Indeed, over the last twenty years, “by, with, and through” has been the principal way in which the United States has found itself engaged in conflicts around the world. And while mentions of security assistance and cooperation are smattered across the document as a means to “alleviate suffering, reduce instability, and prevent the export of terrorism or mass migration,” the level of attention paid to the topic fails to align with the likely importance security cooperation will continue to have in U.S. global engagement.
Moreover, where cooperation is covered, much of the exposition is dedicated to the importance of sustaining and deepening partnerships with likeminded “democratic” allies. While no doubt important, the focus fails to address what has long been the defining dilemma of the U.S. security cooperation enterprise – that a significant portion of U.S. military assistance, training, sales, and support over the last two decades has flowed to non-democratic countries, many of which exhibit predatory behaviors, and which have little interest in human rights. While that fact may be uncomfortable, it is strategically noteworthy, and certainly has consequences for how the U.S. intends to be engaged militarily in the context of competition with near-peer rivals.
It is no surprise, then, that the document contains no mention of the long-awaited Conventional Arms Transfer Policy. While the administration has been assuring external stakeholders of the policy’s imminent publication for months, it remains disappointing that there is no reference, even implicitly, of efforts to implement more effective, integrated, and responsible approaches to conventional arms transfers and a recommitment to international regimes thereto – a defining feature of U.S. security cooperation.
Ultimately, in terms of security cooperation, the NSS says more with what it has left out than what it has kept in. That lack of attention is troubling, especially given how instrumental security cooperation has been in U.S. national security over the past twenty years. Without a clear recognition of the realities defining current security cooperation relationships, the risk grows that they persist without thoughtful integration into broader strategies.
Experts React: Biden Administration’s National Security Strategy
By Christopher Preble • Andrew Hyde • Emma Ashford • Rachel Stohl • James Siebens • Kelly A. Grieco • Aude Darnal • Elizabeth Threlkeld • Evan Cooper • Robert A. Manning • Marla Keenan • Samantha Turner • Sally Yozell
In Grand Strategy
On October 12, the Biden administration published its National Security Strategy (NSS), a legislatively mandated document that explains the security priorities of the administration to both Congress and the American public. It is a wide-ranging document, covering many areas of U.S. foreign and domestic policy at the highest levels. Stimson Center experts provided their reactions to the document and how it addresses issues in their research areas:
NSS Conflicts with Administration's Original Pledge for Foreign Policy for the Middle Class
The Biden administration came into office pledging to pursue a foreign policy for the middle class. The just-released NSS effectively turns this proposition on its head: with but a single, glancing reference to the middle class, it calls for a stronger America at home as a means to an end, rather than an end worthy of pursuing on its merits. Put differently, the Biden NSS seems to want a middle class for its ambitious foreign policy.
And, let’s be clear, this is a very ambitious document. It aims to “proactively shape the international order” asserting that the United States can only be prosperous and secure when the rest of the world is moving in that same direction – a debatable proposition, at best. Other countries manage to enjoy relative peace and prosperity without aspiring to change the entire planet.
A country with the advantages celebrated in the document – a dynamic economy, resilient and creative people, and a dominant military – could reasonably adopt a foreign policy that preserved those advantages by focusing laser-like on vital national interests. Such a strategy would carefully husband resources in order to ensure the United States’ long-term political and economic health. Instead, though the Biden NSS adopts an outwardly confident tone, the subtext reads like it was written for a country that was riven with self-doubt, and fearful of falling behind.
In one respect, however, such doubts are warranted. Severe polarization and bitter partisanship (what the NSS euphemistically calls “passionate political intensities and ferment”) demands our urgent attention – and practical solutions. And yet the NSS curiously waves the problem away, warning that we must not use our domestic dysfunction “as an excuse to retreat from the wider world.”
