The Solarium

President Obama on Marine One, en route to view the oil spill in the Gulf, May 28, 2010. White House Photo.

On Thursday, the White House released the Obama administration's first National Security Strategy. The report can be found here. Compared to the last written strategy and the previous administration's outcomes, this report is a breath of fresh air.

That is in part because this document is more of a strategy than previous NSS reports. For the first time since the end of the Cold War, this document recognized in unambiguous terms that source of our strength is our economy and that without a strong foundation here at home we will not be able to promote our core national interests of prosperity, security, values.

Unfortunately, it is also clear that though the administration understands that this correlation of means to ends is essential, it has not proffered to the American people an economic engine capable of underwriting such a strategy. I write about this more at length here, in this piece I wrote for ForeignPolicy.com. 

There is a lot more to be said about this strategy, its strengths, and its weaknesses. The emphasis on resilience, sprinkled liberally throughout the document, is an important shift away from the homeland security enterprise that in the wake of the Ft. Hood, Christmas Day, and Times Square incidents, is looking more and more like the Maginot Line. My piece is just an initial observation and we'll be looking more closely at the strategy in the coming days and weeks.

Ultimately, however, the President's own actions indicated the importance of this document to his presidency. On the day of the release, the president was in Washington, had no events relating to the strategy and did not mention it once in a rare news conference in the East Room that instead focused on the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The symbolism here is rich. The worst oil spill in America's history has overshadowed the entire agenda for the nation and the president has not even been able to turn the crisis into leverage to advance his energy goals. 

Second, it is important to note the discordance between the NSS and General Petraeus' "Joint Unconventional Warfare Task Force Execute Order," reported in this article in the New York Times. The order authorizes a broad array of clandestine military activity to disrupt or counter state and non-state threats in the Central Command area of responsibility. Instead of making the United States look strong, in the context of the NSS, this order makes us look disorganized and weak, exposing the disconnect between ends and means that I think is this strategy's biggest oversight.