I imagine the Obama administration may be wondering whether or not to release another edition of the National Security Strategy (NSS). They released Obama's first (and so far only) one in May 2010. Although the law mandating the NSS calls for annual updates, at the time it looked like the administration might follow the George W. Bush precedent of releasing just one per term.

The one-per-term standard makes sense for a number of reasons. First, we shouldn't expect the overall national security strategy of the country to change on an annual basis. Second, producing a quality document takes a surprising amount of work; better to invest those resources in monitoring the implementation of the old one than in finding ways to repackage old wine in new wine skins. Third, as an administration creeps closer to the silly season of campaigning, the temptation to turn the document into a brag-sheet rather than a serious articulation of the administration's worldview becomes irresistible. Whether or not you agreed with the content of the arguments, Clinton's first NSS and both of Bush's were more substantial and thus more consequential documents than the later ones produced by the Clinton administration.

However, I would not be surprised to learn that a new version is under consideration. Doubtless the campaign temptation is pulling mightily on the Obama team. President Obama will be the first Democratic incumbent in decades -- maybe since Roosevelt -- to have reason to believe that his bragging rights on national security are stronger than they are on domestic policy and the economy. When the applause lines are louder on national security than they are on the economy, it is easy to predict that the candidate will proffer the former more often than the latter (insert late night comic riff about Giuliani mentioning 9/11 here). Whether or not they can produce a document at least as serious as their first one, let alone on par with earlier ones is tougher to predict. Campaign-induced distortions will be a big challenge.

Yet there is one good reason why they should release another version in the current term -- perhaps good enough to overcome all of my other caveats. A few weeks ago, President Obama released a much-ballyhooed "new strategic guidance" and the administration went to considerable lengths to emphasize the boldness and novelty of what they were doing. The commentariat responded in kind -- a Google search of "Obama strategic pivot" produces some 1,200,000 hits.

If it really is so new and so bold, it raises the obvious question: is it new and bold enough to require changes in the (now) old NSS, from which, in theory, such defense guidance is supposed to emanate?

On the other hand, if the new strategic guidance does not require a change in the NSS, how bold and new can it be?

Given how many times Newt Gingrich rose from the proverbial electoral grave to become campaign-relevant again, I will not join the chorus claiming the fight for the Republican nomination is over. However, I will endorse another cliché: the primary season is at an important turning point, or at least it should be. It is high time the candidates focused on providing a compelling alternative to President Obama rather than providing a litany of reasons for detesting the other Republicans in the race.

The urgency is especially acute in foreign policy and national security. I have been fretting about this for some time now and I concede that the worst of my fears have not been realized; there won't be a crack-up within the party over foreign policy. Moreover, I endorse the conventional wisdom that the election will be won or lost on domestic policy and the economy.

However, that is no reason to settle for sloppy critiques and platforms in the area of foreign policy. Republicans must come to terms with the fact that this will be the strongest Democrat incumbent on national security and foreign policy they have faced in decades. This has more than a whiff of damnation with faint praise, since both President Clinton and especially President Carter were hobbled with substantial national security baggage during their reelection campaign. But for precisely that reason, I think Republicans have sometimes settled for an intellectually lazy critique because, given how weak the opposing party's record is, that seems to have sufficed.

Not this time. Obama has serious national security weaknesses and a record that warrants critique, but it is immune to superficial sound bite attacks. Soft on protecting America? The SEALs bought Obama immunity on that one when they took down Bin Laden. Naïve about the Iranian threat? Candidate Obama was demonstrably naïve about Iran and governed that way for the first half of his term, but since then has talked tough and marshaled strong sanctions.

Even issues where he has made bigger mistakes, like the failure to secure an agreement for stay-behind forces in Iraq, he may not be as politically vulnerable because they have been popular mistakes. The Iraq case illustrates my larger point well. Obama's hands-off approach to Iraq merits criticism (and I have supplied some here, here, and here, but it is hard to present the argument in a fashion that is brief enough to engage but fair enough to withstand administration rebuttals). Thus, Obama may have been hands-off personally, but the administration was not; Vice-President Biden devoted considerable time to the Iraq file, and with Ambassador Crocker on the ground, the administration had a good team in place. Moreover, the lion's share of the blame for the failure rests with the Iraqi leadership. I think reasonable people can question the way Obama handled the Iraq file, but it requires a nuanced line to explain how the administration missed the mark. Offer a sloppy critique, and the administration and its allies in the media swat it down with "But Bush negotiated the withdrawal agreement" -- and all too often the discussion ends there.