There is little danger of that. The same U.S. political system which seems capable of producing mostly vitriol does manage every year to pass a gargantuan (and ever-growing) military budget. And yet the NSS implies that far more spending will be necessary. This additional spending will ensure the United States’ continued military entanglement in nearly every part of the world, while at the same time discouraging U.S. allies and partners from doing more to defend themselves and their interests.
In short, the failure to set clear priorities, and bring the administration’s goals in line with available resources, is likely to haunt Biden’s NSS – as it has those of his predecessors.
Strategy Encourages Multilateral Approach to Advance U.S. National Interests
The President’s 2022 National Security Strategy lays out a cogent and timely case for the United States to cooperate with a range of other nations to advance U.S. national interests. A key component of that cooperation is through multilateral frameworks and institutions. The new strategy also outlines the competition U.S. policy faces, singling out autocracies, namely China, Russia and others, as presenting an alternative. It links competition and cooperation by noting that “a more competitive world affects cooperation and how the need for cooperation affects competition.” This was most vividly on display October 12 when the new strategy was released almost simultaneously with a 143-5-35 vote in the UN General Assembly condemning Russia’s war against Ukraine.
It is an ambitious, aspirational, strategy that retains a uniquely American worldview of taking on the responsibility as a leader in confronting a wide range of international challenges. It relies on cooperation to achieve many of those objectives, not explicitly because it is seeking to shift or share the burden, but in recognition of the fact that relative U.S. power and influence has declined, and Washington cannot achieve most of its objectives without friends and institutions.
The strategy envisions multilateral cooperation that is bespoke to the issues, partners and required capabilities. It turns to multilateral institutions to advance progress in domains as diverse as arms control, food supply and global health. As the UNGA vote made clear, the strategy also looks to the global institutions as forums to call out bad behavior and demonstrate how isolated some countries, such as Russia, have become on the world stage. At multiple points the strategy seeks to strengthen, update and modernize multilateral institutions, highlighting their contemporary role setting normative frameworks in technology, cyberspace, trade, and economics. While there are few surprises in this policy blueprint, it organizes and orders the Biden Administration’s approach and sends an important signal to allies, partners, and rivals.
The U.S. Ignores Need for Burden Sharing with European Partners
The new NSS appears to present a repudiation of the idea that the United States should engage in any kind of retrenchment or downsizing in its foreign policy, instead calling for a more forward-leaning and resource-intensive approach to the world. This stance is perhaps most notable in the omission of any real embrace of burden-sharing or burden-shifting towards capable European or Asian allies as a U.S. policy approach.
Once the rallying cry only of hardcore realists looking to extricate the United States from its commitments to Europe after the Cold War, the need for burden-sharing within NATO has become a broadly accepted reality on both sides of the Atlantic in particular. Burden-sharing is a way to mitigate the growing imbalance between Washington’s relative power and its goals in the international system. By leveraging the potential of prosperous, democratic U.S. allies, the United States can avoid becoming too overburdened, and European states can hedge against the possibility that the United States will leave them in the lurch in some future crisis.
As European Union High Representative Joseph Borrell put it just this week, Europe needs “to shoulder more responsibilities ourselves. We have to take a bigger part of our responsibility in securing security.” Or as Max Bergman, a scholar at the Center for American Progress has put it, “For the EU to become a stronger global actor—and therefore a more capable partner for the United States—it will need to develop its hard-power military capacity.”
Yet the national security strategy barely mentions the issue, other than in passing. “As we step up our own sizable contributions to NATO capabilities and readiness,” it suggests, “we will count on our Allies to continue assuming greater responsibility by increasing their spending, capabilities, and contributions.” There is no discussion of places where European states might pick up some of the United States’ burden. Instead, the NSS doubles down on U.S. leadership and military pre-eminence in every region of the world. In doing so, it proposes a strategy that underutilizes the potential network of U.S. allies around the world, and makes it far more likely U.S. foreign policy will become overextended.
NSS Overlooks the Defining Dilemma of U.S. Security Cooperation
The NSS released this week lays out what the United States defines as its national security concerns and a vision for addressing them. In his remarks surrounding the launch of the NSS, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan specifically mentioned the need to “build and maintain international coalitions both to shape the global strategic environment and to address these transnational threats.”
