Everyone everywhere likes to critique Trump's foreign policy.
The truth is that the US really doen’t have coherrent and long-term strategy for the Middle East, Africa, or Europe.
I sure wish that we did.
The National Security Strategy (NSS) as pubished is unhelpful. For the Middle East it essentially says that no one will be allowed to dominate the global oil markets and terrorism isn’t to be tolerated.
For Africa, free export of American good and counter-terrorism are priorities.
The National Military Strategy isn’t much more help. The Geographic Combatant Command strategic plans are all classified, but safe to say that all these strategy documents tend to be lowest common denominator pablum. Coffee table discussion at best.
You can read the unclassified, open-spource NSS here:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/new-...y-new-era/
Good strategy begins with a clear statement of objectives.
The second piece is defining what you’re willing to invest to achieve those goals. Some return on investment metrics and ways of measuring implementation efficiency are helpful. The last big piece is a critical path management sequencing tool for the strategy.
The US military uses a different description: ends, ways, and means. It’s not helpful to me the practitioners because they tend to get balled up on checking boxes and binning activities properly. Waste of effort in my view. Back in mine and Mortblanc's day we were taught a 3 questions approach to military planning at all echelons. It’s really just project management in a different guise.
1. What are we trying to accomplish? Be crystal clear on this and you stand a good chance to achieve it. Fuzzy definitions result in fuzzy outcomes.
2. What’s really going on here? Understand the incentives of all parties involved or affected. Know the constraints and limits imposed by geography, budgets, societal values, etc. Use whatever engineering or construction analogy you like to clear it up. You have to be realistic about the realm of the possible. Ignoring physics doesn’t yield good results. This question becomes a series of questions and metaphorical vector analysis of the interactions among competitive parties. It’s hard. The NSS avoids it completely.
3. How are we going to get it done? This is detailed planning. Done well, it includes a number of inspection points where one can do quality control and adjustment for unanticipated events. The industrial analogy is quality control and schedule slack. You need both. Good performance and effectiveness metrics help a great deal.
Lastly, the process is iterative and cyclical. It’s never one and done. That’s the nature of competitive human activity.
Only the dead can rest.
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