The Big Three:
Our Greatest Security Risks and How to Address Them
Prologue:
Thinking About the Future
The American national security establishment confronts many immediate problems: "Rogue states" attempt to bully their neighbors and attack U.S. interests; a war with Iraq has been followed by years of confrontation over sanctions and inspection; and a half-century after a major war in Korea, America still faces a constant and unpredictable threat on that peninsula. In addition, state-sponsored and independent terrorist groups explode bombs at American embassies, on U.S. bases, and in American airplanes. Nuclear, chemical and biological weapons are proliferating. Ethnic and national groups lock in conflict so extensive and bitter that even when U.S. interests are not directly at stake, as in Bosnia or Rwanda, there are imperatives for intervention. The challenges at the end of the 20th century are immensely demanding.
But beyond the present lie other, probably even more important, longer term issues. Commendably, U.S. policy makers have tried to attend to the long term. After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, for example, the Department of Defense (DOD) emphasized the importance of "preventive defense." The Pentagon's 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review identified a need to "shape" the environment as well as to respond to crises. American policy has sought to be farsighted, to identify issues before they reach the point of crisis. There is widespread agreement that America should worry about and invest in the future at least as much as in immediate needs.
Unfortunately, powerful factors militate against such efforts. As is often noted, in Washington (or any capital) the urgent preempts the important. A policy equivalent of Gresham's economic law could be stated: political and psychological factors (including the flow of the adrenaline) cause the crisis of the day to absorb the energy of the day. Little is left to plan for tomorrow, less for next month, almost nothing for next year. Only a dribble of attention is devoted to a decade as yet unborn. As in most things, we rush to cure while underinvesting in prevention. Self-interest regrettably reinforces this inclination. Today's crises shape the reputations of today's decisionmakers. By contrast, the energy and skill with which the next decade's problems are anticipated will be evaluated a decade from now, diluted by hundreds of other inputs.
To these universal tendencies may be added a problem of this particular era. We are not accustomed to thinking about a world in which tomorrow's challenges may be very different from today's. Over the last half century, American policy makers have had little occasion to exercise the skills or discipline required to transcend the urgent in favor of the longer term. During World War II we faced an immediate, fundamental threat. Then, for more than four decades after that war, America's most pressing task and its most important longer term security problem were the same: to combat communism as incarnated in the Soviet State and its allies. There was little need to think very differently about the long term as compared with the present. Moreover, our predecessors built an intellectual framework for the Cold War that was comprehensive, consistent, and, in its central tenets, correct. Now, when a new framework is required, we have lost the knack of how to build it.
Furthermore, it is perilous to advance premises about the long term. The number of variables is too large, global change too rapid and diverse, our imaginations too limited, to project with confidence. Who among us could have foreseen the world of 1938 in 1908? The world of 1968 in 1938? 1998 in 1968? As a cautionary recent example, read the book on Japan by the brilliant Herman Kahn, published in 1971. Kahn was characteristically perceptive about much that was to come, but he ventured that if Japan did not surpass the United States in gross domestic product (GDP) by the year 2000 he would "be surprised."1 Or consider the conference of 35 of the best of our Russian experts, assembled by the estimable Center for Strategic and International Studies in 1983. The rapporteur summarized, "All of us agree that there is no likelihood whatsoever that the Soviet Union will become a political democracy or that it will collapse in the foreseeable future."2
Our headlights illuminate only a short stretch of the road before us; we cannot see the many curves that lie ahead.
Even if we saw the future, it would be a considerable challenge to react to it appropriately. In security matters, diagnosis and prescription are not very closely aligned arts. However uncommon it is to discover a reflective analyst and a skilled policy practitioner, the combination in one person is so scarce that when it arises, as for example in a Dean Acheson or a Henry Kissinger, we celebrate it (and live off it) for a long time. Yet the payoff, and the only meaningful reward, from a perception of the future is to translate it into action in the present.
It was said of Bronson Alcott, 19th century poet and philosopher (and the father of Louisa May Alcott), that he "soared into the infinite and fathomed the unfathomable, but never paid cash." Policy makers can't get away with that. After "fathoming the unfathomable" of the future, they must "pay cash" by converting their insight into policies and budgets of present value. Put another way, it is necessary for them to be fluently bilingual: they must translate the present into the future and then interpret the future prospect back into present actions. Either of these tasks is immensely difficult; together, they are daunting.
Finally, there is a paradox. To the extent we foresee the future and effectively address it, then the future will not develop as we anticipated it. This is especially so because national security is a competitive business. When we respond to risks, those who would oppose us adapt to counter our responses. It is not sufficient to be farsighted; we must also constantly reassess. It is not possible to be enduringly correct.