The Obama team's rare invocation of a Bush policy in the defense suggests two fruitful lines of contrast that the Republican nominee should develop:

1. Obama's foreign policy successes have come when he has followed Bush policies; his failures have come when he has struck out on his own. I have made this point before, but it bears reemphasis. Republicans need not fear giving Obama credit for his successes because to a remarkable extent they have come where he has governed like a Republican not like candidate Obama.

2. Obama has made relatively effective use of the tools and instruments of power that he inherited from his predecessor -- it raises the question, what new tools and instruments of power is Obama bequeathing to his successor? The SOF capabilities that produced the successful hunt for Bin Laden were honed on his predecessor's watch, especially by General McChrystal in Iraq. Likewise with tactics, techniques, and procedures associated with drone strikes. The financial levers that are squeezing Iran today were perfected by the Bush team. The key elements of Obama's Asia strategy -- the ones that have the best chance of yielding positive results -- were built under Bush and expanded under Obama. (Of course, in each of these areas, the Bush team took capabilities that were at an even more embryonic stage under Clinton's watch, so there is plenty of credit to be shared on both sides of the aisle. By the way, this is precisely how things transpired during the first Cold War, as the history of key programs like stealth technology demonstrate.) In some of these cases, Obama wisely kept many of the same architects who did the innovative work under Bush and expanded their influence and authority. So, the Republican nominee should ask, in what ways will Obama's successor have a larger and more powerful toolbox than the one Obama got to use?

Framing Obama's national security successes this way cuts sharply against the triumphalism that characterizes the White House communications operation. And, as the saying goes, it has the additional virtue of being true.

Republicans do not need to fear an accurate and fair evaluation of the record. But they will have to do the hard work of supplying it. Careless sound bites won't cut it this time around.

Update: When I said Ryan Crocker above of course I meant James Jeffrey. Crocker was an able Ambassador to Iraq under Bush and is now an able Ambassador to Afghanistan. James Jeffrey replaced Chris Hill in 2010 and, by all accounts, has worked assiduously to advance U.S. interests in Iraq.

A favorite topic for FP bloggers is the so-called gap between practicing academics and practicing policymakers. I have weighed in, but see also contributions from Dan Drezner (here or here and Steve Walt).

It is an important topic (at least to "yakademics" like me -- I don't sense it has quite the burning appeal for my non-academic Shadow Government teammates) and well worth the focused attention it has received. There are several excellent programs designed to help bridge it, including one run by Eliot Cohen and Tom Keaney at SAIS, another by my Duke colleague Bruce Jentleson and Berkeley's Steve Weber and American U's Jim Goldgeier, and a third by Dick Betts at Columbia. There is probably room for more such efforts.

But at the risk of undercutting the urgent language used in grant applications, I think it is only fair to point out that the situation may not be irredeemably bleak. I just had the pleasure of reading through the most recent issue of International Security, the top academic journal in the field of security studies and one of the highest-impact journals in the entire discipline of political science. I was struck by how policy relevant the issue was, without sacrificing in any way academic rigor. Mind you, the articles were too long and perhaps on the academic side to make the reading list of, say, National Security Advisor Tom Donilon. But policymakers would benefit from understanding the arguments contained therein and foreign policy specialists inside the administration would benefit from digging into some of the articles more closely. 

