in making policy. Reagan didn’t want to be engaged and actually demoted National Security Adviser Richard Allen, having him report to the Reagan troika of top advisers, James Baker, Ed Meese and Michael Deaver. Reagan even kicked Allen out of his traditional corner West Wing office into the basement. The result was the nadir for the NSC, no adult supervision and Iran-contra. Bush 41, on the other hand, who is seen as one of the best managers of the process, had an extraordinarily close relationship with Scowcroft. He was also far and away the best prepared of recent presidents when it came to international matters. He knew what he wanted and managed the system to get it. It is already clear Obama is a hands-on manager with a keen interest in these issues. (Much more so than Bill Clinton, who during his first few years was so much more focused on domestic issues that, I remember in one incident, a senior official stormed out of the Oval Office and said to me, “You know the reason they say he’s not a foreign-policy president?! It’s because he’s not a foreign-policy president! He’s just not engaged.” This did change dramatically in Clinton’s second term.) Because Obama is so engaged and is working these issues through his team at the White House, insiders feel the White House will drive process (although steps have been taken to ensure that the vice president’s office is stepped down from the outsize role it played during the George W. Bush years).

Despite the strengths of the national-security team and its ability to have made it through the first months of the administration without the kind of learning-curve gaffes and missteps that have sometimes marked the Obama economic team’s tenure, there have still been controversial decisions and likely errors. Further, reports from administration insiders suggest that, in spite of the fact Jones may consider himself of the Scowcroft school, he has sometimes been a disengaged manager of the NSC staff. His team working out of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building has yet to become cohesive or smoothly functioning. Some of any such critique should, as with the economic team, be written off to the fact that it takes time for an administration to coalesce and hit its stride. But some potential problems will require more than just time to correct; they will require rethinking the Obama administration’s going-in approach to organizing themselves.

SETTING ASIDE appointment-process slipups, such as telling General Anthony Zinni he would be ambassador to Iraq before unceremoniously dumping him for career-diplomat Christopher Hill, the most commented-upon trend is linked to what might be called over-inclusiveness. On the one hand, this NSC will have in formal meetings something near a record-high number of mandated participants; this includes in principals meetings (cabinet-level meetings of the NSC minus the president). On the other hand, this president has developed an acute case of czarism. New White House offices have been set up to handle everything from energy and climate to urban policy despite the existence of other, perhaps more than enough, departments, agencies and offices to handle these issues. This is not to mention new ones for health care and technology plus task forces on the economy, the auto bailout and the middle class.

On the national-security side this trend has been manifest in a headline-grabbing string of appointments of White House and State Department special envoys. Notable appointments have included a special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke; for the Middle East, George Mitchell; for the Gulf and Southwest Asia (read: Iran), Dennis Ross; for Sudan, retired–Major General Scott Gration; and for climate change, Todd Stern. But it’s early days and more could be coming.

This focus on new people and offices creates a variety of concerns. First there’s the impulse, which was characterized by Will Inboden writing for Foreign Policy, of confusing appointments with action. Putting a lot of people in charge of things looks decisive, but the problem is that senior-official positions already existed with responsibility for all of these areas. So, having an envoy per se adds limited value unless the person in question possesses extraordinary skills, although of course one might wonder why such people weren’t given the jobs that already existed. Second, problems of too many cooks spoiling the broth, or get-off-my-turf-or-I-will-destroy-you-with-leaks, are likely and destructive. In other words, putting so many people in charge of so much breeds ill will unless roles are very, very carefully managed. It also creates potential tension at the senior level. Holbrooke and Mitchell report to both the secretary of state and the White House. If everyone is on the same page, fine. But the first time an envoy goes to the president to argue against a position taken by the secretary of state, or simply seems to be backdooring the State Department, further tensions ensue.

It feels good early in an administration to create an inclusive system and to be expansive with the distribution of important jobs. But such systems create tensions—and worse. Consider Middle East policymaking. You have three special envoys, an assistant secretary for the Middle East and one for South Asia, an under secretary of state who used to be the assistant secretary for the Middle East, a senior director at the NSC with responsibility for the region, others with responsibility for combating terror, deeply engaged assistant secretaries at places like Defense and Energy who are also heavily engaged in the affairs of the region, as will be the under secretary of defense for policy, plus all the senior-level policy officials above them. They may all want the same outcome, but when it comes to individual initiatives there will be big differences. To the extent the system channels those differences healthily into choices of the president and the principals, great. To the extent people feel cut out or unheard or seek to move up at the expense of others, leaks and finger-pointing soon follow.

Simply having too many senior players means too many views and too many voices leading to unwieldy, hard-to-focus discussions. But because that’s the case, inevitably presidents begin to move away from using the formal NSC meeting process for day-to-day management of problems. This tends to leave some senior team members out in the cold, thus negating the benefit of having appointed them in the first place. Further, this White House, like virtually all before, has, in the name of “efficiency” or “combating waste,” sought to keep hires to the NSC staff to a minimum. And virtually all White Houses later realize this is untenable given the burdens of governing. These staffs inevitably grow throughout their terms of office.

