Upcoming report from the Institute for the Study of War and AEI’s Critical Threats Project – Al Qaeda and ISIS: Existential Threats to the US and Europe
In this second excerpt from the upcoming report from ISW and CTP, the authors – Drs. Fred and Kim Kagan – examine US grand strategic objectives, the intersecting threats the West faces, and possible endstates to the crisis. Read the first excerpt here.
American grand strategic objectives
Ensuring the safety of the American people and homeland is the first and most fundamental obligation of the American government.
Current policies are not fulfilling that obligation and are unlikely to do so if continued. This planning exercise has therefore focused exclusively on the problems that threaten the safety and prosperity of the American people and on ways of ensuring their security today and into the future. No secondary considerations – democracy promotion, humanitarian activities, or support and expansion of American values, for example – have been allowed to intrude into our deliberations, despite the importance we and many Americans attach to each.
This exercise thus considered only the actions required to accomplish what the authors of NSC-68, America’s strategy during the Cold War, so articulately described as “the fundamental purpose” of the United States: “to assure the integrity and vitality of our free society, which is founded upon the dignity and worth of the individual.” They continued, in words that are as true today as they were when they were first written 65 years ago:
<p">Three realities emerge as a consequence of this purpose: our determination to maintain the essential elements of individual freedom, as set forth in the Constitution and Bill of Rights; our determination to create conditions under which our free and democratic system can live and prosper; and our determination to fight if necessary to defend our way of life....
We restate these realities as concrete objectives to guide American grand strategy in the current crisis:
Drifting along the current path in order to avoid dangerous and unpleasant action will almost certainly fail to achieve vital American national security interests.
- Secure the American people and homeland.
- Protect, retain, and promote by example our free and democratic way of life.
- Retain and promote a free market international economic system, which relies on the free flow of people and goods throughout the world.
- Protect and strengthen a rules-based international order.
- Retain and strengthen our alliances and assist our allies to survive and prosper in the face of common dangers.
- These objectives are connected and interdependent, but all are required for securing the American people and our Constitution and way of life.
What "protecting the homeland" means
Ensuring the physical safety of Americans within the United States is not a sufficient aim for US grand strategy. America is more than a collection of people who happen to live within given borders.
It is an idea, a way of life, and a set of common values still broadly accepted within our society despite the over-heated rhetoric of a fraught and dangerous time.
Today’s caustic discourse has created in the minds of many a belief that Americans no longer share a common set of values, and certainly not that which animated the Founding Fathers of this republic.
From this review of our core values and their implications emerges a clear set of requirements and constraints that must control the development of any strategy to respond to the multifarious crises we face today:
America cannot abandon its values in order to ensure its physical safety.
The threat to those values and to our security comes from beyond our shores, and it must be met and defeated there without compromising the American idea at home.
The US must lead in the struggle to protect its own people and interests, but must also mobilize in its support all of those with compatible values and interests.
<p">America must not aim to remake all countries and peoples into our own image, but neither can it tolerate the persistence of powerful groups or states actively seeking to undermine or destroy our values and security.
US grand strategy must set achievable goals and adjust to new circumstances over time, not imagining that any set of policies can resolve all problems for all time.
Americans must understand the current crisis in all of its depth and breadth, recognizing the interconnectedness of many disparate conflicts but not falsely homogenizing them under a single rubric.
The US must use all of the appropriate instruments of state, economic, social, and cultural power to achieve these aims, not preferring one or spurning another a priori, but using all in balanced application as each circumstance requires.
Americans must not despair of succeeding in a long and difficult struggle despite mistakes and setbacks, disappointments and fears.
The intersecting threats of today
Salafi-jihadi military organizations, principally al Qaeda and ISIS, pose the most imminent threat to the security and values of the United States and Europe. Although these groups currently lack the ability to destroy us militarily, the danger they present is no less existential for that. Already their actions are causing the peoples of the West to turn against one another, to fear and suspect their neighbors, to constrain their freedoms, and to disrupt their ordinary lives.
Iran, China, and Russia all fear Salafi-jihadi groups and are fighting them in various ways. The interests and values of all three states are at odds with one another as well as with our own. There is thus no overt or covert alliance or coalition among these states, ISIS, and al Qaeda, nor a concerted conspiracy to disrupt the world order together. Yet their actions are mutually-reinforcing in the weakening of states, the destruction of the international consensus required to meet current challenges, and the continuous expansion of armed conflict in both scale and intensity.
The US cannot thus understand the challenges of ISIS, al Qaeda, Russia, Iran, and China separately from one another, nor design individual strategies for dealing with each in isolation. Neither can we seek a single grand solution, agreeing with all partners on a resolution to all problems. American grand strategy must, rather, examine component parts of the global challenge we face in the context of all global actors and ensure that the solutions proposed for each component advance solutions for all other components to the greatest possible extent.
Endstate for the current crisis
The present exercise considered one such component, the requirement to develop an approach to defeating ISIS and al Qaeda taking into consideration the intersection of that undertaking with the challenges posed by Russia and Iran (China playing only a very limited role in this matter).
It determined that the endstate required to achieve core American national security interests as defined above is that the United States and Europe can assure the physical security of their peoples and preserve their values and way of life while controlling the continued threat from Salafi-jihadi military organizations through the normal law-enforcement means appropriate for democratic societies at peace.
The next stage of this planning process, therefore, must be a re-assessment of the nature of the enemy and the threat it poses to the international order and to the security of the European and American homelands.
We can then return to the task of defining specific regional endstates and objectives that, together with appropriate actions at our borders and within our societies and states, can achieve our over-arching requirements, protect our peoples, and sustain our values and way of life.
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