Consider the menu:

• An article by Nuno Monteiro theorizing the conditions under which unipolarity conduces to peace or conflict. This is grand system theorizing in a form that is particularly "academic." I am not entirely persuaded by his argument, but I can easily see how speechwriters and strategists would benefit from understanding the framework. [Note to entering Ph.D. students seeking dissertation topics: this article also reflects the turning of the wheel of academic fashion as the field cycles through different levels of analysis. In the early 1980s, system-level work like neorealism and neoliberalism were hot; in the 1990's state-level work like democratic peace theory was hot; in the early 2000's transnational-level work on ethnic conflict and terrorism was hot; right now individual-level work on leaders is hot; it is about time for the system-level work like this about power transitions and polarity to have another run.]
• An article by Michael Beckley rebutting the claims of declinists that a rising China is eclipsing the United States. Again, one can imagine ongoing academic (and policy) debate, but the work speaks directly to a topic of urgent policy priority.
• An article by Ole Magnus Theisen, Helge Holtermann, and Halvard Buhaug presenting a sophisticated empirical test of the link between droughts and conflict and showing that, contra the repeated claims of policymakers, the systematic evidence of a link is missing. This is exactly the sort of policy relevant enterprise that academics are ideally suited to perform.
• An article by David Elbladh tracing the influence of a Depression era historian on the formation of the security studies field. Ironically, in some ways, this is the article that is the least "useful" to policymakers, even though it is the one most directly focused on the gap question itself. It is, however, helpful to academics interested in closing the gap and so I still count it as supporting my thesis.
• An article by David Kang reviewing three recent books on North Korean politics and economics. Given the long lead times of academic publishing, this is a serendipitous masterstroke. The sudden death of Kim Jong-Il has plunged North Korea into a regime crisis and the U.S. national security community is doing an urgent deep dive into the black box of North Korean politics. They couldn't do better than reading this detailed and insightful book review (and, as needed, the underlying academic books themselves).
• An exchange of letters between Michael McKoy and David Lake about bargaining theory and the origins of the Iraq war. Most policymakers might give this a miss, but that would be a shame. McKoy's brief account of the bargaining dilemmas leading up to the Iraq war is one of the fairest and truest summaries of the dynamic that I have read. Academics have really struggled to explain the Iraq war and have all-too-often settled for distorted caricatures. This brief exchange rises well above that.
• At the very end of the issue is an exchange of letters between me and two critics, Betts and Mike Desch, concerning my earlier article about civil-military relations and the surge. I will let readers decide who gets the better of the exchange, but regardless it, too, bridges the policy-academy gap.

Finally, note an interesting fact: the issue predominantly features the work of junior scholars, in some cases scholars not yet holding a tenure track position. (Interestingly, one of the IS authors has made his own useful contribution to the debate about the gap.) Perhaps the emerging generation has not gotten the word about the gap crisis. Or perhaps they are already well on their way to fixing it.

Fareed Zakaria's interview with President Obama on Obama's foreign policy is a missed opportunity. Zakaria enjoyed exceptional access to President Obama, but chose to present the gauzy survey that the White House communications office might have served up (perhaps those two facts are linked?). Zakaria is certainly smart and knowledgeable enough to probe more deeply, but he didn't, or if he did, he didn't include it in the interview, and those deeper insights didn't make it into his own summary analysis of the interview either.

That is a pity, because I think Zakaria is a better critic of American foreign policy than he showed this time.  Here are just a few questions that a more trenchant interview might have pressed the president on:

• You campaigned on the claim that climate change was a national security threat of the highest rank, as important a national security interest as dealing with the threats posed by terrorists and WMD proliferation.  Yet, you have not governed that way. Yes, Congress opposed your cap-and-trade program, but they also didn't want Obamacare yet you rammed that through. Why couldn't you accomplish your grand strategy shift on climate change?
• You campaigned on an unrelenting critique of your predecessor's policies, yet you have kept so many of them in place. Moreover, where you have enjoyed the greatest success, say the killing of Bin Laden, it is through following techniques, tactics, and procedures developed by your predecessor. And where you have enjoyed the least success, say in Israel-Palestine, it has come after making abrupt changes. Do you think it is time now to refine your critique?
• Governor Romney has offered a fairly nuanced critique of your Iran policy, particularly focusing on missed opportunities during the post-election turmoil in June 2009 and then again with the September 2009 revelations of the secret uranium enrichment program.  Looking back on that year, do you agree with Romney that you missed some opportunities?
• Increasingly, our allies are expressing great discomfort with your heavy reliance on drone strikes. If you get a second term, do you think you will be obliged to scale back that program or brace yourself for significantly greater friction with our allies?
• What happened to your idea of a G-2, a condominium of global cooperative problem solving between the United States and China?
• You say you pride yourself on good personal relations with other leaders and that this has contributed to success in foreign policy. How extensive was your outreach to Prime Minister Maliki and how effective was that in negotiating the follow-on agreement that your administration was seeking?