WHAT ALL of this illustrates once again is that how many czars, four-star generals, best-students-in-the-class and rivals you appoint and how much power you give them goes a long way toward determining whether or not you have a high-functioning national-security process. There has, however, been considerable discussion in Washington of late about whether the national-security community really requires a much broader, more sweeping set of reforms. Perhaps on some level this discussion has arisen because there are always those in the professional policy community who like to see personalities matter less, better processes enhance the likelihood of consistently better outcomes and the growing pains commonly experienced by new administrations be minimized. Among those who have been vocal on the issue is former-Senator Joe Biden, who prior to the election called for a new National Security Act to supplement the act of 1947. But it is worth noting that one of the great strengths of the system as it was conceived in 1947 is that it is highly flexible. Each president can easily adapt it to his or her needs. The White House staff is his or her special province (as it should be given that it is his or her personal staff) and not subject to too much congressional interference (read: “oversight”). The system can be structured and restructured with presidential decisions, as it often is. Sometimes it leads to a more decentralized system in which power is at least ostensibly farmed out to the agencies (as in the Reagan years), sometimes it leads to much-more concentrated power in the White House (as it seems to be doing today). So the system we already have has advantages of flexibility and responsiveness to needs and management styles that would be the envy of many organizations.

These merits aside, numerous think tanks and task forces, notably the Project on National Security Reform (PNSR), have joined in the reform debate, much as they do every four years in a discussion that has become as dependable an occurrence in DC as the blossoming of the cherry trees around the Tidal Basin. The two-year PNSR study was overseen by more than twenty former senior officials from both parties. A blue-chip group, it covered the landscape thoughtfully and comprehensively. And it has already achieved what some of its members must have (privately) viewed as one of its primary purposes by getting seven of them into senior positions in the Obama administration. In addition to National Security Adviser Jones and Director of National Intelligence Blair, these include Deputy Secretary of State Jim Steinberg, Under Secretaries of Defense Michèle Flournoy and Ashton Carter, and Deputy Under Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks. Any process that sends so many people into the U.S. government is worth looking at because it offers a view of what the people in charge may be thinking. Perhaps above all however, the PNSR study, which is far better than most of its ilk, nonetheless like many that have come before it, is a great illustration of the fact that the road to policy hell is often paved with good intentions regarding improving process.

The group sought to address what it saw as inadequacies in the national-security system. It identified five key problem areas. The thrust of them is that the system focuses too much on departmental mechanisms and not enough on integrating ones. Departments take too much of a “where you sit is where you stand” view and don’t think enough about broad national interests. This means that the system works particularly badly during transitions; that, surprise, one of the big problems is the U.S. Congress; and that there is too much centralization of control within the White House.

Some of the ideas offered by the group are urgently needed, like merging the NSC and the needlessly redundant Homeland Security Council; an internal process leading to this is already under way. Other good ideas include instituting a national-security review that would add a modicum of strategic planning to the typically reactive national-security-policymaking process, creating an integrated national-security budget, improving the woefully antiquated, disintegrated and problematic knowledge-management systems within the U.S. government, and reforming congressional oversight and appropriations structures in ways that will produce a more integrated system, fewer fiefdoms, fewer stovepipes and fewer politically motivated impediments to getting a good system in place.

But in typical Washington style, the recommendations also include a slew of proposals for changing job titles, institutionalizing task forces, strengthening the State Department and decentralizing nonstrategic policymaking and policy implementation that read more like the traditional hopes and aspirations of agency officials to reclaim the lead from the White House. These are for the most part wonkish and the kind of fine-tuning that leads to unnecessary changes for change’s sake.

In short, this was undoubtedly a worthy exercise by worthy people, but in some important respects, it really amounted to puttering around in the garden while a tank division was rolling down your cul de sac. It doesn’t address deeply imbedded flaws in our system like the toxic role money plays in corrupting the American political process or the role that politics plays in ensuring that very often the wrong people will be given important jobs to satisfy one constituency or another.

Even more important, massive change is afoot—and it is being ignored by the new crowd of people on top and by Washington’s endless supply of blue-ribbon commissions and think-tank gabfests. Here is where new thinking is desperately needed.

RECENTLY BARACK Obama made a comment to the effect that if he had been told a year ago that Iraq would be the least controversial area of his foreign policy, no one would have believed it. It is equally true that a year ago no one could have imagined that the director of national intelligence would appear before Congress to argue that the principal threats the United States faces today are linked to the global economic crisis. Yet, no one disputes making the economic crisis priority number one and there is something very nearly approaching national consensus on Iraq policy. (Frankly, I think there was last year and that both Obama and McCain would have done very much the same thing in Iraq and Afghanistan.)