But despite the rhetorical emphasis, the NSS dedicated very little real estate envisioning the role U.S. security cooperation and assistance would play in U.S. national security, contradicting the central role the enterprise has held in the past two decades of U.S. foreign policy.
Indeed, over the last twenty years, “by, with, and through” has been the principal way in which the United States has found itself engaged in conflicts around the world. And while mentions of security assistance and cooperation are smattered across the document as a means to “alleviate suffering, reduce instability, and prevent the export of terrorism or mass migration,” the level of attention paid to the topic fails to align with the likely importance security cooperation will continue to have in U.S. global engagement.
Moreover, where cooperation is covered, much of the exposition is dedicated to the importance of sustaining and deepening partnerships with likeminded “democratic” allies. While no doubt important, the focus fails to address what has long been the defining dilemma of the U.S. security cooperation enterprise – that a significant portion of U.S. military assistance, training, sales, and support over the last two decades has flowed to non-democratic countries, many of which exhibit predatory behaviors, and which have little interest in human rights. While that fact may be uncomfortable, it is strategically noteworthy, and certainly has consequences for how the U.S. intends to be engaged militarily in the context of competition with near-peer rivals.
It is no surprise, then, that the document contains no mention of the long-awaited Conventional Arms Transfer Policy. While the administration has been assuring external stakeholders of the policy’s imminent publication for months, it remains disappointing that there is no reference, even implicitly, of efforts to implement more effective, integrated, and responsible approaches to conventional arms transfers and a recommitment to international regimes thereto – a defining feature of U.S. security cooperation.
Ultimately, in terms of security cooperation, the NSS says more with what it has left out than what it has kept in. That lack of attention is troubling, especially given how instrumental security cooperation has been in U.S. national security over the past twenty years. Without a clear recognition of the realities defining current security cooperation relationships, the risk grows that they persist without thoughtful integration into broader strategies.
Strategy Draws Connection Between Safeguarding American Interests At Home and Abroad
President Biden’s National Security Strategy draws essential connections between America’s strength at home and its ability to safeguard its national interests abroad. The NSS makes the case that long-overdue investments in U.S. infrastructure, education, manufacturing, and technological research and development will position the U.S. to compete successfully in the 21st Century. It seems to aspire to nothing less than a great rejuvenation of the American nation, at the same time as it seeks deeper cooperation with allies and like-minded countries around the world.
In terms of grand strategy, the NSS remains largely consistent with the “great power competition” framework of the Trump administration. The NSS declares that “the post-Cold War era is definitively over and a competition is underway between the major powers to shape what comes next.” The major powers with which the U.S. is competing are Russia and China, which happen to be engaged in a “no-limits” partnership with one another. The U.S. remains the chief supporter of Ukraine in its defense against Russia’s invasion, and remains the chief supporter of Taiwan in China’s long-frozen civil war. Despite its sometimes lofty rhetoric, the NSS implicitly assesses that “what comes next” is a new Cold War (or perhaps the old Cold War?) and attempts to put forward a strategy for prevailing in it.
The NSS acknowledges that “parts of the world” are uncomfortable with the prospect of another grand confrontation between major powers, divided along ideological and geopolitical lines. These “parts of the world” are implicitly the “non-aligned,” and are presumably “uneasy” because they anticipate, based on past experience, that they may again become the battleground over which the major powers will compete. The NSS addresses their concerns by claiming that the U.S. seeks “to avoid a world in which competition escalates into a world of rigid blocs. We do not seek conflict or a new Cold War.” Yet it is unclear how to reconcile this desire to avoid the emergence of a new bloc system with the central strategic approach articulated in the NSS, which is to “build the strongest possible coalition of nations to enhance our collective influence to shape the global strategic environment and … modernize and strengthen our military so it is equipped for the era of strategic competition with major powers.” Coalition building and mobilizing the combined military forces of the “free world” against a Sino-Russian alliance certainly echoes the strategic thinking of the Cold War era, whether we relish the comparison or not.