You have launched the transpacific trade accord initiative, but you have done so after three years of letting ready-to-go trade agreements languish and after opposing the renewed grant of  fast track authority that all of your predecessors deemed essential for a credible trade promotion strategy. Why should our Asian partners view your proposal as a credible without it?

One could easily generate dozens more, and Zakaria could doubtless come up with a few that I haven't considered. The one time that he actually did press the president (albeit gently) on Simpson-Bowles, he elicited a bit more candor (and defensiveness) from his interview subject.

Perhaps it was the Oval Office effect. I know how the setting can intimidate even someone as self-assured and cosmopolitan as Zakaria. Perhaps, given my own turn at the mound, I would pitch softballs, too. But I would like to think that a seasoned pro would deliver a few fastballs, and maybe even a brush back pitch or two.

A few quick-take reactions to the new strategy roll-out at the Pentagon today:

Reporters may emphasize the "scaled back" aspect in their headlines, but President Obama and his team went to some lengths to provide the opposite frame. Indeed, Obama's opening comments in his prepared remarks could have been taken from any Romney stump speech about America's exceptional role in the world and the importance of never surrendering American military superiority. At least in tonal terms, this was not a "lead from behind" message the administration was selling today.

The president emphasized that this was a strategy-driven rather than a budget-driven exercise. The team tried to dramatize that by refusing to provide budgetary specifics. However, even if the budget is rolled out later, there was an important resource decision that logically and chronologically preceded this strategy: the decision to cut future defense spending by at least $450 billion, more if the sequester hits. Even some of the major strategic shifts the president mentioned -- ending major troop presence in Iraq and cutting short the Afghanistan surge -- were dictated as much by a decision about resources (do we want to spend as much on Afghanistan as it would cost to provide medical coverage to the uninsured?) as they were about geopolitical developments in the region. The president established a topline resource figure, and then the staff tried to devise the optimal strategy underneath it. Put another way, this is not necessarily the strategic posture one would choose if more resources could be made available. That is not a critique of the strategy, just of the way it is being described.

This strategy is something of a vindication of Donald Rumsfeld's arguments about defense transformation. Virtually everything Secretary of Defense Panetta said could have been said (and probably was said) by Secretary Rumsfeld. The search for a smaller, less-manpower intensive, more agile, yet more capable military is the essence of the reforms Rumsfeld pursued.

It is a bit misleading to claim that since defense spending will still be higher in the future than it was five years ago (not counting the direct costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) therefore the military will be at least as capable and, more to the point, the risks at least as manageable as they were then. There are three big cost drivers that continue to grow and together they undermine this claim, at least somewhat: (1) personnel costs, especially pay and benefits (what President Obama means by the code words "keeping faith with our troops"); (2) per-unit procurement costs of weapon systems; and (3) the Chinese military build-up. In theory, we have more leverage over the first two than we have over the third. In practice, all three seem stubbornly resistant to reform and collectively they mean that a dollar of defense spending five years from now may not buy as much national security as the same dollar five years ago.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Martin Dempsey had it exactly right when he said this strategy is all about managing risk. If you cut defense, you can either reduce your goals or accept greater risk in pursuit of those goals. Despite all of the hoopla, I did not read or hear any clear delineation of how the goals have been reduced, beyond the veiled reference to downscale in Europe. (In fairness, I suspect an Obama briefer would say that the Administration has accepted scaled-back goals in Afghanistan and especially in Iraq.  That is true, but I think it belongs on the risk side of the ledger, see below). By cold logic, then, this strategy is a strategy to embrace increased risk.

The briefing paper does not spell out where that increased risk is but one can deduce it:

• Risk that our European allies will not adequately carry the burdens we are shifting to their shoulders.
• Risk that adversaries will exploit a crisis because they believe that a less-capable United States is tied down in one theater.
• Risk that conflicts will not be short and will not require large stabilization forces.
• Risk that Iraq, Afghanistan, or Pakistan will unravel in ways that profoundly affect U.S. national security.

