Phase II the Commission moved from describing objective conditions to prescribing

Ia strategy for dealing with them. Subtitled & Concer for Preserving Sectory and

Promoting Freedom, the Commission stressed that America cannot secure and advance its own interests in isolation. The nations of the world must work together-and the United States must learn to work with others in new ways—if the more cooperative order emerging from the Cold War epoch is to be sustained and strengthened.

Nonetheless, this Commission takes as its premise that America must play a special international role well into the future. By dint of its power and its wealth, its interests and its values, the United States has a responsibility to itself and to others to reinforce international order. Only the United States can provide the ballast of global stability, and usually the United States is the only country in a position to organize collective responses to common challenges.

We believe that American strategy must compose a balance between two key aims. The first is to reap the benefits of a more integrated world in order to expand freedom, security, and prosperity for Americans and for others. But second. American strategy must also strive to dampen the forces of global instability so that those benefits can endure and spread

On the positive side, this means that the United States should pursec, within the limits of what is prudent and realistic, the worldwide expansion of material abundance and the eradication of poverty. It should also promote political pluralism, freedom of thought and speech, and individual liberty. Not only do such aims inhere in American principles, they are practical goals, as well. There are no guarantees against violence and evil in the world. We believe, nonetheless, that the expansion of human rights and basic material well-being constitutes a sturdy bulwark against them. On the negative side, these goals require concerted protection against four related dangers: the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction; international terrorism: major interstate aggression; and the collapse of states into internal violence, with the associated regional destabilization that often accompanies it.

These goals compose the lodestone of a U.S. strategy to expand freedom and maintain underlying stability, but, as we have said, the United States cannot achieve them by itself. American leadership must be prepared to act unilaterally if necessary, not least because the will to act alone is sometimes required to gain the cooperation of others. But US policy should join its efforts with allies and multilateral institutions wherever possible: the United States is wise to strengthen its partners and in turn will derive strength from them.

The United States, therefore, as the prime keeper of the international security commons, must speak and act in ways that lead others, by dint of their own interests, to ally with American goals. If it is too arrogant and self-possessed, Amcrican behavior will invariably stimulate the rise of opposing coalitions. The United States will thereby drive away many of its partners and weaken those that remain. Tone matters.

To carry out this strategy and achieve these goals, the Common defined six key

objectives for U.S. foreign and national security policy

First, the preeminent objective is “to defend the United States: from the dangers of a new era." The combination of unconventional w. the persistence of international terrorism will end the relative invulnere homeland to catastrophic attack. To deter attack against the homelanc

United States requires a new triad of prevention, protection, and response. Failure to prevent mass-casualty attacks against the American homeland will jeopardize not only American lives but U.S. foreign policy writ large. It would undermine support for U.S. international leadership and for many of our personal freedoms, as well. Indeed, the abrupt undermining of U.S. power and prestige is the worst thing that could happen to the structure of global peace in the next quarter century, and nothing is more likely to produce it than devastating attacks on American soil.

Achieving this goal, and the nation's other critical national security goals, also requires the U.S. government, as a second key objective, to "maintain America's social cohesion, economic competitiveness, technological ingenuity, and military strength." That means a larger investment in and better management of science and technology in government and in society, and a substantially better educational system, particularly for the teaching of science and mathematics.

The United States must also take better advantage of the opportunities that the present period of relative international stability and American power enable. A third key objective, therefore, is "to assist the integration of key major powers, especially China, Russia, and India, into the mainstream of the emerging international system.” Moreover, since globalization's opportunities are rooted in economic and political progress, the Commission's fourth key U.S. objective is "to promote, with others, the dynamism of the new global economy and improve the effectiveness of international institutions and international law."

A fifth key objective also follows, which is “to adapt U.S. alliances and other regional mechanisms to a new era in which America's partners seek greater autonomy and responsibility." A sixth and final key objective inheres in an effort to help the international community tame the disintegrative forces spawned by an era of change.” While the prospect of major war is low, much of the planet will experience conflict and violence. Unless the United States, in concert with others, can find a way to limit that conflict and violence, it will not be able to construct a foreign policy agenda focussed on opportunities.

Achieving all of these objectives will require a basic shift in orientation: to focus on preventing rather than simply responding to dangers and crises. The United States must redirect its energies, adjust its diplomacy, and redesign its military capabilities to ward off cross-border aggression, assist states before they fail, and avert systemic international financial crises. To succeed over the long run with a preventive focus, the United States needs to institutionalize its efforts to grasp the opportunities the international environment now offers.

An opportunity-based strategy also has the merit of being more economical than a reactive one. Preventing a financial crisis, even if it involves well-timed bailouts, is cheaper than recuperating from stock market crashes and regional recessions. Preventing a violent conflict costs less than responsive peacekeeping operations and nation-building activities. And certainly, preventing mass-casualty attacks on the American homeland will be far less expensive than recovering from them.

That is of stadeth Conocracy conduces generally to doma premist

These six objectives, and the Commission's strategy itself, rest on a premise so basic

international peace, and peace conduces to, or at least allows, democratic politics. While this premise is not a "law," and while scholars continue to study and debate these matters, we believe they are strong tendencies, and that they can be strengthened further by a consistent and determined national policy. We know, that a world characterized by the spread of genuine

democracy would not be flawless, nor signal “the end of history.” But it is the best of all possible worlds that we can conceive, and that we can achieve.

