In the Fall 2024 issue of the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s journal Orbis, we feature several articles that offer practical advice to the incoming administration on how to improve the national security decision-making process.

John Mauk offers guidance on how to improve the national security-making policy process. This includes ensuring that the development of options for the President involves the “consideration of potential consequences and key uncertainties, and sufficiently qualifying the attendant risks.” The National Security Council must also be able to evaluate any issue “considering all instruments of national power” when “developing pragmatic policy choices.”

Any future National Security Team will have to, as Derek Reveron notes, find a way to navigate among competing interests. The structure Mauk lays out must grapple with Reveron’s admonition:

The United States maintains global interests, but they are not all vital. While presidents inherit the national security system and commitments of their predecessors, they can decide priorities by interpreting how to protect and advance national interests. Certainly, administrations may change, but fundamental US interests have not: protecting the homeland, preserving regional balances of power, sustaining a global trading system, enhancing power through collective security organizations, and preserving an Americanized international order.

This aligns with Andrew A. Michta’s point that the next administration’s national security team has entered a new era “defined by protracted systemic instability across the globe, where success or failure to maintain regional power balances in key theaters will determine whether we can keep the peace, or if we will be pulled into another system-transforming world war.”

It also means, as Mauk points out, that the President and his team have to accept that decisions are made “under conditions of significant uncertainty. The reality is that even the best-informed decisions can have adverse consequences.”

The advice proffered by John Mauk connects to Michael Wise’s recommendations for what Derek Reveron has always seen as one of the major tools of US influence: security assistance. Wise recommends that policymakers understand how “defense and security cooperation activities can help advance US national security goals in the future provided there are realistic expectations. The United States must communicate with partners effectively and consider varying interests, both with the partner and among various US stakeholders.”

The next administration must focus on the continuing challenges in cyberspace to US national security. Thomas Lynch stresses that:

America today confronts contemporary Great Power rivals who are pursuing strategic advantage in the cyberspace domain through malign activities led by government, military, and intelligence organizations. This new era—fundamentally different from the one during the 1992-2014/15 era of US global dominance and preponderant power in cyberspace—is one that requires full use of American and western military tools and capabilities in the cyber domain…

All of this comes back to Michta’s advice to the new team:

We need a strategy articulated in plain language that the citizens can embrace—one that focuses on America’s irreducible national interests, on geopolitics, the economy, the key theaters we must secure, and the force posture we need to build to deter and, if need be, defeat our enemies.

The Fall 2024 issue of Orbis can be accessed here.

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