There is a fundamental tension in the strategy that does not seem resolved: it is cheaper to fight "dumb" because to fight "smart" requires using expensive high technology to minimize the human costs of war, ours and theirs. Ever since Vietnam, we have tended to increase the financial costs we were willing to bear in order to reduce the human costs of our national security. It will be very hard to reverse that. We are inching toward a point where we cannot afford to fight the wars in the manner we like to fight them. One solution, of course, is not to fight the wars. But if you choose to fight them, you may be doing so at higher human cost.

There is a lively debate among theorists of civil-military relations about the appropriate levels of political activity in which the military may engage. Some advocate fairly tight restrictions, even encouraging soldiers to emulate Gen. George C. Marshall who famously refused to vote so as to demonstrate his apolitical professionalism. Others allow for greater leeway, and encourage the military to speak out more regularly in policy debates, even when those debates have a partisan overlay.

I tend towards the restrictive end of the spectrum. I do not discourage the military from voting, for instance, but I do think it is a mistake for prominent retired senior generals and admirals to campaign actively for political candidates (I do not see a problem with veterans of whatever rank running as candidates in their own right. When they do that, they clearly cross over to the pure political side. The problem is trying to maintain the authority, even deference, that comes with professional distance while simultaneously politicking for a candidate).  

For a good introduction into the complexities of this debate, I recommend reading Risa Brooks survey of the topic: her chapter on "Militaries and Political Activity in Democracies,"  an excellent chapter in a recent compendium. (Full disclosure: I have a chapter in that same book, which I co-authored with a brilliant graduate student. I got permission to present and publish that article while still on the NSC staff because, when my superiors reviewed it, they declared it so academic and abstruse that no one would read it, and thus it would neither constitute a conflict of interest nor expose the White House to any risk of embarrassment -- or words to that effect. Sometimes, there is utility in academic irrelevancy.)  

It is also clear that there is a spectrum of opinion within the ranks. A first-rate Georgetown U. dissertation by Heidi Urben (more full disclosure: I was on her dissertation committee) documents that Army personnel have some difficulty in determining where to draw the line -- is it acceptable to encourage fellow military comrades to vote? How to vote? To demonstrate the same with bumper stickers in the barracks?

So I accept that there are gray zones in the area of military and politics and that it is especially difficult to draw clear lines for reservists who have feet planted firmly in both civilian and military worlds.

However, I am hard-pressed to think of a specialists who would tolerate this: an Army reservist, Corp. Jesse Thorsen, speaking to a campaign rally before the Iowa caucus while in uniform. Perhaps there are lawyers who will try to argue that because the corporal was not on active duty at the time he may avoid the harshest punishment. And most people will point out that a corporal is very close to the bottom of the totem pole so hardly on his own capable of destroying our democratic institutions. But this seems a pretty clear violation of both the letter and the spirit of the Department of Defense regulations.

Of equal importance, it is corrosive of healthy civil-military relations. The corporal may believe he is speaking only for himself, but the reality is that if he is wearing his uniform, his audience seems him as speaking on behalf of the institution. For that matter, almost no one is interested in what civilian Jesse Thorsen has to say; the primary reason he was invited to speak was that the campaign knew that folks would be interested in what a corporal had to say. It was his military status, in other words, that gave his political views cachet. That makes it a matter for civil-military relations and a matter for public rebuke.

The Iowa results probably indicate that there will not be a big crack-up within the Republican party on foreign policy because the caucus returns are likely to be the high-water mark for the candidate with the most distinctive foreign policy platform in the field: Ron Paul. He did well enough to gain another week of press attention. But in the one contest best-suited to his unusual political operation, Paul did not beat expectations. He would have to really surprise in New Hampshire in order to remain relevant in the later primaries, and those are likely to be even tougher terrain for him. 

Paul is no longer likely to be a spoiler within the party. He can still play the spoiler in the general election, if he runs a Ross Perot-style third party campaign  and siphons off enough of the anti-incumbent vote to re-elect President Obama. There will be many Obama supporters cheering him on to do just that, but at least one influential Paul supporter argues compellingly against it.

