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44–340 2009

[H.A.S.C. No. 110–159] 

A NEW U.S. GRAND STRATEGY 

(PART 1 OF 2) 

HEARING 

BEFORE THE

OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE 

OF THE

COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES 

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES 

ONE HUNDRED TENTH CONGRESS 

SECOND SESSION 

HEARING HELD 

JULY 15, 2008 

[H.A.S.C. 110-168 part 2] 
(II) 

OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE 

VIC SNYDER, Arkansas, Chairman 

JOHN SPRATT, South Carolina 

LORETTA SANCHEZ, California 

ELLEN O. TAUSCHER, California 

ROBERT ANDREWS, New Jersey 

SUSAN A. DAVIS, California 

JIM COOPER, Tennessee 

HANK JOHNSON, Georgia 

JOE SESTAK, Pennsylvania 

W. TODD AKIN, Missouri 

ROSCOE G. BARTLETT, Maryland 

WALTER B. JONES, North Carolina 

JEFF MILLER, Florida 

PHIL GINGREY, Georgia 

K. MICHAEL CONAWAY, Texas 

GEOFF DAVIS, Kentucky 

JOHN KRUSE, Professional Staff Member 

THOMAS HAWLEY, Professional Staff Member 

ROGER ZAKHEIM, Professional Staff Member 

SASHA ROGERS, Research Assistant 
(III) 

C O N T E N T S 

CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF HEARINGS 

2008 

Page 

HEARING: 

Tuesday, July 15, 2008, A New U.S. Grand Strategy (Part 1 of 2) ..................... 1 

APPENDIX: 

Tuesday, July 15, 2008 ............................................................................................ 43 

TUESDAY, JULY 15, 2008 

A NEW U.S. GRAND STRATEGY (PART 1 OF 2) 

STATEMENTS PRESENTED BY MEMBERS OF CONGRESS 

Akin, Hon. W. Todd, a Representative from Missouri, Ranking Member, Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee ............................................................. 3 

Skelton, Hon. Ike, a Representative from Missouri, Chairman, Committee 

on Armed Services ................................................................................................ 2 

Snyder, Hon. Vic, a Representative from Arkansas, Chairman, Oversight 

and Investigations Subcommittee ....................................................................... 1 

WITNESSES 

Bacevich, Dr. Andrew J., Professor of International Relations, Boston University ......................................................................................................................... 4

Dobbins, Ambassador James, Director, International Security and Defense 

Policy Center, RAND Corporation ...................................................................... 6 

Posen, Dr. Barry R., Director, Security Studies Program, Massachusetts Institute of Technology ................................................................................................ 10 

Reiss, Dr. Mitchell B., Vice Provost for International Affairs, William and 

Mary Marshall-Wythe School of Law ................................................................. 13 

APPENDIX 

PREPARED STATEMENTS: 

Akin, Hon. W. Todd .......................................................................................... 49 

Bacevich, Dr. Andrew J. .................................................................................. 50 

Dobbins, Ambassador James ........................................................................... 58 

Posen, Dr. Barry R. .......................................................................................... 73 

Reiss, Dr. Mitchell B. ....................................................................................... 83 

Snyder, Hon. Vic ............................................................................................... 47 

DOCUMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD: 

A Grand Strategy of Restraint submitted by Dr. Barry R. Posen ................ 99 

WITNESS RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS ASKED DURING THE HEARING: 

[There were no Questions submitted during the hearing.] 

QUESTIONS SUBMITTED BY MEMBERS POST HEARING: 

[There were no Questions submitted post hearing.] 

(1) 

A NEW U.S. GRAND STRATEGY (PART 1 OF 2) 

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES, OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE, Washington, DC, Tuesday, July 15, 2008. 

The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 10:05 a.m. in room 

2212, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Vic Snyder (chairman 

of the subcommittee) presiding. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. VIC SNYDER, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM ARKANSAS, CHAIRMAN, OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE 

Dr. SNYDER. Good morning. Why don’t we get started here this 

morning? We have, I think, titled this hearing, instead of hearings, 

A New U.S. Grand Strategy. 

But the term ‘‘grand strategy’’ is one that I think several of us 

on the committee are still trying to get our hands around, and particularly, do we currently have one? Do we need one? And if so, 

what should it be? And we appreciate the four of you being here 

today and getting a start on this. 

We began last July and then in January on six hearings on Iraq 

in terms of what should our strategy and proposals—alternatives 

be for Iraq. We have had a series of discussions about interagency 

reform specifically focusing on the provincial reconstruction team. 

But the whole concept of reform and change and the new policies 

often comes back to, what is the unifying theme? Should there be 

a unifying theme? And that is what we hope you will help us with 

this morning. 

Chairman Ike Skelton is here with us this morning, and he is 

also in the process of elevating this discussion of what should a national strategy look like. And, in fact, he is in the process of giving 

some speeches about that. In fact, we are going to have a full committee hearing, I believe in September, with—we hope with some 

former high-ranking officials from both Defense and State. 

Henry Kissinger noted in an April opinion piece that the global 

environment is going through an unprecedented transformation in 

a discussion he called the three revolutions: one, the transformation of the traditional state system of Europe; number two, 

the radical Islamic challenge to historic notions of sovereignty; and 

three, the drift of the center of gravity of international affairs from 

the Atlantic, to the Pacific and Indian Oceans. And, in fact, his discussion was about the fact that perhaps our Presidential debate, as 

we head into the fall, ought to be about those kinds of themes rather than the things that have been talked about so far in the national security area. 
2 

Before introducing our witnesses, I would like to recognize Chairman Ike Skelton for any comments or an opening statement he 

would like to make. 

[The prepared statement of Dr. Snyder can be found in the Appendix on page 47.] 

STATEMENT OF HON. IKE SKELTON, A REPRESENTATIVE 

FROM MISSOURI, CHAIRMAN, COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES 

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you very much. 

First, let me compliment you, Dr. Snyder, on your interest in 

calling this hearing. You and I have discussed on any number of 

occasions the need for a strategy for the United States, and I have 

had the opportunity over a period of years and more recently 

months in talking with leading thinkers in this area. And kind of 

like Mark Twain, the more you explain it to me, the more I don’t 

understand it because this is a very complex world in which we 

live. And to try to glue together a strategy based upon a solid policy, much less the tactics, both military and diplomatic, that would 

fit under such a strategy is very, very difficult. 

During the Cold War, the Truman Administration glued together 

what we know as the doctrine of containment, which worked. When 

President Eisenhower was elected, he did not automatically accept 

it. He had a series of three teams that studied the issue of policy 

and strategy; and he ended up deciding that what was in the Truman doctrine was the correct one and swore that the containment 

theory did work, as we know, culminating in 1989 when the Wall 

came down and all of the Soviet Union changed in character. 

To glue together such a strategy now is more difficult, which we 

all know, because of the different challenges, threats, interests that 

are throughout the world. It cannot be centered on the Islamic 

radicals because that omits a great part of the world. 

So where do we go from here? That is where our witnesses come 

in to give us their best thought. First, you have to have a policy, 

you have to have a strategy in order to get there; and then, of 

course, the diplomatic and, when necessary, military techniques 

under it. 

Dr. Snyder and Mr. Akin will have hearings here in the subcommittee, which I compliment them on—Doctor, thank you for 

your leadership in this role—and in September we hope to have a 

major culminating hearing. 

Whatever the strategy is and comes from the White House, it is 

going to have to include Congress. It is going to have to include the 

American people, so that there is a common consensus as to where 

our Nation should go and what we want it to be like in 10, 15, 25 

years and henceforth. And without a strategy, we are treading 

water or getting washed ashore somewhere else. 

So this may be the only place that this is being looked at seriously, and our committee intends to involve you very deeply. 

So, again, thank you so much. 

Dr. SNYDER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

We will recognize Mr. Akin now before we introduce our guests. 
3 

STATEMENT OF HON. W. TODD AKIN, A REPRESENTATIVE 

FROM MISSOURI, RANKING MEMBER, OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE 

Mr. AKIN. Thank you, Dr. Snyder. And I don’t know which one 

is Mr. Chairman. We have a couple chairmen in here. We have so 

many chairmen, we don’t know what to do with them. 

This is a hearing that I have long been looking forward to. Years 

ago, I was able to sneak through an engineering school and get a 

degree in engineering. And it seemed to me that one of the problems that we have is Americans who are really good at solving 

problems, but we are not too good at defining what the problem is. 

And that is why this hearing is exciting to me, because it seems 

like we are getting to the basic assumptions behind who we are as 

a Nation and who we are as a people, and then having to project 

those in terms of our policy. 

I hope that that is the way you are looking at things and can 

give us some thoughts on that subject. It would, I think, be interesting, too, if you built into your testimonies, gentlemen—and 

thank you for coming and joining us today. 

First of all, President Bush, it seems to me, has maybe extended 

or applied the old Monroe Doctrine to a certain degree in a preemptive sense against Islamoterrorism. You might include that as part 

of whether or not you see that as part of where we should be. 

It is also clear that the President has made the war on terrorism 

for the past 8 years his number one priority. Certainly, if you talk 

to him, that is what he is thinking about all the time. And then 

it also seems to me that almost before you can come up with a 

grand strategy, it seems that you almost have to agree to a vision 

of who we are as a people, what America is. 

I have always used largely the basis of what is written in our 

Declaration of Independence as the basis, the idea that we believe 

that there is a God—even if you disagree with what his name is— 

and he gives basic rights to people: life, liberty and the pursuit of 

happiness. And governments are instituted among men to protect 

those basic rights. 

When we have gone to war, in the War of Independence, we 

fought because we believed that sentence. And if you look at most 

of the wars that we have fought, they have been fought basically 

on that idea, that we think that there are fundamental rights that 

all people should have, and some tyrant was trying to take them 

away. 

Is that still a basis for our Nation and for our grand strategy or 

not? And does that fit in? 

I think those are some interesting questions. I look forward to 

the witnesses’ testimony. I thank you, both Mr. Chairmen, for a 

very interesting topic for a hearing. 

Dr. SNYDER. Thank you, Mr. Akin. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Akin can be found in the Appendix on page 49.] 

Dr. SNYDER. We are pleased to have with us today our panel of 

experts: Dr. Andrew Bacevich, Professor of International Relations 

and History at Boston University; his latest book is The Long War 

and New History of U.S. National Security Policy Since World War 

II; 
4 

Dr. and Ambassador James Dobbins, Director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at the RAND National 

Security Research Division, who has served as a diplomat in South 

America, Europe and Afghanistan; 

Dr. Barry Posen, the Ford International Professor of Political 

Science and Director of Security Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; his recent article is called The Case for Restraint; and 

Dr. Mitchell Reiss, the Vice Provost for International Affairs at 

the College of William and Mary and Professor at the College’s 

Marshall-Wythe School of Law, who previously directed the policy 

planning staff at the Department of State. 

Gentlemen, we are pleased you are here with us today. I found 

your written statements to be very thought provoking, and in fact, 

they will be made a part of this record. 

I might also say, any written statement that Chairman Skelton 

or Mr. Akin or other members of the committee wish to be made 

part of the record will be done so, without objection. 

We are going to have the five-minute clock go on here, so when 

you see the red light go off, it means five minutes has ended. Feel 

free to take longer if you need to. But I think we have an energetic 

group of members that would like to ask some questions, so we will 

put the light on there as your guideline. 

We will begin with you, Dr. Bacevich, and just go right down the 

line. Dr. Bacevich, you are recognized for as much time as you 

need. 

STATEMENT OF DR. ANDREW J. BACEVICH, PROFESSOR OF 

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, BOSTON UNIVERSITY 

Dr. BACEVICH. Thank you for the opportunity to present my 

views to this committee. I am very grateful for that chance. 

In American practice, grand strategy almost invariably implies 

conjuring up a response to emerging threats or prospective challenges beyond our borders. The expectation is that an effective 

grand strategy will provide a framework for employing American 

power to shape that external environment. 

These days, strategists expend considerable energy and imagination devising concepts intended to enable the United States to win 

the global war on terror, to transform the greater Middle East or 

to manage the rise of China. These are honorable, well-intentioned 

efforts and may, on occasion, actually yield something useful. After 

all, as Chairman Skelton noted, the grand strategy of containment 

devised at the end of World War II did serve as an important 

touchstone for policies that enabled the United States and its allies 

to prevail in the Cold War. 

Yet there is a second way to approach questions of grand strategy. This alternative approach, which I will employ in my very 

brief prepared remarks, is one that emphasizes internal conditions 

as much as external threats. 

Here is my bottom line: The strategic comparative that we confront in our time demands, first of all, that we would put our own 

house in order—fixing our problems to take precedence over fixing 

the world’s problems. 
5 

The past decade has seen a substantial erosion of U.S. power and 

influence. This has occurred, in part, as a result of ill-advised and 

recklessly implemented policy decisions, the Iraq war not the least 

among them. Yet it has also occurred because of our collective unwillingness to confront serious and persistent domestic dysfunction. 

The chief expression of this dysfunction takes the form of debt and 

dependency. In the not-so-very-distant future, they may well pose 

as great a danger to our well-being as violent Islamic radicalism 

or a China intent on staking its claim to the status of great power. 

To persist in neglecting these internal problems is, in effect, to 

endorse and perpetuate the further decline of U.S. power. Let me 

illustrate the point with two examples. 

