ANSWER: “Because national security is different.”
QUESTION: “I never read ‘collections’ of articles unless they were authored by Charles Krauthammer, Peggy Noonan, or George Will. Why should I read one where all the pieces are by a ‘super-lawyer’ I’ve never heard of?”
The answer above is all you need to know. “We have no permanent allies,” Britain’s great Victorian-era Prime Minister and global strategist Lord Palmerston is said to have declared. “We have no permanent enemies; we have only permanent interests.”
Some dispute whether “Palmy” actually said this—but no matter. He ought to have said it because he conducted Great Britain’s foreign policy as though he believed it with every fiber of his being. So have all the greatest national security strategists. So will the national security strategists that seek to recover America’s badly damaged position in the world.
Because America’s “permanent interests” have been badly damaged by the past seven years of maladministration, the best thinking about what should have been done during those years is now vitally important to inform the decisions to be made for the next eight years, beginning with whom Americans pick to replace the worst foreign policy president since Jimmy Carter.
In 1978, right in the middle of the locust years that made up the Carter presidency, I graduated from college and went to work for former President Richard Nixon in his exile in San Clemente, California, as second to head writer Ray Price on the project that would emerge in the spring of 1980 titled The Real War. Nixon wrote The Real War with the purpose of directly impacting the presidential campaign in which, for obvious reasons, he could have no visible part. But Ronald Reagan was photographed carrying The Real War about and we felt our work had been done. A book read and timely displayed is both crucial content for the campaign and a marker of a candidate’s seriousness.
Robert C. O’Brien’s collection of essays on national security from the Obama years and his new introduction serve the same purpose as Nixon’s 1980 book did. Of course, O’Brien has none of Nixon’s notoriety, and with good reason—he has served quietly as a diplomat and lawyer in some of the world’s most dangerous places and usually out of the spotlight. In the George W. Bush administration he advised Ambassador John Bolton at the UN and headed a State Department initiative to build the rule of law in Afghanistan. He was a close advisor to Mitt Romney in two presidential campaigns. He has monitored elections in Georgia and Ukraine and briefed many GOP presidential hopefuls on the needs of the Department of Defense generally and the US Navy specifically.
O’Brien is in such demand among the GOP presidential campaigns that not one but two “O’Brien primaries” were held in 2015. The first took place when Governor Romney decided not to run. Governor Walker then delivered clear calls for rearmament before his campaign ended—calls shaped by O’Brien and his fellow realist and friend, former Missouri Senator Jim Talent. No sooner had Governor Walker withdrawn from the race than O’Brien’s phone began ringing a second time with requests that he join this or that national security team. Instead of committing to any of the candidates, O’Brien decided to commit to them all via this book and an output of key pieces and features on the national security challenges facing the next president.
In our lifetimes, Republican presidents have arrived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue tasked with clearing away the rubble of collapsed national security strategies three times: Nixon in 1969, Reagan in 1980, and George W. Bush in 2001. “W” inherited a perilously threat-blind national security situation, but even as 9/11 loomed and the new team scrambled to make sense of the chaos left behind by President Clinton, there were strong and able men and women rushing to fill gaps. The attacks left the country devastated, but America rebounded, and with a ferocity that struck the world, led the crushing of the alliance between the Taliban and al-Qaeda, the toppling of Saddam, and the stripping from Qaddafi of all his WMD—thank God. Not long after came unheralded but crucial strategic alliances in Africa, the expansion of NATO, and a strategic understanding with China that was, if not warm, at least stable.
Israel was secure and strongly supported when George W. Bush left office. A tenuous but potentially lasting peace had been won in Iraq through the surge and the sacrifices of the American military. Russia and Iran were contained and the latter was breaking under comprehensive sanctions. The American military was strong and deployed on every front where it was needed. America had a strategic vision—it was being implemented and it was working.
Then came a financial panic not seen since 1907. It crashed the election of 2008 and took America’s collective eyes off the dangers around the globe. As Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke recounted in his 2015 memoir The Courage To Act, financial crises were occurring almost weekly throughout the fall of 2008, and the election of President Obama was almost certainly a response to the fear and uncertainty in markets during that time. Sadly, the new president was perhaps the least well equipped in history to manage a strategically complicated and increasingly dangerous world. Though many millions do not yet understand this, the consequences of his amateurism combined with the (genuinely) killer instincts of Vladimir Putin, the relentlessness of both the People’s Republic of China and the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the bloodlust of Islamist extremists have been catastrophic for the United States.
Just as the blinders of the late Clinton years that kept America from seeing the threat growing in Afghanistan, the domestic political antics of President Obama and a paralyzed Congress have blinded large swaths of America to the new threats that loom in 2016 as large as those that gathered in 2000.
Thus, this timely book from a man recognized across the center-right as among the leading thinkers on global strategy in the rising generation. The Kissingers and the Schultzes, who served so long and so well, still can sally forth with a burst of strategic clarity, but a new generation of strategists is emerging that will guide America’s rebuilding of its alliances and its military, and especially its doctrines of engagement.
O’Brien’s book could not be more vital at this moment in history. He invites the reader to revisit the issues that have followed one upon the other over the past eight years and take away a deep understanding of the sheer number and scale of challenges facing the next president. Don’t be surprised if O’Brien emerges as the key voice and guiding hand of a new and serious National Security Council in the West Wing, or at the Departments of Defense or State in 2017. The new president will need him and the expertise he details here. But no one man or woman can get the job done alone. Scores and scores of serious, sacrifice-minded patriots need to stand in many gaps. Those interested in so serving can get a start by absorbing the key facts and lessons from each of these essays.
We read old things—as old as Thucydides’ account of the Melians’ appeal to the Athenians in the History of the Peloponnesian War—to inform future decision making on American national security matters, because as Lord Palmerston indicated 150 years ago, states have permanent interests, not permanent strategic situations. These old things inform us best when they are written well and persuasively, and remain quite obviously relevant to the headlines of today, as O’Brien’s essays are. Take this new introduction and collection and absorb it for the fall campaign and beyond. It will certainly be read in foreign capitals where O’Brien’s reputation and views are already well known. We can only hope every would-be GOP nominee dives deeply into these pages, and with them, tens of thousands of influencers and serious voters. The country needs a dose of realism about the threats surrounding it. O’Brien’s book is part of a “wake-up” series of alarms that need sounding.
HUGH HEWITT
IRVINE, CALIFORNIA
MAY 10, 2016
On January 20, 2009, the United States inaugurated a new President with high hopes for the future and genuine good will—even from his political opponents. President Barack Obama had promised to transform America and the world.