Culture Counts: Cultural Bias in the National Security Strategy

摘要

The May 1997 document entitled 'A National Security Strategy for a New Century' offers an ambitious international agenda for an epoch which has thus far been marked by domestic concerns about the costs of maintaining a powerful U.S. presence around the world. Funding for the conduct of diplomatic operations has plunged almost 50 percent in real terms over the past 15 years, and the end of the Cold War brought a one-third cut in defense spending. Meanwhile, this National Security Strategy document identifies many new challenges and potential threats to U.S. national interests. None of these threats assumes the magnitude of the vanquished Soviet threat or implies the expenditures the U.S. incurred in countering it, but, collectively, they demand that more resources be devoted to national security than either the American body politic or our national leaders have thus far seemed inclined to commit. It would be tempting to dismiss 'A National Security Strategy for a New Century' as a collection of insubstantial platitudes intended for public consumption and to ask for a copy of the 'real' strategy. But such an approach would ignore the genuine views that underlie this blue-jacketed document and the extent to which it is likely to frame the terms of debate over how and with what means the strategy should be implemented. Instead, this outline of strategy should be taken at face value and its explicit and implicit content analyzed rigorously, so that appropriate resources and means may be applied to the attainment of priority goals and objectives. Assumptions are critical, if often implicit, elements of any strategy document. They form the foundation upon which the strategy's analytical framework is built. If important assumptions are erroneous, the validity of the entire strategy is called into question. This brief essay will examine one apparent implicit assumption and discuss its implications for the overall feasibility of a national security strategy.