President Obama's New National Security Strategy Isn't Actually New

This story has been updated. 

Despite the rapid intensification of security crises abroad and political criticism at home, the new national security strategy unveiled by the White House Friday morning isn’t all that new.

The global security landscape has changed dramatically since 2010, the last time President Obama delivered the national security strategy to Congress, as required by law. The U.S. faces Russian aggression that is resurrecting ghosts of the Cold War and a virulent strain of violent extremism that is spreading from the Middle East to Africa to deadly effect. And Obama faces a constant barrage of criticism that an absence of decisive leadership has spawned these security crises and there is no national security strategy to address them. But on Friday, a somewhat reluctant commander in chief outlined a strategy consistent with his approach to national security since he first entered the White House, seeking to strike a balance between “America must lead” and “strategic patience,” particularly in leveraging American military might.

Obama National Security Advisor Susan Rice, in her rollout of the new national security strategy at the Brookings Institution Friday afternoon, acknowledged that it is a continuation of current policy, despite a “whole new ballgame.”

“Our strategy is guided by the same enduring national interests we laid out in the 2010 National Strategy: security, prosperity, values- and rules-based international order,” Rice said. “But in many respects, 2015 is a whole new ballgame.”

“Every day, I start my morning with a briefing that covers the most sobering threats and the difficult problems that confront us around the world. These include the fallout from the Arab uprisings, Russian aggression, Ebola, cyber attacks, and a more diffuse terrorist threat,” Rice continued.

“But too often, what's missing here in Washington is a sense of perspective … while the dangers we face may be more numerous and varied, they are not of the existential nature we confronted during World War II or during the Cold War. We cannot afford to be buffeted by alarmism in a nearly instantaneous news cycle. We must continue to do the hard work of leading in a complex and rapidly evolving world.”

Echoing his recent State of the Union, Obama articulates a pragmatic view of American power that recognizes its limitations -- what he described in his January address to Congress as “a smarter kind of American leadership.”

“We must recognize that a smart national security strategy does not rely solely on military power,” Obama states in the strategy report. “Indeed, in the long-term, our efforts to work with other countries to counter the ideology and root causes of violent extremism will be more important than our capacity to remove terrorists from the battlefield.”

The president is acutely aware of the fallout from the “leading from behind” quote, made by one of Obama’s advisors, that critics then used to characterize his approach, as well as a Republican party eager to politically cash in on the proliferation of foreign policy crises. A “fact sheet” sent out by the White House along with the strategy guidance even used italic and bold type to repeatedly emphasize “leadership” -- a variation of which the report used some 94 times.

“Any successful strategy to ensure the safety of the American people and advance our national security interests must begin with an undeniable truth — America must lead,” Obama says, with the crucial caveat: “But, this does not mean we can or should attempt to dictate the trajectory of all unfolding events around the world.”

Or, as Rice put it at Brookings, the new national security strategy recognizes “we have to walk and chew gum at the same time.”

This means a diplomacy-first, highly selective use of force. “We have moved beyond the large ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that defined so much of American foreign policy over the past decade,” Obama says in the strategy statement. He notes that the U.S. now has fewer than 15,000 troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, compared to the 180,000 when he took office. He also frames it as a cost-benefit analysis, reminding that those wars came with a heavy price tag of not only American lives but also American dollars. Rice said the strategy is “repurposing our military strength so we can better respond to emerging threats and crises.”

But as in the State of the Union, it makes little mention of the fact that some 4,000 troops have now been authorized to deploy and some $1.25 billion has been spent for the military operation against the Islamic State. Nor does it really acknowledge the administration has shifted the role of the forces that remain in Afghanistan despite declaring the formal end to our war there. Recent reports indicate the White House may also be reconsidering the timeline for withdrawal, and several of Obama’s military commanders have said they would advise the president to do so were the security situation in Afghanistan to worsen.

The strategy emphasizes operating multilaterally rather than unilaterally. The White House still invokes multilateralism as a thinly veiled criticism of George W. Bush and a more blunt, force-first national security strategy. With its latest strategy guidance, the Obama administration holds up the international coalition battling the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria as an example of how the U.S. will continue to utilize a partner-based foreign policy, whether in fighting global terrorism, battling Ebola or negotiating a nuclear agreement with Iran.

“Abroad, we are demonstrating that while we will act unilaterally against threats to our core interests, we are stronger when we mobilize collective action,” the strategy states.

Critics note that the U.S. is also shouldering the burden of these operations. This week Jordan stepped up air strikes against the Islamic State in Syria in the wake of the brutal murder of its pilot, but the U.S. is still conducting roughly 80 percent of the air strikes there and in Iraq.