The Solarium

Our namesake.

Welcome to the The Solarium, the new blog of the Smart Strategy Initiative here at the New America Foundation. We're proudly a part of the great team here in the American Strategy Program, the foreign policy department of the New America Foundation. That said, the core proposition behind our work is that it is time to transcend the sometimes hard, sometimes blurry lines that still separate economic policy from foreign policy, and think big about the next generation of American grand strategy. Thanks to Steve Coll and Steve Clemons for making this possible and thanks to Troy Schneider and his team for making it appear on your internet device. All the problems in logic, clarity and brevity that are certainly to come, are mine.

The Solarium and the Smart Strategy Initiative itself serve a very specific purpose: to get the U.S. and our global partners to examine our strategic predicament outside of the silos and timeframes that allow bureaucracies to govern but which make American leadership in the 21st Century nearly impossible.

We think the United States needs a new grand strategy. But to get there, Washington needs to re-learn what strategy means, look at the world as a single strategic stage, and generate the informed consent of the American people for a new era of prosperity and security. All of that is do able, if fraught with pitfalls and landmines. Indeed, if we don't do it, the consequences are unthinkable.

We named this blog the Solarium as a little double entendre. First, Project Solarium was an exercise directed by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1953 to secure a bi-partisan consensus on America's grand strategy for the Cold War. Eisenhower identified the three leading grand strategic options, assigned a team to argue the case for each, and presided over the debate in the Solarium of the White House. The winner was the grand strategy of global containment, conceived of by George Kennan and expanded by Paul Nitze. Global Containment was a simple correlation of means to ends: first, the Soviet Union was the most important challenge facing the United States; second, we could not defeat it militarily; so, third, we would contain Soviet aggression abroad with our diplomacy and military; but, fourth, we could defeat the Soviets in a long-term contest of economic and political systems. Eisenhower's consensus would last from John F. Kennedy through George H.W. Bush, when the Soviet Union collapsed as George Kennan predicted back in 1947.

Today we need the same kind of thinking in Washington. Today's threat is just as serious, and is just as clearly defined as before: 4.5 billion people are entering a global economy that is running out of ecosystem. These twin threats, inclusion and sustainability, drive, fuel, or complicate most of our major strategic challenges like China, energy, climate change, trade, South Asia, the Middle East, even al Qaeda. We call this the Janus Threat.

And unless we start thinking more like Ike it's going to get very hot in here. Welcome to the Solarium.

Thanks for joining us.

--Patrick Doherty