Example number one is energy. I hardly need remind members 

of this committee of the relevant facts. Once the world’s number 

one producer of oil, the United States today possesses a paltry four 

percent of known global oil reserves, while Americans consume one 

out of every four barrels of worldwide oil production. President 

Bush has bemoaned our addiction to foreign oil. He is right to do 

so. The United States now imports more than 60 percent of its 

daily petroleum fix, a figure that will almost certainly continue to 

rise. 

The cost of sustaining that addiction are also rising. Since 9/11 

the price of oil per barrel has quadrupled. The Nation’s annual oil 

bill now tops $700 billion, much of that wealth helping to sustain 

corrupt and repressive regimes, some of it subsequently diverted to 

support Islamic radicals who plot against us. 

Since the 1970’s Americans have talked endlessly of the need to 

address this problem. Talk has not produced effective action. Instead, by tolerating this growing dependence on foreign oil, we 

have allowed ourselves to be drawn ever more deeply into the Persian Gulf, a tendency that culminated in the ongoing Iraq war. 

That war, now in its sixth year, is costing us an estimated $3 billion per week, a figure that is effectively a surtax added to the oil 

bill. Surely this is a matter that future historians will find baffling, 

how a great power could recognize the danger posed by energy dependence and then do so little to avert that danger. 

Example number two of our domestic dysfunction is fiscal. Again, 

you are familiar with the essential problem, namely, our persistent 

refusal to live within our means. When President Bush took office 

in 2001, the national debt stood at less than $6 trillion. Since then 

it has increased by more than 50 percent to $9.5 trillion. When 

Ronald Reagan became President back in 1981, total debt equaled 

31 percent of GDP. Today, the debt is closing in on 70 percent of 

GDP. 

This is no longer money we owe ourselves. Increasingly, we borrow from abroad, with 25 percent of total debt now in foreign 

hands. Next to Japan, China has become our leading creditor, a 

fact that ought to give strategists pause. 

Given seemingly permanent trade imbalances, projected increases in entitlement programs and the continuing cost of fighting 

multiple open-ended wars, this borrowing will continue and will do 

so at an accelerating and alarming rate. Our insatiable penchant 

for consumption and our aversion to saving only exacerbate the 

problem. Any serious attempt to chart a grand strategy for the 
6 

United States would need to address this issue, which cannot be 

done without considerable sacrifice. 

Now, there are those who would contend that the Bush Administration has already formulated a grand strategy. The centerpiece of 

this strategy is the global war on terror. In some corridors, it is referred to as ‘‘the long war.’’ 

In fact, the long war represents an impediment to sound grand 

strategy. To persist in the long war will be to exacerbate the existing trends toward ever greater debt and dependency, and it will do 

so while placing at risk America’s overstretched armed forces. To 

imagine that a reliance on military power can reverse these trends 

toward ever-increasing debt and dependency would be the height of 

folly. This is the central lesson that we should take away from the 

period since 9/11. 

Shortly after 9/11, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld 

framed the strategic problem facing the United States this way: 

‘‘We have a choice,’’ he said, ‘‘either to change the way we live, 

which is unacceptable, or to change the way they live.’’ And ‘‘we,’’ 

referring to the Bush Administration, chose the latter. 

What we have learned since then is that the United States does 

not possess the capacity to change the way they live, whether they 

are the people of the Middle East or indeed of the entire Islamic 

world. To persist in seeing U.S. grand strategy as a project aimed 

at changing the way they live would be to court bankruptcy and 

exhaustion. 

In fact, the choice facing the United States is this one: We can 

ignore the imperative to change the way we live, in which case we 

will drown in an ocean of red ink, or we can choose to mend our 

ways, curbing our profligate inclinations, regaining our freedom of 

action, and thereby preserving all that we value most. In the end, 

how we manage or mismanage our affairs here at home will prove 

to be far more decisive than our efforts to manage events beyond 

our shores, whether in the Persian Gulf or East Asia or elsewhere. 

Thank you very much. 

Dr. SNYDER. Thank you, Dr. Bacevich. 

[The prepared statement of Dr. Bacevich can be found in the Appendix on page 50.] 

Dr. SNYDER. Ambassador Dobbins. 

STATEMENT OF AMBASSADOR JAMES DOBBINS, DIRECTOR, 

INTERNATIONAL SECURITY AND DEFENSE POLICY CENTER, 

RAND CORPORATION 

Ambassador DOBBINS. Thank you. 

Let me start by saying, I agree with Dr. Bacevich on his main 

point, which is that the budget deficit currently represents America’s greatest vulnerability and correcting it is our greatest national 

security challenge. 

It is very flattering to be asked to comment on the components 

of a new grand strategy. I have to say, as a long-time practitioner 

of American diplomacy, I have some skepticism about the utility of 

grand and somewhat, sometimes, grandiose statements of American purpose in terms of an actual guides for the conduct of policy. 

My experience over the last 40 years impresses upon me the enduring interests, friends, and values that the United States has, 
7 

and the importance of consistency in our behavior and continuity 

in our policies. Rather than try to sketch out an entirely new 

schemata, therefore, let me suggest how our existing grand strategy might be amended in reaction to our experiences of the last 

year. 

I believe that the contemporary schools of foreign policy—realism, Wilsonianism, neoconservative—provide pundits and political 

scientists with useful instruments for analysis, but afford poor 

guides to future conduct. Wise Presidents and legislators will pick 

and choose among these alternative efforts to describe and prescribe for a world that defies easy categorization, worrying less 

about ideological coherence and more about incremental progress 

toward long-term national goals which do not and should not in the 

main change. 

In terms of aspects of the current policy, which I think need 

some amendment, although not complete reversal, I would include 

the war on terror, preemption, democratization and nation-building, all central elements of the current Administration’s approach, 

all of which have become, as a result of the war in Iraq, somewhat 

more controversial. 

On the first, the war on terror, the Bush Administration’s rhetoric since 9/11 has accentuated the martial character of the terrorist threat and the warlike nature of the required response. 

Treating terrorists as combatants and labeling their activities as 

jihad or holy wars dignifies their endeavors, bolsters their self-esteem, and enhances their standing throughout the Muslim world. 

Most of the tangible success in the war on terror comes as a result of police intelligence and diplomatic activity. Certainly efforts 

to counter violent extremism and protect the American homeland 

must continue, but we need to find a vocabulary that secures us 

broader international support, which denigrates rather than dignifies the terrorists, and which supports a greater allocation of our 

own resources to diplomatic intelligence and law enforcement instruments. 

Preemption is another aspect of the current doctrine which I believe needs to be modified. After all, over more than two centuries 

the United States has conducted dozens of military campaigns, only 

two of which were in response to attacks on our homeland. This 

record should leave no one in doubt that the United States will employ military force when necessary to protect itself and its friends 

and its interests without necessarily waiting to be struck first. But 

trying to incorporate this in a declarative doctrine simply makes 

our military actions more controversial when they take place and 

diminishes the degree of international support that we are able to 

get for them. 

Democratization is another aspect of the current Administration’s approach which I don’t think should be jettisoned, but I do 

think needs to be somewhat modified. Like preemption, democracy 

promotion has been a component of our foreign policy almost since 

the country’s birth. In the 18th century, all of Latin America adopted the American model, however imperfectly, and in the recent decades all of Latin America, much of East Asia, some of Africa, and 

all of Eastern and Central Europe have become functioning democracies with American help. It was, as Condoleezza Rice has indi-
8 

cated, probably a mistake to have not applied these kinds of policies in the Middle East over the last 60 years; but it is also unrealistic to expect this deficiency to be remediated over a period of a 

few years. 

Democracy is no panacea for terrorism and no shortcut to a more 

pro-U.S. or, for that matter, pro-Israeli Middle East. Established 

democracies may not wage war on one another, but studies have 

shown that democratizing nations are highly prone to internal and 

external conflicts. 

Furthermore, elections are polarizing events and we have seen 

the effect of elections in highly divided countries over the last few 

years. So I do believe that we should continue to pursue democratization, but we should expect this to be a long-term rather than 

a short-term program; and I think we do need to focus less on dramatic electoral breakthroughs and more on U.S. efforts to advance 

democracy by building on its foundations, including the rule of law, 

civil society, larger middle classes, and more effective, less corrupt 

governments. 

Nation building is another aspect of current policy that has also 

become controversial. And while the Administration has made 

some commendable efforts to improve its performance after the initial setbacks in Afghanistan and Iraq, and while it has clearly determined to do better next time, many Americans may be more inclined not to do this kind of thing next time. 

In fact, both conclusions are valid. The United States should certainly avoid invading any further large hostile countries on the 

basis of faulty intelligence with the support of narrow, unrepresentative coalitions. But not all conflicts are avoidable. Iraq may 

have been a war of choice and the choice may have been a poor 

one, but Afghanistan was neither, and both interventions left the 

United States with a heavy burden for nation building. 

Nation building is tough, slow work. Yet, contrary to popular impression, successes do outnumber failures. Tens of millions of people are living today at peace in places like El Salvador, Mozambique, Namibia, Cambodia, Albania, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, 

East Timor, Haiti, Sierra Leone, and Liberia because either American or European or NATO or U.N. troops came in, separated the 

combatants, disarmed the contending factions, helped rebuild the 

economy, organized elections, and stayed around long enough to 

make sure that those governments could take effect. 

It is the Middle East where our national security strategy has 

undergone the greatest innovation since 9/11, where it has encountered the least success, and where, consequently, the need for renovation is the greatest. Today, we have some 200,000 troops in the 

region and yet our influence has never been more absent. At 

present, the European Union is leading negotiations on the Iranian 

nuclear program. Turkey is brokering peace talks between Israel 

and Syria. Qatar has just mediated an end to the political crisis in 

Lebanon. Egypt has brokered a cease-fire accord between Israel 

and Hamas in Gaza. 

This Administration initially resisted all of these efforts. American leadership is currently manifested only in what appears to be 

a dead-end negotiation between the Israelis and the Palestinians, 
9 

a process that, at best, is going to produce a statement of principles 

before the end of the current Administration. 

There is no controversy about what our country’s objectives in 

this region are. We all want a secure Israel at peace with its neighbors, a denuclearized Iran, a unified and democratic Iraq, and the 

modernization and democratization of all the societies in the region. What is under debate is not our ends, but how we prioritize 

them and the best means of approaching them. 

The threat from al Qaeda is centered primarily in South and 

Central Asia, and secondarily, in disaffected Muslim populations in 

Western societies, not in the Middle East. The attacks of 9/11, 

therefore, do not justify or require an enduring American presence 

in the Gulf region. The overall American goal in this region should 

be to promote the emergence of an equilibrium among local powers 

that does not require most of our available ground forces to sustain. 

This is not an impossible goal. Such a balance existed from when 

Great Britain left the Persian Gulf in the early 1950’s until Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in the early 1990’s. During this 40- 

year period, American interests were preserved with little more 

than occasional naval visits. A return to this condition may take 

a while, but it will be worth enunciating this as a national goal. 

On the other hand, a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq could easily move us further from that objective. We owe it to the Iraqis, we 

owe it to the region, and we owe it to ourselves to leave behind a 

unified country capable of contributing to regional stability. This 

will not happen overnight nor even, in all likelihood, within the 

next year or two, although some significant troop draw-downs over 

this period may well prove feasible if the security situation there 

holds. 

I have not addressed many other areas of our national security 

strategy on which I think there is a broad consensus and on which 

I have no great differences with the Administration. 

The Bush Administration has moved away from its unilateral approach in its early years and has sought to force better relations 

with Europe, Russia, China and India, the world’s other major 

power centers; and I would anticipate that the next Administration 

is likely—whoever is elected—to embrace these policies and continue those approaches. 

Having served under eight Presidents through seven changes of 

Administration, I have come to view these transitions as periods of 

considerable danger, as new and generally less-experienced people 

assume positions of power with mandates for change and a predisposition to denigrate the experience and ignore the advice of 

their predecessors. 

America needs a grand strategy that helps it bridge these troubled waters, one that enjoys bipartisan support and is likely to endure. One key criteria for judging any newly announced grand 

strategy, therefore, is whether it is likely to be embraced by successor Administrations. In this respect, Napoleon’s advice with respect to constitutions may prove apt: that they be short and vague. 

Thank you. 

Dr. SNYDER. Thank you, Ambassador. 
10 

[The prepared statement of Ambassador Dobbins can be found in 

the Appendix on page 58.] 

Dr. SNYDER. Dr. Posen. And, Dr. Posen, I note you have the 

greatest challenge of condensing your thoughts to 5 minutes because you gave us a very comprehensive written statement, which 

I appreciate. 

STATEMENT OF DR. BARRY R. POSEN, DIRECTOR, SECURITY 

STUDIES PROGRAM, MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY 

Dr. POSEN. I am an academic scrivener and you have my 

scrivenings, so I will not read them. 

I want to thank you for inviting me. The last time I was before 

the House Armed Services Committee was in the 1990’s. Congressman Dellums was Chair. The subject of the hearing was U.S. grand 

strategy. At that time I argued that there were roughly four grand 

strategies competing in the American intellectual discourse, and I 

believe we are down to two. 

I am going to say what the two are. One is, I think, basically the 

consensus, which I think to some extent Ambassador Dobbins just 

represented; and the other is a critique that has been around since 

the 1990’s that several of us are making. You have heard a little 

from my colleague, Andy Bacevich, and that is a grand strategy 

that many are starting to call restraint and renewal. And I will 

talk in a second about restraint and renewal. 

Before I do, I want to not lay out what I think the grand strategy 

is, but I do think grand strategies offer a lot of benefits. And I feel 

like Ambassador Dobbins was critical of that, and I just want to 

remind people that there are reasons why you want grand strategies to do the things that they do. 