Jon Huntsman is the other candidate who tried to capitalize on foreign policy divisions within the party, but he avoided Iowa altogether, thus delaying his moment of truth until next week's primary in New Hampshire. Predictions in this campaign season have been notoriously unreliable, but I am willing to bet that New Hampshire will be more of a Waterloo than a surge for Huntsman.

That means that Romney will very likely be the nominee, and whichever runners-up remain in the race to challenge him through a few more primaries will be doing so on the basis of domestic or economic policies or personality, not national security and foreign policy. Romney already had the strongest foreign policy platform of the field, and, if I am right about the fading of Paul and Huntsman, any remaining rivals -- even a surprise new not-Romney drafted from the bench -- will largely echo him on foreign policy.

There had always been a chance that the primaries would exacerbate the within-party divisions on national security, which are wider today than they have been since Reagan. A majority of Republican voters continue support the traditional "peace through strength" posture of muscular internationalism that characterized the tenures of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush (yes, there were differences across those administrations, but I would argue far more continuity than is popularly credited). A sizable minority shows more sympathy for steps ranging from retrenchment to neo-isolationism. Paul was the candidate that resonated most effectively with the latter group, but his positions were probably too extreme to serve as the foundation for a new Republican consensus. In any case, he would have to be considered a plausible candidate to win the nomination to further that debate, and I think that moment has passed.

There are still policy divisions: some Republicans think there should be essentially no cuts in defense spending, while others are willing to live with the first round of Obama cuts; some Republicans want more of a populist message on Chinese trade policy, while others want more of a traditional free trade posture; and so on.

But I think the big intra-party fight over foreign policy is over, if it ever really began.

My Shadow colleagues have already taken the best choices for best and worst foreign policy moves of 2011.  

I might quibble with them on minor points.  For instance, contra Inboden, Obama has not "creat[ed] a new strategic posture in Asia." Rather, after meandering a bit with some failed efforts (G-2, the 2009 Myanmar outreach), by the end of 2011 Obama can finally and truthfully claim that "America is Back," by which I mean, "America is back to pursuing the successful Asian strategic posture that President Bush bequeathed to Obama."  And, contra Blumenthal, I think the Trans Pacific Partnership announcement is less significant than it otherwise should be precisely because the Obama Administration's record on free trade is so equivocal.  If the gap between vision and execution gets too large, then the vision itself becomes a source of friction rather than inspiration.  The soundings I have taken in the region convince me that we are uncomfortably close to that point when it comes to trade.  But these are quibbles; my Shadow colleagues have done a good job compiling cheer-worthy and jeer-worthy steps taken this past year.

Since I have already weighed in with critiques and would like to end the year on a high point, I will only flag a cheer-worthy move (there will be time aplenty in the coming year for further critique): 2011 marked the year when Obama irrevocably embraced the bipartisan war frame in confronting the challenges of transnational terrorism.

Candidate Obama campaigned unevenly against the war frame.  On the one hand, he criticized Bush for underemphasizing the war on terror, as when he alleged that Bush took his "eye off the ball" and when Obama boasted about a willingness to do unilateral strikes against Pakistan.  On the other hand, Obama blamed what he considered to be excesses in the fight precisely on the war frame and promised to undo a long list of Bush policies. 

The unevenness continued into the first year or so of Obama's tenure.  On the one hand, he ramped up some aspects of the war on terror, particularly drone strikes and the surge in Afghanistan.  On the other hand, he tolerated demoralizing witch-hunts to ferret out "wrongdoing" in the Bush Administration, promised rashly to close Gitmo without accurately counting the costs, and famously attempted to relabel activities (combat became "overseas contingency operations," and so on).

The unevenness was enough for reasonable people to debate whether Obama marked radical discontinuity or fundamental continuity in the war on terror. Reasonable people such as President Obama and former Vice-President Cheney used to plausibly claim the former.  As 2011 closes and one by one the attempted changes fell by the wayside, only the latter is plausible.  

As I argued earlier, resolving the question in favor of bipartisan continuity does not resolve all policy debates about what to do.  There is still plenty to debate about the handling of the terrorism file, and the 2012 campaign will provide an opportunity to do so.  But the cartoons and chimeras that contributed confusion to earlier rounds have finally been put to rest and that is a cheer-worthy foreign policy achievement.