In Phase I, this Commission presented four "Worlds in Prospect." agglomerations of basic trends that, we believed, might describe the world in 2025. The Democratic Peace was one. Nationalism and Protectionism was a second, Division and Mayhem a third, and Globalism Triumphant the fourth. We, and presumably most observers, see the Democratic Peace as a positive future, Nationalism and Protectionism as a step in the wrong direction, Division and Mayhem as full-fledged tragedy. But the Globalism Triumphant scenario divides opinion, partly because it is the hardest to envision, and partly because it functions as a template for the projection of conflicting political views.

Some observers, for example, believe that the end of the nation-state is upon us, and that this is a good thing, for, in this view, nationalism is the root of racism and militarism. The eclipse of the national territorial state is at any rate, some arguc, an inevitable development given the very nature of an increasingly integrated world.

We demur. To the extent that a more integrated world economically is the best way to raise people out of poverty and disease, we applaud it. We also recognize the need for unprecedented international cooperation on a range of transnational problems. But the state is the only venue discovered so far in which democratic principles and processes can play out reliably, and not all forms of nationalism have been or need be illiberal. We therefore affirm the value of American sovereignty as well as the political and cultural diversity ensured by the present state system. Within that system the United States must live by and be ready to share its political values-but it must remember that those values include tolerance for those who hold different views.

Ab

broader and deeper Democratic Peace is, and ought to be, America's aspiration, but there are obstacles to achieving it. Indeed, despite the likely progress ahead on many fronts, the United States may face not only episodic problems but also genuine crises. If the United States mismanages its current global position, it could generate resentments and jealousies that leave us more isolated than isolationist. Major wars involving weapons of mass destruction are possible, and the general security environment may deteriorate faster than the United States, even with allied aid, can redress it. Environmental, economic, and political unraveling in much of the world could occur on a scale so large as to make current levels of prosperity unsustainable, let alone expandable. Certain technologies-biotechnology, for example-may also undermine social and political stability among and within advanced countries, including the United States. Indeed, all these crises may occur, and each could reinforce and deepen the others.

The challenge for the United States is to seize the new century's many opportunities and avoid its many dangers. The problem is that the current structures and processes of U.S. national security policymaking are incapable of such management. That is because, just below the enormous power and prestige of the United States today, is a neglected and, in some cases, a decaying institutional base.

The U.S. government is not well organized, for example, to ensure homeland security. No adequate coordination mechanism exists among federal, state, and local government efforts, as well as those of dozens of agencies at the federal level. If present trends continue in elementary and secondary school science and mathematics education, to take another example, the United States may lose its lead in many, if not most, major areas of critical scientific-technological

competence within 25 years. We are also losing, and are finding ourselves unable to replace, the most critical asset we have: talented and dedicated personnel throughout government.

Strategic planning is absent in the U.S. government and its budget processes are so inflexible that few resources are available for preventive policies or for responding to crises, nor can resources be reallocated efficiently to reflect changes in policy priorities. The economic component of US national security policy is poorly integrated with the military and diplomatic components. The State Department is demoralized and dysfunctional. The Defense Department appears incapable of generating a strategic posture very different from that of the Cold War, and its weapons acquisition process is slow, inefficient, and burdened by excess regulation. National policy in the increasingly critical environment of space is adrift, and the intelligence community is only slowly reorienting itself to a world of more diffuse and differently shaped threats. The Executive Branch, with the aid of the Congress, needs to initiate change in many areas by taking bold new steps, and by speeding up positive change where it is languishing.

The

he very mention of changing the engrained routines and structures of government is usually enough to evoke cynicism even in a born optimist. But the American case is surprisingly positive, especially in relatively recent times. The reorganizations occasioned by World War II were vast and innovative, and the 1947 National Security Act was bold in advancing and institutionalizing them. Major revisions of the 1947 Act were passed subsequently by Congress in 1949, 1953, and 1958. Major internal Defense Department reforms werc promulgated as well, one in 1961 and another, the Department of Defense Reorganization Act (Goldwater-Nichols) in 1986. The essence of the American genius is that we know better than most societies how to reinvent ourselves to meet the times. This Commission, we believe, is true to that estimable tradition.

Despite this relatively good record. resistance will arise to changing U.S. national security structures and processes, both within agencies of government and in the Congress. What is needed, therefore, is for the new administration, together with the new Congress, to exert real leadership. Our comprehensive recommendations to guide that leadership follow.

First, we must prepare ourselves better to defend the national homeland. We take this up in Section I, Securing the National Homeland. We put this first because it addresses the most dangerous and the most novel threat to American national security in the years ahead.

Second, we must rebuild our strengths in the generation and management of science and technology and in education. We have made Recapitalizing America's Strengths in Science and Education the second section of this report despite the fact that science management and education issues are rarely ranked as paramount national security priorities. We do so to emphasize their crucial and growing importance.

Third, we must ensure coherence and effectiveness in the institutions of the Executive Branch of government. Section III, Institutional Redesign, proposes change throughout the national security apparatus.

Fourth, we must ensure the highest caliber human capital in public service. U.S. national security depends on the quality of the people, both civilian and military, serving within the ranks of government. If we are unsuccessful in meeting the crisis of competence before us, none of the other reforms proposed in this report will succeed. Section IV, The Human Requirements for National Security, examines government personnel issues in detail.