One, we live in a world of scarcity. Choices need to be made. We 

need some sort of metric by which we are going to make those 

choices. 

Second, the U.S. Government is a vast enterprise. We need some 

general concepts, general theory, to coordinate the activities of that 

enterprise. 

Third, this is a great, big, and rambunctious political system. We 

need a way to ensure government accountability. The population of 

this country, its elites, need a way to judge new enterprises when 

they are offered. Are they consistent with the grand strategy that 

we understand to be our grand strategy? And why are they consistent? 

And finally a grand strategy is needed to communicate America’s 

interests abroad. Much of what we do in the world is either about 

coercion or deterrence. You can only practice coercion and deterrence if people know what you are up to and why you are up to 

it. Stated grand strategies help you do that. 

The current grand strategy consensus in the United States is 

centered around the United States being essentially the preeminent power in the world, an extremely active power, a very 

heavily armed power, a power that is concerned about threats of 

all kinds—threats to safety, sovereignty, national security, power 

position. It is concerned about the internal workings of other countries and the power that other countries can mobilize. It is con-
11 

cerned about terror. It is concerned about great powers. It is concerned about energy. 

It is a long, long list which almost defies prioritization; and it 

leads the United States to an extremely activist policy that I think 

has not served us well in recent years, for some of the reasons that 

Andy Bacevich talked about. 

Now, people who are interested in this grand strategy, I think, 

are motivated by five big facts that they see as being extremely important in international politics today. One is the fact that the U.S. 

has great power. The United States is still the preeminent economic power in the world, and it is certainly the preeminent military power in the world. 

This is an enormous source of American security, but it is also 

an enormous source of temptation. Americans always believe they 

have the capability to do the things that they can imagine. That 

is extremely tempting. 

Second, much of the world we used to talk about, the great regions of the eastern and western ends of Eurasia where the middle 

and great powers are, these parts of the world are as stable as they 

have ever been. There are balances of power, regional balances of 

power, in these parts of the world. And the United States has to 

do much less to accomplish its basic interests in the world than it 

once did. 

Third, globalization is a powerful force. The people who study it 

have disagreements about how the force works. The one thing I 

think we can say it does: It disrupts the lives of hundreds of millions of people in the world. It brings the power of modern capitalism to the developing world. It shakes up societies. It draws 

people into cities. It interacts with the population explosion in this 

part of the world, with urbanization in this part of the world; and 

it makes large numbers of people extremely insecure and ripe for 

mobilization for all kinds of political action—most of it, we hope, 

good; but some of it, we have seen, bad. 

Another aspect of globalization is the diffusion of power in the 

world, right? And though the United States is certainly a clear 

number one, a lot of capability is now out there in the hands of 

countries that we have formerly thought of as weak. And this capability makes itself felt particularly when the United States military 

goes ashore. 

There are millions and millions of young men of military age in 

the developing world. There are millions and millions of infantry 

weapons left over from the Warsaw Pact that have made their way 

into the developing world. When an American soldier goes to the 

developing world, he meets many, many adversaries. And this is 

going to drive up the cost of American intervention to rebuild societies, to wage counter insurgencies. The costs are high and they 

are going to get higher. 

Finally, nuclear proliferation is a sad fact of modern international life. We look at the new proliferators, the countries that 

are managing to get nuclear weapons. These are not modern, highly capable industrial powers—or they are modern, highly capable 

industrial powers, but they are small ones. Cracking the nuclear 

code is just not that difficult anymore. And if the United States has 

the idea that we can basically control entirely the diffusion of nu-
12 

clear weapons technology to the rest of the world, then we are in 

for a very, very large and very, very demanding project, all right. 

Now, in light of these facts, what does restraint recommend as 

a U.S. grand strategy? Basically, the United States has to focus 

first on preserving its own power, which is the ultimate source of 

American security. And right now, as Andy Bacevich suggested, the 

sources of that power, the sinews of American power, are in danger. 

Second, we have to maintain the capability when we wish, when 

we need to, to tip the balance of power on the Eurasian landmass. 

As I said earlier, the Eurasian landmass is quite stable right now, 

so America does not have to do much. But it does have to maintain 

the capability to do it if it has to. 

We have a problem with terrorism. We should focus on the key 

source, which is this organization, al Qaeda. And we should deal 

with terrorism in a way that doesn’t create more support for terrorists, which means the United States has to be extremely judicial 

in the offensive use of military force and depend much more on intelligence and police cooperation to deal with this problem. 

Finally, we have to avoid the following four perils of our current 

grand strategy: 

One is overstretch, the tendency of American activism to take us 

into costly and open-ended engagements. 

Second, making the United States a magnet for balancing and 

targeting, right? Being too imminent in the lives of others cause 

them to blame us for the problems that they face. 

Third, we have a problem with our allies. Our policies encourage 

free riding and reckless driving. The Europeans spend a very small 

share of GDP on defense compared to the United States, less than 

two percent typically. The Japanese spend less than one percent. 

These are rich allies, with strong currencies these days, all right? 

They have good industrial bases. They produce good weapons. They 

have decent and, in many cases, quite good military commanders. 

They could do more, they should do more; they don’t have to do 

more because the Americans are carrying the load. 

The flip side is, we have allies who trust us too much and who 

drive recklessly. Right now the Iraqi Government continues to 

drive recklessly, secure in the notion that the Americans will catch 

them if they fall. For years, the Taiwanese Government drove recklessly. Sometimes the Israeli Government drives recklessly. And 

the United States needs to do something to discourage this reckless 

driving. 

And, finally, we face a problem of blow-back. Our grand strategy 

affects American politics at home. When we go to explain a policy 

to the American people, it seems like we invariably tell them that 

whatever new initiative, whether it is going to be Bosnia or Iraq 

or Afghanistan, it is ultimately going to be inexpensive. 

It is time we started leveling with the American people about 

these things. The deployment of military power to rebuild nationstates, to fight counterinsurgencies, to occupy other countries, these 

are very expensive and long-term projects. And the American people need to be told so that they can participate in this debate in 

a way that allows them to have some say over whether or not they 

want to pursue this strategy. 
13 

With that, I will stop. Thank you. 

Dr. SNYDER. Thank you, Dr. Posen. 

[The prepared statement of Dr. Posen can be found in the Appendix on page 73.] 

Dr. SNYDER. Dr. Reiss. 

STATEMENT OF DR. MITCHELL B. REISS, VICE PROVOST FOR 

INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS, WILLIAM AND MARY MARSHALLWYTHE SCHOOL OF LAW 

Dr. REISS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you and the 

whole committee for inviting me to testify today. 

It seems that we have been searching for a new Mr. X or Ms. 

X, for a decade now, since our ultimate triumph in the Cold War. 

A number of foreign policy experts have tried to answer the call to 

become the next Mr. X, yet none has won the Mr. X sweepstakes. 

Public and elite opinion have not yet coalesced around any of these 

grand strategic attempts. So it is interesting to ask ourselves why 

is this so. 

There are three possible reasons. The first is that there is no single unifying threat that galvanizes the attention of the United 

States, our allies and friends and the world. There is currently no 

‘‘glue’’ to bind countries together like the glue the Soviet Union provided during the Cold War. The global war on terror, which some 

would maintain is the unifying force around which a grand strategy can be constructed, simply doesn’t provide the same amount of 

glue. 

A second possible reason is that the world today is too complex. 

In place of a single overarching threat, there are today a wide variety of lesser threats that impact different countries differently, 

thereby discouraging collective action. These threats fall into two 

general categories, country-specific threats, like Iran and North 

Korea, and transnational threats, such as climate change, WMD 

proliferation, mass migration, terrorism, and infectious diseases. 

It is humbling to think that today George Kennan would not only 

need to have a deep understanding of Russian politics, history, and 

culture, but would also need a deep understanding of China’s military modernization, global economic flows, demographic trends, environmental degradation, WMD proliferation, and the sources of Islamic extremism, to name but a few topics. That is a pretty high 

bar for anyone to surmount. 

The third possible reason has less to do with the supply side 

than with the demand side. Our political system today is too divided to accept a grand strategy. And it is not just divisions between the Republicans and the Democrats; it is also divisions within the different wings of each party. There is simply not a lot of 

receptivity to grand, unifying ideas. In particular, there is no consensus over five key concepts, what we might term the building 

blocks of any new grand strategy. 

The first key concept is American primacy. As you recall, the 

Bush Administration’s 2002 national security strategy was a rousing call for extended American primacy. For some, this language 

was viewed as aspirational, a distant goal on a faraway shore, and 

certainly unobjectionable. After all, why wouldn’t we want the 
14 

United States to remain the dominant power for as long as possible? 

Others saw this goal as a realistic and achievable objective, assuming we kept our economy strong, made the necessary military 

hardware and personnel investments, and employed our strength 

widely. And still others viewed it as arrogant and objectionable, 

perhaps even horrifying. 

Significant differences exist around a second key concept: the use 

of American military force. Few people disagree that the United 

States should defend its vital interests. But this begs the larger 

question of how these vital interests should be defined, a task 

made more complex by the increasing interconnectedness of the 

world in which we live. 

A further complication is that some would maintain that the prevention of humanitarian disasters, such as genocide, is a vital interest of the United States, consistent with our national character 

and under an increasingly developing responsibility to protect. 

A third key concept where there isn’t consensus is in our attitude 

toward international institutions. The classic reasons for establishing international institutions are well known, they reduce 

transaction costs, they provide a forum for regularized contact and 

information exchange, and they institutionalize a cadre of professional expertise. However, critics argue that these institutions 

often take a lowest common denominator approach and are unable 

to respond effectively to fast-moving crises. 

They point to the inability of the International Atomic Energy 

Association (IAEA) to thwart the nuclear ambitions of North Korea 

and Iran, the U.N.’s Oil-for-Food scandal, and the gross misbehavior of some of its African peacekeepers. We have just seen in 

the past few days the inability of the U.N. Security Council to effectively sanction Zimbabwe. 

These critics prefer, instead, coalitions of the willing, ad hoc 

groups of like-minded states that form and reform depending on 

the contingency. 

A fourth key concept where there isn’t agreement: democracy 

promotion. On few Bush Administration policies has there been 

less agreement over how best to proceed. Is democracy promotion 

about holding elections, building civic institutions, alleviating poverty, reforming education, promoting women’s rights, transparency 

in the rule of law; or all of the above? Do we promote democracy 

differently depending on the country or region? Is democracy promotion the same for China, the Congo, Saudi Arabia, and Belarus? 

And even assuming we can find the right tools, how do we measure success? What metrics are the most relevant? And how urgently do we push democracy? What time frame do we use? 

Needless to say, answers to each of these questions range all 

over the political spectrum. 

The fifth key concept is globalization. The debate over 

globalization in the United States has largely been reduced to 

strongly held views on trade. The wide gap between the ‘‘free 

trade’’ Republicans and the ‘‘fair trade’’ Democrats has been on 

public display during this Presidential campaign season. 

Now, these are serious divisions, and it is unclear whether they 

will be bridged or reconciled anytime soon. But more importantly, 
15 

they mask an even greater shortcoming that threatens America’s 

security. 

As in George Kennan’s time, America’s diplomatic standing, military power, and financial influence are a product of our economic 

strength. Without a strong economy, our ability to promote our values and defend our interests, to support properly our men and 

women in uniform, to help our friends and allies overseas, and to 

safeguard our country will be gravely weakened. Without a strong 

economy, all talk about a grand strategy is illusory. 

As a first step, I strong strongly urge the committee to focus its 

first hearings on developing a strategy for sustaining and enhancing America’s economic power. Such a strategy would include the 

following issues: reducing the national debt, which now stands at 

record levels and has placed great stress on the middle and working classes; tackling the coming crisis in entitlement payments, especially health care, U.S. citizens 65 and over will increase by a 

projected 147 percent between now and 2050; reforming immigration laws to ensure that highly skilled and motivated people can 

continue to come to the United States to work, create jobs, and receive an education; revitalizing our industrial infrastructure and 

developing a new national energy strategy to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, including greater investment in alternative energy sources. 

These are just a few of the hurdles that we will have to surmount in the coming years if we wish to keep America strong. 

Thank you. 

[The prepared statement of Dr. Reiss can be found in the Appendix on page 83.] 

Dr. SNYDER. Thank you all for your thoughtful, both written and 

oral, statements. 

Mr. Skelton has asked if he could defer to the end of the subcommittee members, and we will do that. We will go ahead and put 

on the clock. We will put ourselves on the five-minute clock and go 

around, and we will probably have time for a second round. 

I appreciate you all’s comments today. And I also appreciate—I 

think there is unanimous agreement on—I think every one of you 

talked about the economy and that here we are a subcommittee of 

the House Armed Services Committee, and yet you see the economy 

as being perhaps our number one priority that we ought to look at 

as a nation. And I certainly can’t disagree with that. 

The two questions I want to ask I am going to combine into one 

and let you respond to it. One is, given what you all have presented 

here today, do you see—would you describe what we are in? The 

situation right now is—are we in a situation of drifting? 

Dr. Reiss, you talked about how there is not really an agreement 

in—either politically or in the country for a grand strategy. Would 

you describe this as a period of, we are drifting? Would we describe 

it as a period in which we have sufficient strategy? Would you describe it as a situation in which we just need to recognize we do 

need to have a complex—a statement, but it will be a complex 

statement of where to go in terms of strategy? 

And the second question I want to ask, what role for Congress 

do you see in these discussions that we have asked you to respond 

to today? 
16 

Dr. Bacevich, we will start with you. 