Strategy Overextends Europe into the Indo-Pacific
The Biden administration’s NSS denies the hard cold realities of European interests and capabilities. Only two European allies—France and the United Kingdom (UK)—maintain a regular maritime presence in the region, and even they are incapable of deploying more than seven frigates and two destroyers to the region for an extended period. In the case of France, at least some of those ships would be needed to fulfill existing obligations around Reunion, New Caledonia, and French Polynesia. Other European navies are even more limited—the total number of frigates and destroyers fell 32 percent between 1999 and 2018. While Germany and other European allies have pledged to increase defense expenditures, spurred by Russia’s war in Ukraine, those funds will focus largely on replenishing weapons stocks sent to Ukraine and closing urgent capability gaps for collective defense against Russia. In other words, Europe will not have the capacity to make a meaningful military contribution to Indo-Pacific security and defense any time soon.
More importantly, shifting NATO Europe’s attention to the Indo-Pacific is a dangerous distraction from its core mission—the collective defense of the North Atlantic area—at a time when it needs to be less globally ambitious and more focused on territorial defense to secure its eastern flank against threats from Russia. President Vladimir Putin’s willingness to use force and take risks has alarmed Europe and altered perceptions of his intentions. This revised threat assessment, along with Washington’s encouragement, steered the direction of NATO’s recently-released Strategic Concept, which called Russia “the most significant and direct threat to Allies’ security and to peace and stability in the Euro-Atlantic area.” By comparison, China is a peripheral security concern—a political rival, an economic competitor, but not an immediate military threat. Geography matters. Europe will always prioritize the Russian threat over the Chinese one, and the Biden administration ought to reconcile itself to the reality of European interests.
Rather than try to draw European allies into the Indo-Pacific region, the United States should encourage them to stay home and assume the main burden for their own security, so it can devote more resources to the Indo-Pacific region. Washington needs to get its strategic house in order. Unfortunately, the Biden administration’s NSS poses more questions than answers.
NSS Highlights Contradiction Between Great Power Competition and Considering Other Nations' Interests
Through its strong focus on great power competition, the NSS reveals several contradictions regarding U.S. policy towards smaller and emerging powers (SEPs). To avoid these, it is critical for the Biden administration to translate its pledge from the NSS not to “see the world solely through the prism of strategic competition” into action. So far, the United States has failed to do so. In fact, the omnipresence of the concept of competition throughout the strategy document reflects how the United States has approached the world for years.
After decades of neglecting its engagement with SEPs across the world, the United States has recently sought to scale up its relations with these nations. But this has repeatedly come late and in reaction to Beijing’s ambitious engagement policy with smaller powers, who have turned to China when other powerful partners failed to step up. This dynamic has been seen in the Southern Pacific, in Africa, and in the Caribbean and Central America.
Moreover, the United States’ strong focus on countering Chinese and Russian influence across the globe, and on “outcompeting” its rivals―as stated in the NSS―has too often led the United States to attempt to coerce other countries to align their positions with those of U.S. leaders. This has often backfired. Leaders in South Africa, for example, have regularly decried these dynamics as Russia’s war in Ukraine unfolded. The narrow competition narrative echoes throughout other strategic documents like the U.S. Strategy towards sub-Saharan Africa, which states that the United States is “responding to growing foreign activity and influence in sub-Saharan Africa.”
But by failing to define clearly what the end goal of these outcompeting efforts are and to consider other nations’ interests, this competition framework could be viewed as a way to hinder these countries’ ability to diversify their diplomatic, economic and security partnerships, despite U.S. leaders claiming otherwise. The United States should avoid making that mistake. As the NSS stresses, global challenges, to which SEPs are more vulnerable, require cooperation and coordination between all actors. The tensions resulting from great power competition are not conducive to such partnerships, as they hinder mutual trust and risk sidelining possible avenues for combined efforts through innovative policies. The NSS acknowledges this contradiction but fails to highlight a clear path to overcome this challenge.