Everyone acknowledges that there has been a massive transformation in U.S. national-security policy thanks to the arrival of the Obama team. The tenor of relations has changed. Outreach to allies has increased. Multilateralism is fashionable again. Engagement and conciliation are the hallmarks of U.S. diplomacy. These are big and long-overdue changes for which the new administration deserves much credit. And yet, for all the buzz about personalities, for all the work the new team has been effectively doing since they arrived in office, for all the many forests worth of policy and process papers produced in the run-up to the new administration as part of the quadrennial national-security–job-audition process, one of the most profound changes concerning our role in the world with which we must soon grapple has gone largely unaddressed.

That change will demand an attitudinal and strategic adjustment more sweeping than any since the beginning of the cold war, and it is unlikely to be addressed either by a new czar in the White House or a new study from Washington’s wonkocracy. It is a change that will happen whether policy makers accept it or not, prepare for it or not. And it is one we have ignored because it comes in the most effective form of stealth technology known to man—not radar-absorbing surface angles but the almost-universal desire of everyone in a position of national-security influence to pretend it wasn’t happening.

It is the impending need to end America’s long-standing, global-role-defining policy of “permanent war.” And how the players on Obama’s national-security team cope with it, indeed when and if they even acknowledge it, may well do more to define their legacy and reputation than perhaps anything else they accomplish, ignore or mishandle.

In 1944, at the height of World War II, the head of the War Production Board, “Engine” Charlie Wilson, former chief executive of a once-prominent U.S. automotive company known as General Motors and later secretary of defense, explained to the Army Ordinance Board that the massive expansion in the U.S. economy that took place during the war could not be reversed without risking sending the United States right back into economic decline.

As a consequence of this spending, the United States entered a period of protracted defense outlays unparalleled by any nation in history. Throughout the cold war, the spending was seen and rationalized as a deterrent against Soviet expansion. But today, eighteen years after the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States still spends more on defense than every other nation added together. (And that does not include the fact that many of the costs of wars like Iraq and Afghanistan have until recently been kept off budget.) Our nearest rival, China, depending on what estimate you use, spends about a tenth of what we spend. The United States and our European allies together spend eighty-five cents out of every defense dollar spent on earth. And naturally, over time, such massive expenditures of money have built up not only our military but also an army of special interests in Washington that have grown dependent on the gigantic cash flows involved.

Is such spending truly the vital investment in peace it may have been during the cold war? Certainly, that is what is argued. Of course, it remains true that we are the most militarily active nation, leading the fighting in two wars, the prime target of extremist movements worldwide, arguably more at risk than any other major power.

But in the end, the more salient fact is that whether we want to or not, no matter how persuasive we may find politicians’ rhetoric about the sacrosanct nature of defense spending or fancy ad campaigns that make building airborne tankers seem roughly the patriotic equivalent of drafting the Declaration of Independence, the United States cannot continue this policy. According to estimates from a study done a couple of years ago by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, were the United States to generate revenues according to precrash projections—and defense spending at pre–Iraq War levels—simply due to the increasing obligations we face in meeting the costs of retirement health care for an aging population, by 2017 there will be no money left for roads, schools, research and development, green energy, gray energy, energy of any color. Of course, with a protracted crash keeping revenues down and protracted wars keeping expenses up, this picture could be worse (even if there were only modest health-care reforms).

Most great powers do not recognize the need to retrench, spend less, find ways to better leverage their resources, reset their ambitions and expectations. As a consequence, history takes care of all of these issues for them and virtually never to their liking. We have a choice. Do we follow their examples or do we find a new way to lead, a new formula for being safe, a way to save hundreds of billions in defense spending each year, trillions each decade, by focusing in new ways on efficiency, priorities and strategies that can enable us to continue to lead for less so we can restore the fundamental economic wellsprings of our strength? This would be a worthy goal for collaboration between Obama’s gifted and experienced senior policy-team members who between them bring all the skill sets one needs to start to grapple with this. However, on this matter, like all others of importance, in our system this means they will turn to the president for guidance. They will see whether he has the political will to approach this critical issue proactively or whether we, like so many other great powers of the past, will wait to have the memo about our limitations delivered by some other messenger of history.

Should the Obama team choose to grapple with this question in a constructive way, four principles must guide this process.

We must take a zero-based approach to national-security-asset allocation. We need to reassess our priorities and focus only on those we can afford.

We need to abandon the redundancies and excesses that mark our current system. Multiple air forces, expeditionary forces, bases, training facilities and other elements that exist often in many incarnations within and between services should be reconsidered. The Obama team, led by Secretary Gates, is to be credited with making a substantial start in this direction, announcing major efforts to reduce waste and to cancel or cut back redundant programs. But what supporters and critics of these efforts alike must realize is that they are necessarily only the first step—even-deeper cuts are required.