Dr. BACEVICH. I think that the Bush Administration seized upon 

9/11 as an opportunity to revolutionize U.S. grand strategy. And 

when we look at a very important—I personally think wrong-headed, but very important document like the National Security Strategy of 2002, we see an authoritative statement of what that new 

grand strategy was to be. 

Fast forward to 2008, and it seems to me that events have shown 

that that grand strategy, post–9/11 grand strategy, was fundamentally defective and, indeed recently, increasingly we see the Bush 

Administration implicitly backing away from it toward a more realistic and, I think, more restrained approach to things. 

So I think the answer to the question is, we still have a grand 

strategy on the books, as it were, and it has been discredited. And 

yet there has been insufficient recognition of the extent to which 

it has failed and, therefore, insufficient public dialogue about the 

need to replace it. 

I mean, this hearing, in a sense, may be part of an effort to promote that kind of a dialogue. But we don’t so much have drift as 

we have a statement of policy that has failed and has yet to be replaced. 

Dr. SNYDER. Mr. Dobbins. 

Ambassador DOBBINS. I agree with that. Looking back throughout the Cold War for 40 years, we essentially had a bipartisan approach to national security policy. There were hawks and doves, 

but they were in both parties. There were doves in both parties; 

there were hawks in both parties. There were people for arms control; there were people against arms control. There were people for 

detente; there were people against detente. But it was Nixon and 

Kissinger who led the detente move. 

So you had a national argument about these things, but it wasn’t 

conducted on clearly partisan lines. And I think that helped very 

much to keep the dialogue constructive and to keep the country on 

course. 

That began to break down with the end of the Cold War. In the 

1990’s, the Clinton foreign policy was attacked by the opposition. 

And that is certainly one of the functions of the opposition, to oppose; so within reason, that is fine. But that, of course, continued 

with the Bush foreign policy. And I think as long as national security policy is, you know, regarded as a partisan issue—I am tougher than you are, I am more capable of leading the country than you 

are; and this transcends not just the personalities of Presidential 

candidates, but the parties—I think you are going to have a virtually impossible time devising a grand strategy that will transcend Administrations. 

Dr. SNYDER. Dr. Posen. 

Dr. POSEN. I will not surprise you that I have a different view. 

We may be drifting, but the feeling of drift, I think, has more to 

do with where we are in the political cycle. 

A colleague of mine did a little drill. She went through all of the 

national security policy statements of the principal candidates that 

appeared in the Journal of Foreign Affairs. I sat down last night 

and looked again at Senator Obama and Senator Clinton and Senator McCain. The amount of consensus is really quite surprising. 
17 

And I think it would also be surprising if those documents were 

actually written by those people. They probably had staffs of foreign policy experts who helped them write those things. So I think 

there is quite a lot of consensus. I don’t really think it is drift. 

Where I see the drift is an inability to bring together a sense of 

the real scarcity that the United States is going to begin to see in 

terms of resources because of the fiscal condition of the country and 

because of the expenses that are coming, the real difficulty of 

bringing that sense of scarcity together with our national security 

policy and trying to look at these things against each other. 

We have a tendency in this country to basically assume that if 

we identify something as a national security problem, we are going 

to find the money. But we have gotten into this habit of identifying 

many, many things as a national security problem, and this has 

produced a very, very big bill. And we have to do major rethink to 

try and figure out what our actual national security priorities are. 

And if there is one—if you are asking for a role for Congress, and 

I am no expert on how the Congress works—but I do think we have 

a problem in bringing together the disparate corners of our revenue 

raising and our spending in this country right now. We need a way 

to look at these very big numbers which you can find in any of the 

Congressional Budget Office documents about the future—these 

very big numbers about rising health care, about taxes that are insufficient to cover our spending, and about the magnitude of the 

defense budget today and the apparent preference for both of the 

current Presidential candidates to keep that defense budget high 

and maintain a high level of energy. 

So something has to give here. My own guess is that everybody 

is going to have to contribute to paying the bill. The defense budget 

and defense efforts are going to have to come down. Medical care 

is going to need to be controlled. And taxes are going to need to 

go up. And we need to have a discussion in this country about the 

realities of those trade-offs rather than sort of continue to talk 

about these things in isolation and end our conversations with a 

kind of an airy collection of hopes and dreams about how we are 

going to slice away at these problems at the margins. 

These are percents of GDP, which is a lot of resources in this 

country. So that is the thing I think we need to find a way to focus 

on it. And if this body and this House can kind a way to focus on 

it, I think it would be a great contribution. 

Dr. SNYDER. My time is up; we will go to Mr. Akin. But, Dr. 

Reiss, when we come around again, I will call on you first. 

I think we are going to have this problem all day, just because 

of the nature of the topic. I think we will try to follow the 5-minute 

rule as closely as we can even if it means witnesses don’t all get 

a round. 

Mr. Akin for five minutes. 

Mr. AKIN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

And I appreciated your perspectives. It is refreshing to hear. You 

know, in certain ways you are agreeing and yet the focus and your 

emphasis is a little bit different and all. 

I guess some of the discredited and failed language that I heard 

in terms of what has gone on, it seems to me to be a little blind 

to what has happened in the last year in Iraq. I would be a little 
18 

surprised if the people in Iraq really feel that in five years from 

now that they are in the same place they were back when—before 

we attacked Iraq. 

I think there has been progress. Whether the cost was reasonable 

in terms of return is a very different question. But it seemed to me 

that the President made a statement that was really a broad vision 

for what he wanted to do in foreign policy, and that was, he wanted 

to export freedom. 

I guess I would be interested—first of all, I don’t know that he 

knew how to define that. But I am not sure that that wasn’t a pretty grand vision for what we should be doing. I am not sure that— 

his approach to doing that was maybe more muscular than it needed to be and had less sales and more coercion in it. But yet that 

was still a pretty big idea. 

Would you want to respond to the concept of exporting freedom? 

Dr. BACEVICH. I will take a stab. 

I think you ought to know what it is you are trying to export before you do try to export it. I agree with you that apart from some 

sort of grandiose language, they really had very little understanding of what the export of freedom in particular to the greater 

Middle East entailed. And we are oblivious to the possibility that 

people who lived in that region of the world might define ‘‘free’’ differently than we do. 

So, to my mind, it was a fool’s errand that we never should have 

undertaken; that is to say, that the export of freedom to the greater 

Middle East in the aftermath of 9/11 was a completely wrong-headed objective and has taken us down the path. 

Now you alluded to the fact, and it is a fact, that over the past 

year or so technical conditions on the ground in Iraq have improved, at least in terms of the level of security. But it seems to 

me, to be fair to the Administration, the Administration didn’t invade Iraq simply because of Iraq, but as you suggest, with this expectation that the invasion of Iraq was going to produce all kinds 

of positive second- and third-order consequences. 

From my perspective, that hasn’t happened. 

Dr. BACEVICH. My perspective is that hasn’t happened and that 

freedom has not been brought to the region. To the extent that democracy has taken hold, it has done things like brought Hamas to 

power in Gaza; it has enhanced the power of Hezbollah in Lebanon. 

So there is something fundamentally flawed with seeing the promotion of freedom as somehow the cornerstone or the fundamental 

source, the place to begin thinking about the U.S.—— 

Mr. AKIN. Does anybody else want to agree with that, or do you 

all disagree with the idea that exporting freedom is a reasonable 

starting point? 

Ambassador DOBBINS. I think it is an important component of 

American foreign policy and has been for a long time, and I think 

it is an element of continuity in our approach. 

I do think that the emphasis given to this in the Administration’s 

policies from 2003 to 2005, say, was excessive and ultimately counterproductive. I mean, we needed the cooperation of all of Iraq’s 

neighbors if we were going to stabilize it. And none of them were 

going to cooperate in a project that was designed to undermine 

their legitimacy and ultimately overthrow their systems. 
19 

So to the extent we saw Iraq as a model for the region and as 

a precursor for democratization of the region as a whole, we simply 

built up resistance to our overwhelming objective, which was to 

stabilize the country behind a freely elected government, which we 

could have done with a lot lower rhetoric. 

So I think the goal should continue to be an important element 

of our policy, but not always the dominant element and not always 

the element that we lead with rhetorically. 

Dr. POSEN. I just think we have to be aware of what other definitions are. For many, many people, peoples, around the world, ‘‘freedom’’ means freedom from outside intrusion into their affairs. It is 

not their model of our government that is defined as freedom. It 

is the ability of their people to determine their own governments 

and their own ways. 

So the very idea of exporting freedom, the greatest power in the 

history of the world, sort of, bringing freedom to you, immediately 

involves all kinds of dilemmas and runs the risk of causing all 

kinds of trouble. 

I, sort of, look at the problem differently. I don’t think freedom 

is very easy to export. I think others could import it, but I am not 

sure that we can export it. 

Mr. AKIN. Go ahead, Dr. Reiss, or we may never get to you. 

Dr. REISS. Thanks very much. 

I think President Bush’s second inaugural address will go down 

as perhaps his greatest public speech. And, as Jim said, the promotion of democracy and human rights overseas is a longstanding 

element of American foreign policy. 

But, as the other panelists have also said, we can’t reinvent 

these other countries in our own image. It is not going to be Jeffersonian democracy throughout the rest of the world. And, in fact, we 

have to pick and choose the means we use, the places we use. What 

we try to do in Saudi Arabia is not going to be the same as in Iraq 

or Belarus or China or other places. 

But what I would like us to try to adopt is to have a little bit 

more patience and a lot more confidence that this is a universal 

value, it is not an American value, that most people want to have 

dignity in their lives, whether it is expressed as liberty or freedom 

or democracy or what have you. They want to be able to live safely, 

with accountable government, with decent schooling and education 

and health care for themselves and their family. That is something 

that is, I think, a universal aspiration. And when we try to use a 

cookie-cutter approach and impose it on other people, I think we 

run huge risks. 

Dr. SNYDER. Ms. Sanchez for five minutes. 

Ms. SANCHEZ. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Thank you, gentlemen, for being before us today. 

I completely agree with you that our number-one national security issue is this whole fiscal responsibility or lack of responsibility 

in Washington, D.C. And I, as a former investment banker, have 

been very worried about this issue. I remember in 2000 when we 

started with President Bush, and the people will remember, I think 

it was in the February-March-April time frame, we were having 

discussions in the front page of the Wall Street Journal about what 

would the Government really look like without Government debt, 
20 

without T-bills and T-bonds, and was that really something that we 

wanted to do. And now we find ourselves in completely the opposite 

direction. And the war is, of course, just a very, very small piece 

of that, although it is a bleeding that continues to go on. 

So I guess my question to you is, what would be the format or 

the forum in which we could begin to really address this broader 

issue with the American people? Because they, I believe, aside from 

now suffering individually from lack of savings or costs going up 

with respect to fuel and other issues, I don’t really think that they 

understand just how bad this fiscal foundation is of our United 

States. 

So I guess, as a lot of you are academics, what would you suggest 

as a forum, or how do we begin—and it is a lot of political risk. 

I mean, every individual Congressperson goes back to their district 

and says, ‘‘Things are going to get better. Don’t worry.’’ But the reality is that they are so broad, the entitlement issue is so broad, 

the energy independence issue is so long-term, could be, although 

I believe Californians are much further ahead in solving that issue 

for us. 

But what would you say would be the forum for that? 

And then the second question would be, how can we on the defense committee, I mean, what is it that you think we should be 

doing in the area that we control, i.e., our military and how we use 

it, to begin to address this larger issue that I believe—I don’t know 

whose testimony I have in front of me, where you talk about the 

five or six different things that we need to do. And I think the 

theme is throughout all of your written testimonies. 

So the first question, what kind of forum do we use to really talk 

to the American people about the hole that we are in? And, second, 

what can we do as members of the military committee? And it is 

up for grabs to anybody. 

Dr. REISS. I think you have a wonderful platform and a wonderful megaphone, and you can hold hearings. 

And I spent a long time negotiating with both North Korea and 

with the political parties in Northern Ireland, and I always saw my 

first job was to educate and explain, not to negotiate. And I think 

that you need to educate and you need to explain to the American 

people exactly what the balance sheet looks like right now. 

You know, if this was a business and you were coming in, you 

would do an audit. You would do a strategic audit of the whole 

business and find out where is the money coming in, where is it 

going out, where can you plug holes, where can you get more revenue? Doing a strategic audit for the U.S. Government, for the new 

Administration coming in, may be one way to do it. 

But you need to explain what the balance sheet looks like to the 

American people, whether it is in the military budget or whether 

it is in the other accounts. And I think that there has been no coordination in advance among any of us, that I am aware of, and 

yet I am pretty impressed that there is a large degree of overlap 

in terms of how we are analyzing the challenge. 

And it faces all of us, but you are the public representatives, and 

it is your responsibility not just to respond to the American people 

but to lead us. And so I think that there is some political risk involved, but that is why you get paid the big bucks. 
21 

Ms. SANCHEZ. Don’t worry. I voted against a lot of things, like giving you $600 rebate checks when there is no money in the coffers. So I don’t worry about it. 

Dr. Bacevich. 

Dr. BACEVICH. Well, I don’t fully understand the way the Congress works, but, I mean, it seems to me that one of the things you 

can do is try to break down those compartments. I mean, again, I 

don’t know if this is feasible, but to insist that just because you are 

on a committee that is concerned with the Armed Forces that these 

other matters, like debt and dependency, somehow need to belong, 

to be owned by somebody else, because in terms of the long-term 

interests of the Nation, they do all come together to shape the 

problem. 