The Biden administration wants to “avoid a world in which competition escalates into a world of rigid blocs” and it seeks instead to “support every country, regardless of size or strength, in exercising the freedom to make choices that serve their interests.” But within the current context, these bold statements lack credibility. If the US government is serious about engaging with the world “not for the sake of competition, but for their own sake,” it will have to make a clear break from the recent past.
Biden Administration Makes Space for Cooperation in U.S. policy in the Indo-Pacific
The Biden Administration’s NSS works hard to counter a common critique of U.S. policy in the Indo-Pacific – that Washington’s approach demands full alignment with U.S. interests and forces countries to choose between it and Beijing. Instead, the Strategy repeatedly makes space for cooperation with states on shared priorities “even if they do not agree with us on all issues.” That is a pragmatic approach and a necessary one to maintain space for cooperation on transnational threats and accommodate the realities of economic constraints across the region. It will, though, require deft diplomacy to manage those differences within the context of competition with China.
Reading between the lines, several such issues emerge in the NSS’s treatment of South Asia. The Strategy largely refers to India as a member of multilateral partnerships including the Quad (with Australia, Japan, and the U.S.) and I2U2 (with Israel, the UAE, and the U.S.). It frames the Quad in terms of public goods provision and standards-setting rather than hard security, side-stepping a point of friction. It highlights the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF) as a means of deepening economic engagement, though without noting that India has only signed on to three of four pillars over concerns on trade and digital governance. Indeed, India’s focus on data protection and localization will be a continued point of disagreement to be managed. On Russia, the NSS argues that the war in Ukraine has “profoundly diminished Russia’s status vis-à-vis… India,” an assertion that India’s continued balancing act and repeated abstentions on UN votes – not to mention its significant dependance on Russian-origin arms – call into question.
Pakistan, meanwhile, does not feature in the NSS. While this is likely to disappoint those in Islamabad who seek to remain relevant in Washington, it can also be seen in a more positive light. No longer is Pakistan framed as the provider of safe-havens to terrorists nor as a potential source of nuclear escalation in the event of India-Pakistan conflict – as it was in the most recent 2017 National Security Strategy. Instead, the Strategy identifies the Indo-Pacific as “the epicenter of the climate crisis” and highlights South Asia as a priority area for addressing the effects of climate change. Pakistan’s floods place it at the center of that conversation, though it will be for Islamabad to outline a viable adaptation strategy that Washington can support. Likewise, Pakistan now finds itself in closer alignment with U.S. counterterrorism goals than before the Taliban takeover, as both states seek to prevent attacks emanating from Afghanistan. The NSS does highlight nuclear risks more broadly – a focus that should continue to apply to the risk of escalation in South Asia and will remain a key U.S. interest in Pakistan.
The Strategy reserves some of its strongest language for Afghanistan. It declares an end to “major military operations to remake other societies” and critiques an “an unrealistic faith in force and regime change to deliver sustainable outcomes, while failing to adequately account for opportunity costs to competing global priorities or unintended consequences.” It nonetheless maintains that Washington met its objectives in “delivering justice” to Al Qaeda and points to the al-Zawahiri strike in Kabul as a demonstration of over the horizon counterterrorism capacity. While much of the focus in the NSS is on outmaneuvering China and Russia, it does acknowledge that the terrorist threat has not passed. Indeed, the strategy notes the ideological diversity and geographic diffusion of terrorist groups, and focuses much of its attention – rightly so – on domestic terrorism. This is no doubt the case, but it raises the unanswered question of how capable the U.S. and its partners will be to meet this expanded range of threats while prioritizing great power competition.
Biden Administration May Need to Focus More on the Long-Term Strategy of Diplomacy
Diplomacy is heavily relied on as a tool of national power in the Biden administration’s NSS, but the ends that such diplomatic endeavors are meant to achieve are opaque. The document switches between combative pledges to “outcompete” rivals and vague attempts to define an international system where countries cooperate under a security architecture led by the United States.