We need to abandon strategies that create needless expense. At its core this will mean even-more focus on unmanned, over-the-horizon, rapidly deployed forces and technologies that will in turn chafe against deep prejudices within the military. A U.S. Air Force that promotes pilots will increasingly have to become about unmanned aircraft. A U.S. Navy that promotes carrier-battle-group commanders must finally accept the obsolescence of the carrier battle group. The U.S. Army must recognize that the era of its massive supply chains built for global conflicts of an increasingly unlikely kind must come to an end. (And for those in the military who would respond that we are already exploring these technologies, the point is that we will have to choose between the old approaches and the new ones, that it is no longer an acceptable answer to say “We want it all.”)

In turn, this means we will need to place a new premium on the tools of leveraged leadership—burden sharing with allies, stronger dependency on alliances as a central element of strategy, greater resources devoted to preventative strategies (meaning diplomacy, aid, etc.) and a general strengthening of international institutions, particularly those associated with maintaining the global peace and preserving the global commons. And our allies need to realize that it is not that we want their help, it is that either they step up or no action will be taken. We can no longer afford to go it alone.

We will have to stop asking every time a situation arises in the world, “What should we do?” And we will start having to do as other nations do and ask, “Should we do anything?” This will mean letting other nations lead; multilateral solutions that are not optimal will be tested before more costly unilateral actions are considered. Sometimes it will mean doing what we have a great deal of trouble with and being patient, focusing on investing in ourselves and restoring our strength through solving the domestic problems that are the greatest threats to our national security. Fixing health care and enhancing our energy and climate security are far better uses of our resources than costly interventions beyond our borders.

Fortunately, embracing a new energy paradigm reduces our dependence on the dangerous Middle East and strengthens our negotiating position there. Fixing health care by providing coverage to all restores our fiscal well-being, makes our companies more competitive and will make American workers less afraid of the dislocations caused by globalization. Fighting climate change will reduce the risk of future dislocations associated with natural disasters or changing sea levels and related migrations. Fighting demand for drugs in the United States is the most effective way of stabilizing countries that produce those drugs, such as Mexico, Colombia or Afghanistan. Balancing our budget reduces our dependence on rising rivals like China and other emerging powers that have become our creditors. In fact, the healthy consequence of accepting the constraints we face, and responding to them rationally and with the long term in mind, is that we allocate our assets to domestic priorities, which happen, in turn, to resolve some of the greatest international challenges we face.

Of course, the problem raised by each of these facts is that our main national-security answers lie outside the ambit of traditional national-security experts. In other words, the people who hold the keys to our future national security may not even be in the room with the people who are currently charged with managing it. It’s why getting the NSC-NEC balance right is so important. But, more fundamentally, it is why an entirely new way of thinking will be needed by those in power—again, beginning with the president.

THE OBAMA team needs to set aside distractions and launch an internal review addressing our new security environment. We don’t need a new department. We don’t need a new czar to handle this. We just need thoughtful analysis and a new paradigm within which to review and reassess the most basic assumptions underlying U.S. national-security policy for the past two-thirds of a century. Obama, and his leadership, like those who came from the PNSR study, must come to accept that there is a paradox upon which the future of American national security rests. That is, if America is to continue to lead in the twenty-first century, we must spend less, do less, act alone less. We must shrink to grow. It is not unlike the aging pitcher who stops throwing fastballs and starts resorting to better pitch placement and a craftier array of pitches. Or, perhaps more appositely, it is the aging chieftain who once dominated by brute force but who no longer can throw his weight around and now must learn to lead, manage a team and find new means of influence.

Of course such changes require self-awareness, political courage, vision and true leadership. There is no reason to believe that the talent- and experience-rich Obama team does not have these things; but as is always the case in matters of U.S. national-security policy, our ability to do what we must begins and ends with the president of the United States. If he fears approaching this because critics will argue he is making America weaker or “disrespecting the military,” he must line up his team—including current and former four-star officers like Jones, Blair, Shinseki and Petraeus—behind him and say that a smaller, more efficient, less costly military and a stronger, more vibrant economy is actually the path to greater U.S. strength. This, he should state, is the starkest form of realism and that in our current state continuing to spend what we cannot afford weakens us. Maintaining massive outmoded programs weakens us. Spending wastefully weakens us. And if we continue to do these things, no army, navy or air force of any size will be able to preserve the United States or the role we aspire to have in the world.

Or, he can quote Gandhi, “We must become the change we want to see in the world.” His team can do the analysis, offer options and back him up. But in the end it will once again be revealed that in the toughest of times and on the most important issues, like this one, we have a national-security team of one.

David Rothkopf is the president and CEO of Garten Rothkopf, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the author of Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008) and Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power (PublicAffairs, 2005).