Now, specifically with regard to the matters under this committee’s purview, it seems to me that one of the big questions that I 

don’t think has been fully engaged with has to do with the fundamental purpose of the United States military as we try to reshape 

it and configure it. 

To oversimplify, if we look at the pre–9/11 era, the first nine 

months of the Bush Administration and of Mr. Rumsfeld’s tenure, 

the bumper sticker to describe how we were going to reshape U.S. 

forces was transformation. It implied a particular emphasis on 

technology, on long-range strike, probably a bias in favor of air and 

naval as opposed to ground troops. 

Since the invasion of Iraq, since the rise of General Petraeus and 

the rediscovery of counterinsurgency operations or, as I think they 

are now called, stability operations, we are, sort of, drifting toward 

a model of U.S. forces that now places greater emphasis on boots 

on the ground, on long-term, protracted presence and engagement, 

on nation-building, not simply warfighting. 

I think a fundamental question as we look to—we must look to— 

the post-Iraq era is, which of those two models really is going to 

help us think about the future of U.S. forces? Or is there a third 

model? And we can’t do both. Because to do both I think is utterly 

unaffordable. So what is the shape and purpose of the United 

States military as we look out 10 years or 20 years? 

Dr. SNYDER. Mr. Bartlett for five minutes. 

Mr. BARTLETT. Thank you very much. 

David Walker has resigned as the Comptroller General. He is 

now the CEO of the Peter Peterson Foundation. Peterson has committed $1 billion of his personal fortune to educate the American 

people about the imminent financial crisis that we face in our country. 

This is a huge challenge, and it may, in fact, be insurmountable 

if we don’t have a proper policy relative to another crisis we face, 

and that is the energy crisis. The two of you mentioned energy specifically, and the third of you mentioned scarcities in our country, 

and energy is one of those scarcities. 

There is a new mantra now: Drill now, drill more, pay less, to 

hell with our kids and our grandkids. 

Oil is not an infinite resource; it is finite. It will run down, and 

it will run out. We reached our maximum capability to produce oil 

in our country in 1970. No matter what we have done since then, 

we have produced less oil every year, year after year. We have 
22 

drilled more wells than all the rest of the world put together, and 

we now produce half the oil than we did in 1970. 

The same man that correctly predicted that 14 years before it 

happened predicted the world would be reaching its maximum production of oil now. The International Energy Agency (IEA) and the 

Energy Information Administration (EIA) have oil production in 

the world flat for the last 36 months, while oil has risen from $52 

a barrel to $146 a barrel. 

We have no national energy policy. What is going to have to happen before the American people and our leaders recognize that it 

is a huge, huge challenge? You are not going to drill your way out 

of this. You are not going to solve it with immediately turning to 

alternatives. What is going to have to happen before we recognize 

the magnitude of this challenge? 

Dr. POSEN. I have a little pet peeve here about oil, and I don’t 

know that it would help much, but it might help a little bit. 

I think, without quite thinking it through, a big part of America’s 

energy security, and particularly oil security, policy is nested in the 

Department of Defense in the fact of the enormous American military commitment to the Persian Gulf, which, from my point of 

view, has no other rationale other than oil. 

The magnitude of this commitment is not well-understood, and 

I think it is actually quite hard. I have tried to find decent academic articles that will tell you what exactly it is we are spending 

in the Persian Gulf. 

DOD spends a lot of money every year, and my own guess is that 

a big, big chunk of it is going in this direction. And we should be 

asking ourselves, do we want a big chunk of America’s energy security policy to be nested in the Pentagon? 

And to even begin to offer a rational answer to that question, we 

need to have a relatively defensible estimate for exactly what we 

are spending each year. I am not just counting the Iraq war. I am 

talking about what we have been spending every year, certainly 

since Saddam Hussein’s first defeat at our hands, what we have 

been spending every year to make ourselves ready for war in the 

Gulf. 

It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it maybe we should. But it would 

be useful to know what those figures are, because maybe some of 

that money could be better spent going to some other energy 

sources and some other way of providing energy security that 

might have a longer-term payoff. 

Ambassador DOBBINS. Well, $4-a-gallon oil or gas has already 

had a quite beneficial effect on conservation, carbon emissions. And 

one probably impolitic approach is to determine that we should not 

want the price of gas to go down. That, as the external price goes 

down, taxes should rise to keep the price at the pump where it is 

now, which is still lower than most other countries. 

And most other countries have had this approach for a long 

time—that is, very high taxes, which encourage conservation, 

smaller cars, more efficient cars, et cetera, more efficient homes. 

And there is no hope for America unless we are prepared to adopt 

that philosophy. 

Dr. REISS. If I can just add quickly to that. To answer your question, I wonder sometimes whether we can mobilize ourselves politi-
23 

cally in the absence of a crisis. And there is a joke in this town 

that the Government only knows two speeds, complacency and 

panic. And unless there is another opportunity, short of a crisis, 

that is hard for me to imagine, it is hard to see how we are going 

to mobilize the political will, given all the vested interests in things 

the way they currently are. 

And I agree with what Jim was saying. You want to make sure 

that the revenues from gasoline stay in the United States and don’t 

go to a lot of our adversaries around the world, where they are currently going. But that is not sufficient. You then need a government policy that is going to recycle those dollars into science and 

technology and research and development with new alternative energy sources. 

And I am not the first one to say that we should be aiming to 

be the world’s leader in energy technologies for the 21st century. 

We have the ability in our universities, in our best companies. We 

have the brain power. We just don’t have the political willpower 

right now. 

But I think that is clearly the way to go. And that is what is 

going to sustain America’s strength, I think, long term. 

Dr. SNYDER. Mrs. Davis for five minutes. 

Mrs. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And I certainly appreciate this hearing. There aren’t too many opportunities, 

as you well know, for us to have these kinds of discussions, and it 

is a good one to have. 

One of the things that we have done on the committee is talk a 

lot about interagency coordination. And I wonder if you could perhaps put that in some of the context in which you are speaking. 

We know that the tools of government were not used in Iraq or 

Afghanistan the way they could have been. We came pretty late to 

the table with that. A little more of that is happening today. 

I think that you have certainly touched, Ambassador Dobbins, on 

the idea that people are probably going to be pretty tired of nationbuilding. They want, as Tom Friedman has said, they want nationbuilding, but they want it here at home. 

And how can we better talk about the need to use all of these 

tools better in a way that might, in fact, engage the American public? 

Ambassador DOBBINS. I think that the current Administration’s 

performance has significantly improved in this respect. I think you 

see good civil-military relations and a substantial civilian role in 

both Afghanistan and Iraq. I think the White House is functioning 

quite successfully as an integrator of policy. And I think you see 

the effects of this improvement in the turnaround that we have 

seen in Iraq. 

We have recently completed a study looking at how Presidential 

leadership and interagency structures and decision-making processes affect outcomes in America’s national security efforts abroad. 

And the conclusion is that some Administrations are better than 

others, but all of them get better over time. And then that improvement doesn’t transfer to their successors, that there are abrupt discontinuities, in terms of expertise and competence, when Administrations change, particularly when they are accompanied by 

changes in party. 
24 

And, therefore, if you are looking at a place to fix the system, fixing it at the transition point is the point at which you are likely 

to have maximum effect, because they all do get better. And I 

would suggest that there are several ways of doing that. 

First, it would help to have legislation that set out clearer guidelines on what State, AID, Defense and others are supposed to be 

doing. The Administrations need some flexibility, but completely 

reinventing the interagency division of labor every 4 or 8 years is 

very disruptive, because no department is going to invest in the 

long-term personnel and other capacities that are needed to perform functions that may be taken away from them and given to 

some other agency. And we have seen repeated shifts between 

State and Defense, really, since 1989, as to who does what when 

they are jointly engaged in some constituency. 

Second, I think that just as our military are told that if you want 

to reach general rank, you have to have served in another armed 

service other than the one you are in, or in a joint position, telling 

members of the Foreign Service and the Civil Service that they are 

not going to get to the Senior Foreign Service or the Senior Civil 

Service unless they have served in another national security agency or in a White House or joint position would be an appropriate 

way of improving jointness at the interagency level. 

And, finally, I think that the number of political appointees that 

are now transitioned every 4 or 8 years as a new Administration 

takes office—we are now up to 6,000 or so people change when a 

new Administration takes office—this is very disruptive. It demoralizes the career service. It creates an ideological layer between the 

professionals at the bottom and the policymakers who are appropriately political at the top. 

And I think setting some limits on that and perhaps establishing 

that a certain proportion of sub-Cabinet positions and White House 

staff positions, including particularly national security positions, 

National Security Council staff positions, should be career would be 

another way of bridging these abrupt discontinuities that occur at 

transitions. 

Mrs. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. How important is all that to this 

grand strategy? 

And I think my follow-up question was going to be really on the 

international level, as well, in terms of trying to have a counterpart 

to that. 

Ambassador DOBBINS. I think most people would agree that the 

major failures of the current Administration were the failures of 

competence in the early years. You can argue whether it was a 

good idea or not to have invaded Iraq. But whether or not it was 

a good idea, there were many multiple failures, which the Army 

has recently documented and any number of academics have documented, which are purely questions of competence and expertise. 

Mrs. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. Is there any disagreement with that 

issue, in terms of interagency, on the panel? 

Dr. POSEN. Well, just to, at least a footnote. It matters more to 

Ambassador Dobbins’s grand strategy than it does to mine, the 

interagency process get itself sorted. 

You know, as everyone, including me, agrees, these state-building or nation-building or peace enforcement or counterinsurgency 
25 

projects are immensely complex military, political, economic activities, and all kinds of expertise is required. 

And I am guessing that one of the reasons it looks better at the 

end is because of actual craft knowledge that is gained on the 

ground. I am actually very dubious that this can somehow be structured in before you can get into one of these projects. My own guess 

is that most of these projects are going to go badly for several 

years, no matter what, no matter what you do. 

Now, I subscribe to a grand strategy that wants to do a less of 

this. Because I want to do a lot less of it, then I need lots less of 

it. And if you have doubts about our ability to become real experts 

at this fine orchestration of multiple talents, then it should make 

you question the viability of the entire grand strategy that, sort of, 

drags you into these projects. 

Dr. REISS. Just to address very quickly on this point. One thing 

that would be very useful for whatever grand strategy is adopted 

would be to revise legislation to allow statutorily the Secretary of 

the Treasury to become a member of the National Security Council. 

Right now, the Secretary of the Treasury is invited to these 

meetings according to the discretion of the President. But statutorily, I would argue, especially with today’s world, the importance 

of globalization, trade, commerce and finance and that interconnectedness with all these other issues, the Treasury Secretary 

needs a seat at that table in order to empower him or her going 

forward and to make sure that Treasury has an input into these 

deliberations. 

Dr. SNYDER. We are now going to the members in the order in 

which they arrived after the gavel. It will be Mr. Sestak, followed 

by Mr. Jones, then Mr. Conaway. 

Mr. Sestak for five minutes. 

Mr. SESTAK. All right. Thanks, Mr. Chairman. 

I heard a couple things today. One was that national security begins at home; we need to address the fiscal issues. The other one 

I heard is that there is a destructive phenomenon going around 

globalization; it is somewhat disturbing out there. 

And I also heard that we need to reach out every so often, to Dr. 

Posen’s points and others, that we have to do something every so 

often when people are driving a car the wrong way. In fact, Mr. 

Ambassador pointed out, however, recently we have let Egypt, Turkey, Qatar, someone else, the European Union handle affairs in the 

Middle East, they are deciding where the car is to go. 

My question is, or I guess my assessment has been, up to now, 

and I would like a comment, is that I have seen a need for some 

template, grand strategy, call it what you might, that appears to 

be less in this grand strategy world now than ever before, particularly as we have walked away, for good or bad, from past templates—the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty, CBC protocol, 

Kyoto treaty, International Court of Justice. 

So that U.S. leadership has been absent, not just in these individual cases you point out, Mr. Ambassador, but it has been absent 

from—what we did after World War II is constructed consciously 

63 defense agreements around the world—the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the United Nations (U.N.). 
26 

My question is not what should that be. I don’t think anybody 

here knows exactly. But in a world that is increasingly destructive, 

in terms of blurring the lines between what used to be foreign policy and domestic policy, because we can’t fix our fiscal house without dealing with globalization, this construction needed, in my 

opinion, of the right types of international entities, which U.S. 

should influence for its self-interest. 

What has been, in your viewpoint, the impact of not having that 

upon here in the decision-making? I am not interested in what the 

construct is; but I am interested, if you Congress should hold up 

some national mirror to the Nation and say, here is what is attendant to what we need, I think they would be more interested in 

knowing what happens here at home in decision-making if you 

don’t have it? 

One might argue that the Joint Chiefs of Staff didn’t have a template in this new genre of how to argue for the right or wrong of 

Iraq. Some might argue that when the Pentagon sends over here 

something called a conventional Trident missile to be stuck on a 

nuclear submarine with 23 other similar-looking missiles that are 

all nuclear-armed, that there is no arms control template to argue 

that. We vote for it, but we don’t have this deep, thorough discussion that, obviously, Congress probably hasn’t had in 10 years until 

this has come up. 

I am interested, if you could quickly, what is the impact if we 

don’t have it upon decision-making policy and decision-makers that 

don’t have such a template to think about this national security 

strategy that no longer really has borders between us and overseas? 

If you could, just each. 

Dr. BACEVICH. I am not sure I can answer your question in a satisfactory way. However, it does seem to me that, even if there is 

no construct, there at least ought to be the opportunity now to try 

to divine in a nonpartisan way what are the lessons of the Iraq war 

or the lessons of the global war on terror. And if we can identify 

those lessons, those lessons at least provide the basis for some kind 

of a construct. Let me illustrate what I mean with a specific example. 