The section on technology exemplifies this dynamic. In one paragraph, the document outlines how the United States can improve its security and that of its allies through cooperation on technological development, “rallying like-minded actors to advance an international technology ecosystem that protects the integrity of international standards development and promotes the free flow of data and ideas.” The following paragraph, however, makes the case for protectionist tech policy as an imperative for countering China. The focus is less on how the United States can work to establish commonly accepted rules in the tech space and more on threatening how the United States will attempt to isolate China through tech and trade policy.
Elsewhere in the document, there are important pledges to expand U.S. diplomatic efforts on issues like climate change, global health, and food security, but how those endeavors fit into a vision of U.S. interests beyond competition with adversaries is not made clear. Pursuing diplomacy with competitors and adversaries is important, and the NSS does call for cooperation with China on areas of intersecting interests. But the dominant theme uniting the calls for diplomacy in the document is the need to isolate adversaries. This approach both overlooks the United States’ attractive power and is a weak grounding on which to base a strategy. Other countries will engage with U.S. diplomatic efforts to isolate China so long as it serves their own interests. The Biden administration, however, relies more on the assumption that Chinese authoritarianism will repel potential partners instead of making the affirmative case for an adapted international system that advances the security of the United States and partner countries.
Ultimately, the Biden administration treats diplomacy as the best bucket to put out the many fires it faces: Covid-19, economic woes, Russian aggression, and countering the rise of China. This is a pragmatic approach to immediate national security crises, but it may be less effective as a long-term strategy to obtain widespread buy-in from partners to organize an international order in which the United States maintains an outsized leadership position.
NSS Features Contradictory and Conflicting Strategic Goals for Global Economic Order, Global Commons, and Trade
The Biden NSS features several contradictory strategic goals with regard to global economic order. For example, it repeatedly refers to the goal of being “inclusive,” even as it excludes those outside of “democracies and like-minded partners,” particularly China, the world’s largest trade power ($4.2 trillion exports-imports in 2021). And while the NSS rightly says there is a deficit of technology rules and standards, there is no reference to global rules or standards, but only of mobilizing democracies and like-minded nations.
A similar problem pertains to global commons such as space, a subset of a larger contradiction. The NSS correctly explains that global challenges such as climate change, pandemics, food insecurity and terrorism require global cooperation. The NSS argues that there is more to the strategy than just strategic competition. But these competing goals are not easily compartmentalized; China has shut down cooperation on climate change to protest U.S. policies toward Taiwan and bans on high-end technology exports.
The NSS seems conflicted on trade, too. On the one hand it says, “The United States has long benefited from international trade’s ability to promote global economic growth, lower consumer prices, and access to foreign markets to promote U.S. exports and jobs.” However, the next sentence says, “the longstanding rules that govern trade and other means of economic exchange have been violated by non-market actors, like the PRC; [and] were designed to privilege corporate mobility over workers and the environment.” This somewhat schizophrenic view reflects the administration’s penchant to eschew new free trade agreements and instead focus on digital economy standards with no market access, supply chain resilience, a green economy and climate change mitigation, and non-trade economic cooperation. And yet recent trade agreements such as the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) addressed issues of labor and the environment. But the NSS, perhaps reflecting anti-trade views in both political parties, seems to distrust markets. Moreover, the NSS does not spell out how to fix the flaws of the global trading system, for example via reforming the World Trade Organization and its dispute settlement mechanism, and yet both are essential to a rules-based order.
