Another View: We could have a sane foreign policy if we wanted to

nhregister.com

image from

Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post

Excerpt:

This week the Brookings Institution put out a voluminous report titled, “Building ‘Situations of Strength’: A National Security Strategy for the United States” ... [a] uthored by 10 national security experts from the center-right (e.g., Robert Kagan, Eric Edelman) and center-left (e.g., Jake Sullivan, Tom Wright) ...

The report mentions human rights but does not incorporate that fully into our strategies for dealing with undemocratic big powers or unstable, war-torn Middle East countries. It remains a hard topic for Republicans and Democrats to agree upon.

The report does not directly address another key topic -- public diplomacy. “Washington needs to do a better job of reaching out to the rest of the country as well as the rest of the world,” Julianne Smith, director of the Center for a New American Security’s Strategy and Statecraft Program, tells me. “I fear that in recent years/decades, the national security community has spent too much time focusing on our friends and allies abroad. We did that because we assumed (falsely) that the rest of the country understood and supported the rules-based order and other fundamental pillars of U.S. foreign policy. Now we have to find ways to make our case and connect some of these lofty and academic sounding concepts to the lives of everyday citizens.” ...