I think in the decade after the end of the Cold War there was 

a bipartisan—and I mean Republican and Democratic, civilian, 

military—intoxication with what seemed to be the limitless capacity of American power and especially American military power. 

I think the greatest expression of that was this conception conceived in the Pentagon in the 1990’s called ‘‘full-spectrum dominance,’’ in which the Pentagon claimed that by tapping both the 

great expertise of U.S. forces and the potential of information technology, the United States was going to be able to be dominant in 

all forms of warfare, and that this kind of an idea had a certain 

amount of purchase among national security experts. It was false, 

it was silly, it was stupid, and it has been demolished by the events 

on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq. 

So what we ought to do, it seems to me, at this juncture, even 

if we can’t agree on the label that will describe our grand strategy 

going forward, we at least ought to confront the actual lessons and 

the limitations of our capacity—and, again, I would emphasize, es-
27 

pecially our military capacity. And at least the recognition of those 

lessons would provide some basis for going forward and trying to 

think about what the construct ought to be. 

Dr. SNYDER. Mr. Conaway for five minutes. 

Mr. CONAWAY. Well, thank you, gentlemen, for coming today. Obviously very bright, articulate folks. 

My one contribution would be that we need a better name. 

‘‘Grand strategy’’ has a pluralistic, kind of, overarching, kind of, 

ugly phrase, to me, personally, that, Mr. Chairman, maybe we can 

figure out something else to call whatever it is we are talking 

about. Because I am put off, right off the bat, just by the phrase. 

Dr. SNYDER. We could have met in a solarium, but that wouldn’t 

have worked out so well. 

Mr. CONAWAY. You know, hindsight is wonderful, and I guess 

you guys get paid for looking backwards. And we are trying to look 

forward with this, whatever we call this piece. 

I was particularly impressed that it is dominated by the fact that 

our internal threats probably—not probably—do outweigh any external threats to this country. If some nation-state would threaten 

us, I suspect we would galvanize immediately. World opinion or 

U.S. opinion, following 9/11, although it was a relatively huge attack, but on the grand scale of the world wars it was a pretty small 

pop, but, you know, this country rallied quickly. We don’t see that 

same kind of spirit rallying behind cuts in Federal Government 

spending, raising taxes, whatever your solution. And those of us on 

our side of the aisle think this Federal Government spends too 

much money. 

I would be interested in where you would cut spending. Dr. 

Reiss, you might want to start this, because your five points circulated around national debt and government reform and a couple 

other things. Where would you whack a significant chunk off Federal spending? 

Dr. REISS. Well, we are quickly—— 

Mr. CONAWAY. It is easy to talk about reform—— 

Dr. REISS. We are quickly going to exceed my competence on the 

domestic side of the ledger. 

I think what I would want to do would be, first of all, to not identify any single thing. I think probably there are going to need to 

be hits taken across the board. 

But rather than be arbitrary, I think that there needs to be a 

process so that everybody can see transparently what the balance 

account looks like, and then you are going to have to have a national conversation. And it is going to be messy, and it is going to 

take a while, but I don’t see any alternative, unless we have another crisis again, in which case anything is possible. I don’t think 

any of us want to wait for that to happen. We hope that that never 

happens. 

So I am afraid I can’t give you very many specifics. I am kind 

of like a general practitioner here, rather than—I think you need 

a specialist to try and examine this patient. 

Ambassador DOBBINS. Well, I think the defense budget is the 

largest component of discretionary spending by far, if I understand 

correctly. And, therefore, to the degree that this committee were to 

agree with the proposition which all of us here in one form or an-
28 

other have stated, which is that balancing the budget and getting 

our domestic fiscal house in order is the most important national 

security challenge we face today, and were to offer to the other 

committees of Congress who are responsible for other forms of discretionary spending a willingness to join in a broader effort to reduce those deficits, I think that would be a significant contribution. 

Dr. BACEVICH. I mean, it seems to me that, again, it depends on 

your assumptions or your expectations. To go back to the earlier 

comment about do we need Donald Rumsfeld’s high-tech, transformed military, or do we need a military that is configured to do 

stability operations, how you answer that question suggests where 

you make the cuts. 

If, indeed, the future of the U.S. military is to be more and more 

stability operations, then the current expansion of the Army and 

the Marine Corps, which I think is supposed to be 92,000 over 5 

years, is inadequate, if we are going to have more Iraqs and Afghanistans in our future. And if that is going to be the case, then 

we cut the F–22 and we get rid of a couple of carrier battle groups 

from the Navy, and that is where the budget cuts come from. 

If your military is the transformed, high-tech military, it is not 

going to be, in particular, focused on stability operations, then the 

expanded expansion of 92,000 more ground troops is probably unnecessary, and we can make cuts there. 

Dr. POSEN. I will share the humility expressed by my colleagues. 

But I think that we are talking about big numbers here, so it is 

easy to pick on one particular problem in DOD that one or the 

other of us doesn’t like. I think we have to, sort of, begin to confront the fact that defense spending as a share of GDP in this country has to go back under three percent. It is hovering around four 

now. This is a big and wrenching change for DOD and requires lots 

of cuts across the board. 

Mr. CONAWAY. Mr. Chairman, I suggest that the panel adequately expressed what we face every day, that nobody wants to be 

the first guy to raise their hand to take those cuts in spending. 

So thank you, panelists. 

Dr. SNYDER. In Arkansas, we look at cutting a lot of projects in 

Texas. But that doesn’t seem to work out so well with the Texas 

delegation. 

Mr. CONAWAY. Big target. 

Dr. SNYDER. Mr. Skelton. 

The CHAIRMAN. First, let me thank you for your excellent testimony today. We are very appreciative. 

It seems that in recent years we have had two international 

traumas to our country. One, of course, is 9/11, the other one is 

Iraq, both in the Middle East. They seem to have dominated international thoughts on where we are as a country. And we seem to 

be measuring ourselves in relation to the Middle East, when, in 

truth and fact, there is a lot of world we have not adequately addressed. 

What, of course, we all want is a return to our country being not 

only respected but admired. And as a result of particularly the actions in Iraq, we have lost some friends and standing with longtime allies. 

But I have two questions, in listening to your testimony. 
29 

Is it even possible to derive a singular American strategy for the 

days ahead? 

And the second question is this. Fast-forward to January the 

20th. The phone rings, it is the President of the United States. And 

he says, ‘‘You are the expert. I would like for you to write a twopage paper for me and have it to me in 7 days, because I want to 

make a speech on national strategy on the 8th day. Would you 

please get that paper to me?’’ And being the President of the 

United States, you would say, ‘‘I would be glad to.’’ And then you 

start struggling with that two-page paper. 

Just assume that telephone call has come in to you. Would you 

outline for us what you would put down on your two-page paper 

devising a strategy for the United States as will be enunciated in 

8 days by the President of the United States? 

Dr. Bacevich. 

Dr. BACEVICH. I think that my two-page memo would begin by 

saying that the global war on terror as a construct to frame our 

post–9/11 policies is deeply flawed, and that this new Administration intends to reject it. That the terror threat, the threat of violent 

Islamic radicalism is real, it will be persistent, but we have misconstrued it, and we have overstated it. That, in many respects, the 

catastrophe of 9/11 happened not because the adversary was cunning and strong, but because we had let our guard down; and that 

we will never do that again. 

And, therefore, when it comes to terror, I would subscribe strongly to some of the remarks of my colleagues, that rather than thinking in terms of war, rather than thinking that invading and occupying countries somehow is going to provide an antidote to terror, 

that we need to revive, revitalize, strengthen the so-called law enforcement approach. 

Having said that, it seems to me that, going forward, the essence 

of our grand strategy will be focused on reconstituting and husbanding American power, primarily economic power but also American military power. And it will be done with a general sense that 

the nexus of international politics in the 21st century, which in the 

20th century tended to be in Europe, is now decisively shifting toward Asia. And that our efforts, in terms of trying to shape the 

world beyond our borders, will focus primarily not on the greater 

Middle East, but will focus primarily on East Asia, where stability 

and openness are absolutely essential to the wellbeing of the 

United States over the next several decades. 

That would be what I would say. 

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you. 

Ambassador DOBBINS. I am not sure that we are going to be able 

to replicate what we had during the Cold War, which was a national strategy that fit conveniently on a bumper sticker. We had 

‘‘containment and deterrence.’’ And then, for the last 20 years of 

the Cold War, we had ‘‘containment, deterrence and detente.’’ And 

that pretty much summed up a bipartisan approach to our main 

national security challenge, which was the Soviet Union. 

It is a more complex world today. If you had to put it on a bumper sticker, I would say ‘‘inclusion.’’ Our main objective ought to be 

to gradually include the emerging powers—or re-emerging in the 

case of Russia—China, India, and of course the European Union in 
30 

the international system, which we have done so much to build, in 

a system based on the rule of law and on institutional arrangements that channel competition among nations in constructive 

fashions. 

And to do that, we need to explain to the American people that 

we need to play by those rules ourselves, we need to belong to 

those institutions, we need to shape those institutions in order to 

bring these emerging powers into this. 

Now, if I was looking for a way of explaining this, I would definitely, as I think all of the panelists and many of the committee 

members have indicated, stress that national security begins at 

home. 

And I would go back and look at some of the rhetoric from President Eisenhower’s Administration. You know, it was Eisenhower 

who ended the Korean War, imposed drastic reductions in the defense budget, talked about the dangers of the military industrial 

complex, and conducted what historians now regard as one of the 

most successful American presidencies in history. So I think going 

back and looking at how Eisenhower handled some of these tradeoffs between strength at home and strength abroad is worth doing. 

Dr. POSEN. I am a great admirer of Eisenhower’s defense strategy, as well. 

I would make only a few points to the President, bearing in mind 

that my two pages is not the political speech. 

One, the facts of the case: The U.S. is already enormously secure. 

We have spent the last 15 years trying to tell Americans that they 

are not, but we are. We have a quarter of gross world product. Our 

nearest competitor has less than half. We spend half of what the 

entire world spends on defense, and our military is really unchallengeable in normal, conventional, or nuclear war. We have a huge 

nuclear deterrent. We have big oceans to the east and west and 

weak, compliant neighbors to the north and south. 

So the first thing we have to do is do no harm. Our principle risk 

today are errors of commission, not errors of omission. 

Now, what do matter? What are the obvious threats? One, we 

have to keep an wary eye on the balance of power in the Eurasian 

land mass. That is why the United States waged the Cold War. 

That is why we waged World War II. That is why we waged World 

War I. The main reason why America goes abroad for big wars or 

big peacetime military operations is because of the possibility of a 

great military empire rising in Eurasia. That possibility isn’t very 

great right now, but we always have to maintain the capability to 

thwart it. 

We have two other problems in the world today, new problems, 

threats to safety: They arise from terror, and they arise from nuclear proliferation, and some people fear the nexus of the two. 

We have to figure out a way to work those problems. But one of 

the things I think we have learned from the last few years is working those problems in a way that is designed to try and achieve 100 

percent solutions ends up being extremely costly and probably 

undoable. This is an uncomfortable fact for Americans. 

So we have to do what we can to restrain the proliferation of nuclear weapons, but we have to maintain a strong nuclear deterrence so those that get them know that trying to threaten the 
31 

United States is the most dangerous and crazy thing they can ever 

do. 

We have to do what we can to suppress terror, but suppression, 

not 100 percent victory, has to be the model. And we have to fight 

that battle in the back alleys and back streets of the world with 

the assistance of other intelligence agencies, other police forces of 

other countries who have at least as big an interest in stopping al 

Qaeda as we do. 

Dr. REISS. I think the new American President next January is 

going to want to start redressing America’s image in the world, 

which we all know is not what we would like it to be. And I think 

that there are five things that he would need to say, not really a 

grand strategy, perhaps more a combination of a strategy and 

shorter-term policy, but nonetheless would send a very positive signal to the world, would be that: The United States is going to take 

the lead now on climate change. We are not going to be in denial. 

We are not going to refuse to do this. We are actually going to be 

the world’s leader in acknowledging this problem. 

Second, we are going to close Guantanamo and abide by the rule 

of law. 

Third, we are going to elevate the importance of the Middle East 

peace process, not episodically but on a consistent level, appointing 

a special envoy who will report directly to the President of the 

United States. 

Fourth, we will aggressively promote free trade agreements, trying to revive the Doha round, and try to pass through Congress the 

three Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) that are currently before it. 

And, fifth and finally, that there will be a much greater effort on 

national investment in research and technology for new energy 

technologies to make us, not energy-independent, because we are 

never going to be energy-independent, but rather what I would call 

energy-secure. 

And I think that alone would do wonders for reviving America’s 

image throughout the world. 

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you. 

Dr. SNYDER. Gentlemen, we are going to go around again, if you 

have the stamina here. And we will use the 5-minute clock. 

I appreciate you all’s comments today and thoughts. I don’t want 

you all to have to dwell on this any more than my wife and I do, 

but we currently have a two-year-old and she is pregnant with triplets. So our thinking about the future has passed the, ‘‘Oh, my 

God, I will never retire,’’ to actually thinking about the future as 

all of us with children and grandchildren, and care about what 

America does. 