Then there is this confusing point where the NSS says, “Recognizing we have to move beyond traditional Free Trade Agreements, we are charting new economic arrangements to deepen economic engagement with our partners, like the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF).” But there is little agreement on the NSS’s claim that we “have to move past traditional Free Trade Agreements.” Our democratic partners in Asia, Europe, or Latin America certainly do not feel that way, given that they continue to negotiate new, and expand existing, free trade deals. Most contemporary trade agreements address environmental and labor standards. The IPEF is not a trade agreement and does nothing to liberalize market access or reduce tariffs, and it intentionally excludes the largest trading partner of all US allies and partners in Asia – China. Thus, claiming IPEF as an economic framework for the Indo-Pacific region appears exaggerated.
Strategy Fails to Address Human Security Issues as an Aspect Critical to National Security
The new US NSS fails to address the Protection of Civilians (POC) and other Human Security (HS) issues, domestically and multilaterally, as a critical aspect of national security. It stresses the importance of the US role in the NATO Alliance to US national security. It falls short, however, of clearly articulating how the United States can and should lead in innovative and forward-leaning strategy on future conflict and crisis domestically and multilaterally. The NSS blurs the lines between domestic and foreign policy and, in that vein, fails to mention the importance of protecting civilians in conflict as a critical determinant of winning any future wars. For example, the Biden administration recently issued the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response-Action Plan (CHMR-AP). It lays out steps the US military will take to better protect other populations from our actions but fails to mention anything building capabilities to protect our or our Allies’ people from the efforts of our would-be adversaries.
NATO has moved beyond an outdated single-visioned approach to state-centric security and territorial integrity to a more broad and inclusive approach which includes Human Security and Women, Peace, and Security. This approach makes sense for the Alliance as a whole, as Allied territory is at risk of becoming the battlefield on which a future crisis or conflict will play out.
The Alliance is learning the lessons of past and present conflicts; If Ukraine has taught us anything, it is that our adversaries will seek to harm civilians as a whole-of-society strategy in waging modern war. And in an Article 5 collective defense event, citizens within NATO territories will demand protection, and Allied militaries are currently unprepared to protect the population from these attacks. Adversaries will leverage our norms and our compliance with international humanitarian laws against us on the battlefield. If we are caught flat-footed and are unable to protect civilians equitably—the whole reason for NATO’s existence—the Alliance may be tested in a way that may prove its obsolescence. Yet, in the NSS document, there is no mention of “Protection of Civilians” or “Human Security” at all, just rhetoric about the importance of the Alliance.
It would be prudent for the Biden Administration to consider how the United States can take a leadership role in the Alliance as it diversifies its focus and leans forward on security to include not just hard or territorial security but also the protection of civilians and human security.
NSS Highlights IUU Fishing as a National Security Threat
We applaud the Biden Administration’s National Security Strategy for highlighting the threats Illegal Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) fishing pose to national security. Commercial fishing is big business with a complex, opaque global seafood supply chain.
Over 56 million people work on vessels to support it, many in dangerous and inhumane conditions. Distant water fleets are known to fish in other nation’s sovereign waters, traffic in drugs, arms, and persons, and use shell companies to launder illicit money.
The clandestine nature of the industry makes it difficult to know where vessels operate, who owns them, labor practices onboard, the amount of fish caught and the journey from harvest, transshipment and processing to when it enters global markets.
IUU fishing operations are often linked to unlawful transnational organized crime which further threatens the sustainability of global fisheries, undermines the rule of law, and harms economic, food and human security. Small island developing states and least developed coastal nations are often targeted by IUU fishing perpetrators because they lack the capacity to combat IUU fishing. The National Security Strategy underscores the importance of a whole-of-government approach and the use of all available resources to combat IUU fishing, as described in the Maritime SAFE Act and the National Security Memorandum on IUU Fishing and Associated Labor Abuses.
The National Security Strategy also rightfully focuses on the war in Ukraine and economic sanctions against Russia. Despite a U.S. ban on Russian caught seafood products, the murky nature of the industry enables Russian fish to enter the domestic market. Russian seafood is mixed in with American caught fish such as pollock and cod or mislabeled red crab. The National Security Strategy provides another opportunity to prioritize transparency throughout the seafood supply chain and take action to stop Putin’s pollock from entering U.S. commerce.
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