Yet when all this is assimilated, and the immensity of the challenges and the probability of failures are acknowledged, our visions of the future provide the most important guide to action in the present. At a minimum, we place present decisions in perspective--we evaluate their importance and correctness by intuitively assuming what the future will be like. This essay tries to improve that process by making possible futures the center of discussion and by asking what is likely to be undervalued in our preparations for these futures.
The following question may deepen understanding. Imagine that we policymakers are sitting around a table, gazing into a crystal ball. Suppose we saw in this crystal ball ourselves sitting at this same table 30 years from now saying that things had gone badly for America; those responsible for this country's international relations at the end of the 20th century had not done well, had failed to take appropriate actions. Then the crystal ball clouds over and we are left to guess what it was said--what had gone wrong for America from a national security standpoint, between 1999 and 2029? What would it be? Something unforeseen?
From discussions and reflection in response to this question, I have distilled three risks that warrant better articulation, more attention, and a better targeted, richer investment of our time, energy, and treasure.
Given the opening observation that we cannot predict the future, why is this a valuable discussion? A handful of independent answers, any of them valid, would justify the exercise. If several are persuasive, the effort is that much more warranted. First, whether the views here are persuasive or misguided, they will serve a good purpose if they trigger a broader debate about what others see in the crystal ball. Even if the resulting discussion tells us nothing about the world of 2028, it can tell us a great deal about 1998. The greatly respected investor, Warren Buffet, is credited with having disparagingly commented that predictions about the stock market say less about the stock market than they do about the psychology of those doing the predicting. For Buffet, this implied that people's forecasts were not worth much attention. But I should like to follow Buffet's trail in the opposite direction: to use the predictions as a source of insight about the psychologies.
From this angle, the future is a Rorschach test that can reveal fundamental present concerns. The focus in this respect is not so much on what might be in the crystal ball but on what the observers think they see. This is therefore a work about present fears and insecurities, and how they might apply to the future.
Though longer term concerns rarely are discussed in the way they are presented here, they underlie our day-to-day national security decisions and investments as the unconscious underlies the conscious. Raising these matters to the surface and making articulate what is usually inchoate can improve the policy debate about the present. Discussions about the superstructure of decisions are sounder if the foundations of longer term perspectives are better understood.
Second, even though some fundamental differences in perspective will persist after discussion, the discussion will sensitize policy makers to indicators that may later change their views. For all their uncertainty, predictions have an attractive aspect--they are ultimately verifiable hypotheses; "time will tell." But time speaks initially in whispers, amplifying its teachings as the years pass. Discussing our expectations teaches us to be better listeners. When we are sensitized to what we and others anticipate, we may, more quickly than an unprepared listener, pick up clues that a scenario is unfolding or that a trend is occurring.
Third, this approach offers us an opportunity to correct for underinvestment. These pages offer no pretension to comprehensiveness; this not an essay about everything important to a sound national security policy. The question posed does not address opportunities or good things that may happen in the future, nor does it focus on issues, even very important issues, that already receive their due in present discussion. This question elicits people's anxieties, not their aspirations. Even if predictive, it would only predict "the dark side." If the observations in these pages are well taken, they need to be integrated with ongoing efforts in other respects to elaborate a complete national strategy for America in the first decades of the new century.
What these pages can do is focus our attention on ill-mapped problems that loom above the flatland of national security risks, encouraging us to look up, to focus beyond the day-to-day events that fill our calendars and our minds. If successful, it will induce debate about the contours of our long-term risks and about plans to minimize these risks. That debate can produce robust and worthwhile decisions without being able to see the future. We don't have to predict an airplane crash, much less identify its site, to think it is worth mapping the mountains. It is precisely because we cannot be confidently predictive that we are well advised to hedge--to try to understand where we might go wrong and to mitigate those contingencies.
Finally, our predictive capability, though perpetually imperfect, can be improved through group discussion. Some people will be more insightful than others. If discussions about the future are like most others, an exchange of views will deepen understanding. As a recent mantra from the computer industry puts it, "No one is smarter than everyone." If a great many of us discuss what is really important over the longer term, we are likely to determine more correctly what matters. If we rely instead on only our own rudimentary, closeted views, we are more likely to err. We will never be terrific. Like Herman Kahn and the experts on the Soviet Union we will make mistakes, but a small improvement in our foresight could be worth a lot.
This essay will not foretell the future. To the extent it is successful, however, it should help us to understand and sharpen national security priorities and policies in the present.
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