But it seems like what you all have talked about today in terms 

of, as you look ahead, to what you see as security threats is really 

a grand opportunity. I mean, the priorities that you are putting on 

your list, energy, security—and I prefer that term, too. We are always going to be a trading nation, and we shouldn’t shy away from 

being a trading nation. We want security of price and security of 

supply, and make sure that it is a reasonable percentage of family 

income that every American pays for whatever kind of energy 

choices they make. 
32 

But when we look at things to do in energy, things that are in 

conservation, in investments in new technologies, the economy, 

things that we can do in terms of dealing with our national debt, 

our long-term challenges of boomers that you all talked about, 

what you talked about, either Ambassador Dobbins or Dr. Posen, 

about the competency of government, the transition to new Administrations, dealing with all these kinds of things, in terms of focusing on diplomacy, making sure it is the quality that we want it to 

be. 

All of those things are under our control. These are all things 

that are under our control. It is a tremendous opportunity for us 

if we all buy into that these are the priorities that this Nation 

needs to undertake. 

A dramatic contrast with where we were during these periods 

after the Solarium Project and the strategies were developed where 

there were things that we could certainly do, and did, in terms of 

alliances and building up our forces and the tremendous investment in our military. But the reality is, a lot of what the future 

of the world had to hold was out of our control. And we saw that 

in Vietnam, and we saw that in North Korea, in the Korean Peninsula. 

So it seems to me that there is some tremendous opportunities 

here as you all describe what you see as the security challenges for 

this country. 

I wanted to talk about one specific issue, if I might, and it is a 

detail. Let’s see, who mentioned it? One of you talked about the absence—oh, I know, it was Dr. Posen. He talked about language. I 

think it is on page 93. 

Yeah, page 93, Dr. Posen, I am quoting from you now, you say, 

‘‘Despite the great power of the United States, its national security 

establishment is particularly ill-suited to a strategy that focuses so 

heavily on intervention in the internal political affairs of others. 

The U.S. national security establishment, including intelligence 

agencies and the State Department, remain short on individuals 

who understand other countries and their cultures and speak their 

languages.’’ 

Now, I think from your perspective you would say what you said 

to Mrs. Davis: If you have a policy of restraint, perhaps you don’t 

need as many people. I would also argue, though, along with what 

you all have said about developing the American economy, if we 

want to compete in this world, our kids and our adults today had 

better be prepared to understand cultures and understand languages, or otherwise we don’t compete. 

Would you all respond to the specific niche question of what I 

see, what a lot of people see, as the lack of foreign language expertise and its accompanying lack of cultural sensitivity? 

Dr. Reiss. 

Dr. REISS. I am very excited about this question, because I have 

given it a lot of thought—— 

Dr. SNYDER. Well, I was excited to ask it, Dr. Reiss. Carry on. 

Dr. REISS [continuing]. When I was in the Government and now 

in academia. 

You use as a reference point the launch of Sputnik and how the 

United States responded after that shock to our American political 
33 

system, and you look at the legislation that Congress passed. Not 

just a bump-up in the military budget, but also a National Education Act that put in the hands of American students grants for 

them to study the Russian language, Russian history, Russian politics, aspects of Russian society that paid dividends throughout the 

rest of the Cold War. 

You then contrast that with what happened after 9/11. And there 

were some attempts by the House to try and pass some modest language programs. There was some, again, a modest bump-up in the 

Boren program. But, again, given the need for us to understand 

this strategic part of the world, the greater Middle East, the different languages involved, the need for universities to be able to 

get qualified teachers to teach our students, the response has been 

wholly inadequate. 

And it is not just in the State Department and the military; I 

think it is throughout our entire society. So that we are not doing 

a very good job in terms of responding to, I think, a heartfelt strategic need right now. 

And even if you don’t think that military intervention is going to 

be the right way to go in these situations, and I think many of us 

would agree with that, if we are going to win hearts and minds, 

we have to be able to have conversations with these people. If we 

don’t speak the language, we literally have nothing to say to them. 

And we just can’t expect people to speak English; and if they 

don’t speak English, they must not have anything worthwhile to 

say to us. We have to be able to understand not just Arabic but 

all the different dialects and languages in this part of the world, 

because we are going to be there for a very long time. 

Ambassador DOBBINS. I agree in general, but let me be a little 

contrarian. I think that the problem, particularly in the early years 

of this decade, was less a problem of supply than demand. That is 

to say, the Defense Department, the military, the Administration 

simply weren’t interested in tapping the sources of expertise that 

was available. 

This has changed dramatically. You know, today we are deploying anthropologists with every brigade we send to Afghanistan and 

Iraq to advise the commander on the human terrain in which he 

is operating. This is a big change, and it is just one example of the 

ways that the State Department, the Defense Department and the 

White House are beginning to look to external sources of expertise 

and tap them. But back in 2001, 2002, 2003, the Defense Department wasn’t even interested in asking the State Department for 

advice, let alone academics from outside the Government. 

So it won’t do us any good to up our language training if we don’t 

have the demand side. If you don’t have enough foreign service officer positions funded that require language as a prerequisite, It 

doesn’t make any difference matter how many graduates you have. 

The fact is that, with our immigrant population, we have an advantage over most countries of having native speakers of almost any 

language in the world in large numbers, including Arabic. 

So, you know, I think that we need to fix the demand side as 

well as the supply side. 

Dr. SNYDER. Mr. Akin, for five minutes. 

Mr. AKIN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 
34 

I appreciate a lot of the different points you are making. And it 

seems to me that a good foreign policy—in the political world, we 

go back and tell our constituents, ‘‘I am fighting for you in Washington, D.C.’’ We don’t do any fighting down here. The things that 

we accomplish are all based on persuasion and salesmanship. Even 

if you look at the bills that we pass, there is very little that we accomplish that has not had to have been really agreed to by both 

political parties. Any time, in the political world, one party tries to 

shove something down everybody’s throat, it usually doesn’t get 

through the system. 

So my sense is that the way that we approach a lot of these 

things is pretty much more—I like the idea of exporting freedom, 

but I agree with you, you can’t really export it; all you can do is 

encourage people. And it seems to me that the emphasis should be 

on understanding their cultures and saying, ‘‘Boy, we have a lot of 

problems in our own country too, but here are some things that 

worked for us when we ran into some similar problems,’’ and that 

sort of a friendship kind of reaching out a hand and working with 

foreign cultures, understanding them. 

This committee has done a great deal of work, a lot of hearings, 

years’ worth of hearings, on basically projecting the GoldwaterNichols jointness concept to a much broader kind of context. I think 

one thing that was very exciting to us on this committee was we 

have some real left-wingers and right-wingers and conservatives 

and liberals and Republicans and Democrats, and we all had a 

good sense that this was a project we all saw the need for. There 

was a good sense of cooperation that this is a direction that we 

should be going. Interesting that DOD was saying, ‘‘We think the 

State Department budget should be bigger.’’ Kind of interesting. 

My question to you is—and maybe you would reject it, that we 

can’t really know this for sure. But, as we took a look after September 11th at threats, what we realized was the most dangerous 

thing to us is a nation-state that has the funding mechanism of a 

nation-state that concentrates in developing weapons of mass destruction and is determined that they are going to use them if they 

can get a hold of them. 

Now, you might argue that we don’t have such a nation-state in 

existence. But what we found was it is very hard to develop nuclear weapons if you are just a bunch of terrorists running around 

from camp to camp. You need to have a source of oil or something 

to pay for the amount of research and technology that goes into 

making a significant threat, particularly asymmetric kinds of 

threats. 

But let’s say that you are the President and you are stuck with 

a situation where you believe there is some country that truly is 

run by nutcases and that they have enough money to develop nuclear weapons and that they are very close to having them and that 

they will use them. If you will grant those assumptions. Now we 

are confronted with a pretty sticky wicket. How do you proceed 

under those conditions? 

Because those of us that voted here, the U.S. Congress, as you 

know, voted almost unanimously to go into Iraq, because we 

thought that those conditions were in existence in Iraq when we 
35 

made that decision. Let’s say that we had been right. What do you 

do? 

Ambassador DOBBINS. Well, one of the questions you have to ask 

yourself is whether the regime that you are concerned about is 

more irrational than Joe Stalin or Mao Zedong. Where are they on 

that scale? After all, Mao sent a million troops to confront us in 

Korea and put his own people through hell with the cultural revolution, and Stalin conducted genocide on a far wider scale than 

even Adolph Hitler. And yet, we found them sufficiently rational 

actors. So a combination of containment, deterrence and detente 

was our response. So you have to go pretty high beyond that 

threshold before those aren’t the right answers. 

And if you are beyond that threshold, then coercive diplomacy 

and declaring preemptive doctrine probably isn’t very useful, because if the person is so irrational, those probably aren’t going to 

sufficiently correct his behavior. And so, you know, maybe invasion 

is the right answer, but that doesn’t mean having a doctrine of preemption is a good way of dealing with the generic problem of nuclear proliferation. 

Mr. AKIN. Anybody else? Or take the other one, China invades 

Taiwan. What are you going to do? 

Dr. POSEN. On your nuclear question, I couldn’t add a single 

thing to what Ambassador Dobbins said. I mean, I think agree with 

him, sort of, 110 percent. I mean, one can always define a problem 

in such a way that the answer is, sort of, inevitable. But we should 

set a fairly high bar to convince ourselves that we are dealing with 

undeterrable countries. 

Now, we can always imagine a set of facts that will make almost 

any of us deviate from our standard policy line. So I think buried 

in your question is some deeper question about how we do these 

assessments, what would convince us that the particular actor is 

undeterrable. 

Mr. AKIN. I was asking the question, recognizing you are swallowing a very big premise. And that is one of those things. But 

somewhere along the line, when you are a CEO—and we have to 

make those decisions when a vote comes on the floor. But I think 

most of us are pretty sensitive to that. You don’t jump into it quickly. 

Thank you. 

Dr. SNYDER. Dr. Gingrey for five minutes. 

Dr. GINGREY. Mr. Chairman, thank you. 

I am sorry that I had to leave to go to another committee hearing. And this is, I think, extremely informative. And I commend 

Chairman Snyder, Ranking Member Akin and Chairman Skelton 

for being with us here earlier. It is a very important discussion. 

Dr. GINGREY [continuing]. I guess the one question I would like 

to ask—and hopefully it has not already been addressed—we talk 

about the development of our grand strategy, and we have talked 

about a number of things. Before I left, I heard a number of you 

comment on internal strategy and the importance of getting our 

own house in order before we could really have any grand strategy 

that was applicable to the nations of the world. 

I want to know if you can describe for us the grand strategies 

of some of these other nations, such as China, India, Russia, Brit-
36 

ain, Japan and, indeed, Iran. Are their grand strategies explicitly 

declared? Or do we understand them implicitly as a result of their 

actions and what principally influences their strategies? 

Maybe you can also touch on how much information we really 

should be sharing with the general public. I think maybe a grand 

strategy from the 30,000-foot level, an overarching explanation, but 

certainly I would be concerned about sharing too much detail on 

how our grand strategy meshes or, indeed, conflicts with the grand 

strategy of these other countries, just a few of whom I mentioned 

by name. 

So any one of the four of you who wants to take that on, go 

ahead. 

Dr. POSEN. Well, it is not always true. And in fact it is mostly 

untrue that states develop clear and coherent grand strategies and 

state them publicly. Many of us are sort of axiomatical about the 

grand strategy of the Eisenhower Administration, and a good bit of 

it could have been divined from public statements. But the guts of 

it remained in a national security document; I think it was NCS 

162, and I believe that document remained classified until many 

years thereafter. 

It was quite common during the Cold War to keep much of it secret, and I think a lot of that secrecy had to do with the competition inherent in international politics. The trade-off between the 

values and the gains of having a clearly stated grand strategy in 

public and the possible risks of telling adversaries too much always 

has to be treated. You have to be self-conscious about that. 

Second, sometimes countries have grand strategies, but you 

know, they are not written down in one place. And you are looking 

for kind of a main line of advance, you know, a set of basic principles. And I think that would be true right now of most of the 

countries you are talking about; I am not sure you can find a single 

written document for one of those countries in public. 

You do find them from time to time. Just as an example, when 

I first started in this business, I tried to figure out what Israeli 

grand strategy was, and it wasn’t written down anywhere. So I collaborated with a fellow one summer at the RAND Corporation, and 

we managed to assemble what we thought was basic outlines of 

their grand strategy. The document was very popular in Israel because they had nothing to talk about, so they essentially used ours. 

I think you are on to something here. But it is a good idea to 

start out with the premise there is one and see somehow if you can 

fill in the blanks. My own view is that most countries’ grand strategies, first and foremost, arise from their international situation. 

And by their international situation, we are talking about, what is 

their power position relative to others? What big interests, conflicts 

do they have with others? What is the geography around their 

country? And in many countries, something that we know less 

about is the ethnography in their own country because many countries have different ethnic groups living in different parts of their 

countries, and they have to worry about them together. 

So China today, we think of China being a strong and growing 

country that is interested, in some sense, in challenging American 

dominance in that part of the world, in the first instance, trying 
37 

to develop some regional military capability, maybe some regional 

denial capabilities. 

But we also should understand that China has its own concerns. 

You know, out at the other end of China, there are many disparate 

ethnic groups. Keeping those ethnic groups under some kind of control is a big problem for them; and it seems to be a source of conservatism in their grand strategy because when they get too adventurous, they have problems. 

But that is just a kind of example of how it works. 

Dr. GINGREY. Dr. Posen, I am about to run out of time and 

maybe one of the others would like to comment. 

Dr. BACEVICH. I would want to emphasize, I think it is absolutely 

imperative for this strategy, whatever it is, to be explained to the 

American people, because if they haven’t bought into it, it is not 

going to happen. 

We have talked about the strategy of containment. Kennan’s foreign affairs article, President Truman’s speech where he enunciated the Truman Doctrine, Secretary Marshall’s speech where he 

enunciated the Marshall Plan. These speeches were really the effort to explain, to—and if you want to put it crudely—sell the 

American people on the idea of containment. If they hadn’t have 

bought it, it wouldn’t have worked. 

In particular, I would say today, if there is going to be a new 

grand strategy, it is going to have to be explained and sold, because 

any new grand strategy that focuses on getting our house in 

order—talk about energy security and the like—is going to require 

near-term sacrifice by us; and that is going to have to be explained 

in great detail in order to make it palatable. 

Dr. SNYDER. Mr. Jones for five minutes. 

Mr. JONES. Mr. Chairman, thank you very much. And, again, I 

want to compliment you for this hearing. I have been looking forward to something like this for a long time. 

I sit here in great amazement. Are we at a point in the history 

of this country that we don’t need to have a grand strategy for the 

world? Is what we need a grand strategy to rebuild America? I 

think it is amazing. 

I regret that I voted to give the President the authority to go into 

Iraq. It was a failed policy to begin with. I bought what I was sold, 

I will leave it at that. 

What I see happening is that in this country, today, we cannot 

be seen as a superpower. We are borrowing money from the Chinese to pay our bills; we are borrowing money from Japan. You 

have all acknowledged this. I am not telling you anything you 

haven’t said. The trade deficit with China is $252 billion. And yet 

we in Congress are trying to deal with some very difficult issues 

that there are no easy answers to. And I hope the next President, 

whoever that is, Mr. Obama or Mr. McCain, will concentrate on 

America and only do the things that have to be done militarily 

when we are attacked, or if it is in the national security interests 

of this country. 

But for this country to continue to believe—I will tell you the 

truth. I don’t know how we, our military people, sit down with the 

Chinese. I ask this question in Armed Services, and I will close and 

I will get your responses to some of my rambling. 
38 

We had Assistant Secretary for Pacific Affairs, we had a four-star 

Air Force general, very fine gentleman. They are telling us about 

a sit-down with the Chinese and talk about, we need to do this, we 

need to do that. I said to them, how in the world can the Chinese 

look across the table at you with the same respect that they might 

have if you didn’t owe them money? 

So are we at a point that—I am not talking about being an isolationist. I am not talking about being a protectionist. But if we don’t 

get this country back on its economic feet—we lost 3.5 million manufacturing jobs in 7 years. I don’t know how we can see ourselves 

as being a world leader when we can’t pay our bills. 

I conclude my rambling. I think I have put maybe not anything 

of any depth out for you to respond to. But I wish you would respond back because this frustration I feel—I have felt it for the last 

six, seven years—is great. And my concern is that I am sitting here 

and watching not Rome burn, but America crumble. 

Ambassador DOBBINS. I think most of us would agree that the 

international situation has seldom been more benign. We have no 

peer competitor; we have nobody who could even become a peer 

competitor within the next two or three decades. 

Now, part of the reason the world is on balance, rather more benign than it has been for most of the last 200 years, is because of 

American leadership and American engagement and building up an 

international system. And it is frayed around the edges as the result of some of the decisions we made over the last few years. But 

it has by no means deteriorated. 

So I think we do have the luxury of turning back and worrying 

about our own problems somewhat more—without becoming isolationists, without withdrawing from the system, and without ceasing to strengthen the system when we can, but recognizing that it 

is in pretty good shape. 

Mr. JONES. Would anyone else like to comment? 

Dr. BACEVICH. Well, I think you have introduced this term ‘‘isolationism’’ into our discussion, and it is very important to do that because, in essence, that becomes the club that some will employ in 

order to beat into submission anybody who counsels a strategy of 

restraint or who advocates spending more time correcting our internal problems. And it is very important to recognize the history 

of discourse about U.S. foreign policy and the role that this bugaboo of isolationism has played. 

The truth is, we have never been an isolationist country. And I 

would simply want to emphasize that as a strategy of restraint focused on internal rebuilding is articulated, it needs to be articulated in the sense that we are rebuilding ourselves in order to facilitate engagement, in order to make it—make us better able to 

engage the world in ways that are, first of all, in our interests, but 

may also actually contribute to building a peaceful and prosperous 

international order. 

Dr. SNYDER. I want to give—about winding down here, gentlemen. Mrs. Davis, did you want a second round? 

Mrs. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. Just briefly, Mr. Chairman. I am 

sure you are familiar with Henry Kissinger’s article of April 7, 

2008, the three revolutions and how—is that familiar to anybody? 

And he talks about—well, the world order and what is occurring. 
39 

I am wondering, and it is partly with regard to some of the other 

questions, where does our discussion of a grand strategy—and that 

may be not be the best way to define it at this time—fit in with 

our allies and our ability to include others in that discussion? Are 

we doing that? 

I guess—what advice would you give to the next President if in 

the next, you know, first month or three months or so of the Presidency, where would you go first? Where should that be placed initially? 

Dr. REISS. Let me try and address that a couple of ways. 

First of all, the centerpiece of our strength and the centerpiece 

of any grand strategy has to be our allies, so the first place you 

want to go is to Europe to visit our allies in Asia, Japan, South 

Korea, Australia and others. They are very desirous of American 

leadership right now. I have been to both Europe and Asia recently; they are waiting for the next Administration. It is not so 

much that they expect some of the policies to change, although 

some people do; but I think that they would welcome a change in 

tone in terms of the face that we show the world. 

And it shouldn’t be an angry face where everything is reduced 

to a war on terror, but rather something positive and affirmative 

which the United States has traditionally stood for. Economic development, human dignity, human rights, these are the values I 

think resonate globally and that epitomize the best of our country. 

But when we are talking about a policy of strategic restraint, if 

I can just sort of transition to one of the earlier questions, we have 

to recognize the rest of the world isn’t going to take a global timeout while we get our house in order. Things are going to be taking 

place, many things, around the world that we are not going to be 

very happy with. 

And I think for Congress, especially over the next few years, the 

two biggest issues you are going to have to grapple with in addition 

to—well, the three biggest things then—is going to be what is the 

next phase of our history with Iraq? In particular, what type of 

American diplomatic and military presence do we want to have in 

the Persian Gulf 5 to 10 years out? Because that is really what the 

debate is all about right now. 

We are going to be coming home, whether quickly or slowly. But 

the issue is, what residual force presence do we have? And what 

residual diplomatic influence do we have in the region in response 

to a secondary threat, which is a rising Iran, in particular, an Iran 

with unfettered nuclear ambitions. 

And then the third big issue to really focus on—which, again, is 

not going to await our getting our house in order—is going to be 

Pakistan. This is ground central for al Qaeda, according to the intelligence estimates. And Pakistan is beset by all sorts of internal 

difficulties. There are structural problems that have long afflicted 

that country, and it is not going to await our ability, our timing 

to engage it. It is going to be demanding the attention of the Congress and the next Administration well before then. 

Mrs. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. Does anybody else want to comment, 

in a minute or two, just in terms of those issues that you put front 

and center, the extent to engage our allies in that? Because I think 

part of our question is—this goes to Afghanistan as well—this 
40 

threat is not perceived in the same way that we perceive it necessarily. So where does that fit into that? 

Dr. POSEN. Well, the only thing I would suggest is that it is very 

interesting the way Dr. Reiss started talking about the traditional 

allies. When we start talking about problems, the problems were 

all concentrated in this one little cauldron. And, of course, we have 

problems with our allies in that cauldron. 

I think we need to have a serious engagement with our allies 

about risks and costs and interests in this part of the world. It is 

about time we found out what kind of allies we actually have. I 

don’t think what we have discovered is particularly good. 

The British and the Australians and the Canadians can’t carry 

all the weight for America’s alliances. There are other rich countries out there who put many, many caveats in their participation. 

And we have to press harder. If we can’t get their help for some 

of the things we are inclined to do, I think we have to think a lot 

harder about whether we can do them. 

The $64 question on Iran is: Are we going to have a war with 

them? What is everyone else going to say about that war if we decide to have it? These issues have to be thought through very seriously, because if there is one straw left out there that could break 

the camel’s back as far as an American act of commission, it is a 

prevented war with Iran. 

Mrs. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. Thank you. 

Dr. SNYDER. We will close with Mr. Bartlett for any questions he 

wants to finish up. 

Mr. BARTLETT. Thank you very much. And thank you, Mr. Chairman, for holding this very important hearing. 

I think it is very clear that we cannot have a defensible grand 

strategy unless it addresses the energy challenge that the world 

faces, particularly facing us because we, having only about 2 percent of the world’s oil, use 25 percent of the world’s oil. 

I think, Dr. Reiss, it was you who mentioned in your testimony, 

we were sent to negotiate. The first thing you did was to educate 

and explain so that you would then have a basis for negotiation. 

Who is responsible for educating relative to energy? There is so 

much misinformation out there. People come to me talking about 

schemes for getting energy out of water. Water is the ash you get 

when you burn hydrogen. Do you think there is energy in water? 

You probably think there is energy in the ash in your furnace. 

I had a Member the other day, with a straight face, tell me that 

we had 2,500 years of coal, so we didn’t need to worry. I hear people saying that by 2050 we will be using twice as much energy as 

we are using now, and most of it is going to come from fossil fuels, 

from oil. 

Then there are those who worship the market: The market will 

fix this problem; it fixes other problems. But resources are finite. 

You will not like the way the market fixes this problem if you wait 

for the market to fix the problem. 

Then there are others that tell me, don’t worry at all about the 

future because we have 1.6 trillion barrels of oil in the oil shales 

of the West. Two bubbles have already broken and one will shortly 

break. The first bubble that broke was the hydrogen bubble. People 
41 

finally figured out it is not an energy source, I think; it is simply 

an energy carrier. 

The core ethanol bubble broke with disastrous consequences, like 

world hunger and food shortages around the world. And now the 

next bubble that is going to break—and remember, you heard it 

here—it is the cellulosic ethanol bubble. I can’t imagine that we are 

going to get a great deal more energy from our wastelands, not 

good for growing any crop, that we could get from all of our corn 

and all of our soybeans. 

And the National Academy of Sciences—this isn’t Roscoe Bartlett; this is National Academy of Sciences. If we used all of our corn 

for ethanol and discounted it for fossil fuel input, it would displace 

2.4 percent of our gasoline. They noted you would save as much if 

you tuned up your car and put air in the tires. And if we use all 

of our soybeans for soy diesel, we would 2.9 percent of our diesel. 

There is just a gross amount of misinformation out there. Who 

has the responsibility to educate? Because until people are educated, we cannot possibly have a rational discussion of energy. Who 

has that responsibility? 

Dr. REISS. Congressman, we all do, as educators, as representatives. But the prime responsibility is the President of the United 

States; he has the biggest megaphone and the biggest pulpit. That 

is really what is going to be required, and it is going to take more 

than one speech. It is going to take a long-term, persistent effort; 

and there is going to be an awful lot of push-back from vested interests. 

And, again, this is why I keep on saying, there has to be an 

awful lot of education that takes place here because it is going to 

be a struggle. You are going to be promising people future benefits, 

but they are going to be taking short-term pain; and that is always 

a very difficult political bargain to sell. 

But I think what you have heard today from all of us, if I can 

be presumptuous for a minute, is that I think we all see that this 

is absolutely essential if we are going to keep our country strong 

for the future. 

Dr. POSEN. It is easy for people in the education business to tell 

others that they should educate, but—I agree. 

But people need more authoritative sources of facts. One of the 

problems with—one of the beauties, really, of the Information Age 

economy is that there is too much information, and much of it is 

not vetted, we need more sources of information that are authoritative. People that, you know, we can sort of have a little—you 

know, give a little credibility to some of the sources. 

For years and years and years, you know, I have been indebted 

to you folks, because in my business, we love the stuff that we get 

from Government Accountability Office (GAO), we love the stuff we 

get from Congressional Budget Office (CBO), we love the stuff that 

we get from Congressional Research Service (CRS). And you guys 

have a terrific capability to create facts that have a little bit of 

credibility behind them, rather than factoids or candidate facts or 

baloney. 

And so we welcome your assistance. 

Mr. BARTLETT. It is not that the information is not out there. 

Our government has paid for four studies, all of them saying the 
42 

same thing: The peaking of oil is either present or imminent with 

potentially devastating consequences. The Hirsch report, Science 

Applications International Corporation (SAIC) report, was the first 

one; Corps of Engineers, the second one in 2005. Last year there 

were two reports; the second one was the National Petroleum 

Council, the first was the Government Accountability Office. And 

our government has chosen to ignore all of those. 

The Hirsch report says the world has never faced a problem like 

this, that the mitigation consequences will be unprecedented. And 

still, it is business as usual. I am just—you know, I am flabbergasted, Mr. Chairman, how we can do that with all of the evidence out there. 

Thank you very much. 

Dr. SNYDER. Thank you, Mr. Bartlett, for your questions and for 

your very eloquent way of expressing what clearly is a national and 

world challenge. 

Gentlemen, I appreciate your being with us today. Let me say 

that if, either in your minds now or in the near future, you come 

up with something you wanted to add, feel free to submit that as 

an answer—as a question for the record, and it will be distributed 

to the Members and the staff and included as part of the record 

of this hearing. 

[The information referred to was not available at the time of 

printing.] 

Dr. SNYDER. We are adjourned. 

[Whereupon, at 12:24 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.] 
A P P E N D I X 

JULY 15, 2008 

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Æ