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United States Strategic Plan
First Revision. Released by the Office of Resources, |
INTRODUCTION
The National Security Strategy, Foreign Policy, and the IASP
What's New? National Interests and Strategic Goals
Refining National Security
Economics and Global Issues
The Strategies
Measuring Performance
Whose Plan Is This?
Strategic Planning Applications
This first revision of the International Affairs Strategic Plan (IASP, or the Plan) incorporates several refinements, drawing on extensive reviews and comments provided over the past year by members of the foreign affairs community, both within and outside the U.S. Government (USG). Most importantly, in a roundtable series held at the National Foreign Affairs Training Center between November 1997 and February 1998, over 200 representatives of USG agencies, Congressional staff, NGOs, and academia offered their critiques and recommendations for improving the IASP. The Plan also benefits from assessments contained in two recent studies on changing the way the United States conducts its international relations by the Henry L. Stimson Center and the Center for Strategic & International Studies. An analysis prepared by the National Academy of Sciences helped guide the inclusion of science and technology issues. An interagency working group surveyed performance measures used throughout the USG and developed the consensus set of indicators presented here. While not adopting every proposed modification, we have done our best to incorporate new thinking, and believe that this is a better product as a result.
The basic structure of the Plan has stood up to examination fairly well. We are reasonably confident that the seven national interests and 16 strategic goals provide a comprehensive and sensible framework for defining what it is that the United States is trying to achieve in the world.
The National Security Strategy, Foreign Policy, and the IASP
We are frequently asked, "What is the difference between the International Affairs Strategic Plan and the President's National Security Strategy?" The answer is, both are entirely compatible statements of United States grand strategy that view foreign affairs from related but distinct perspectives.The National Security Strategy articulates the priorities of the Administration in terms of the policies and tools employed to meet the principal international security threats to the United States. It serves as the touchstone from which the national security agencies - the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community - derive their roles and missions under the direction of the National Command Authority, that is the President.
The International Affairs Strategic Plan sets out a comprehensive and systematic vision of United States national interests. In addition to including challenges and threats to national security articulated in the National Security Strategy, the IASP encompasses the range of U.S. international affairs goals and activities of all USG agencies overseas.
The IASP is the International Affairs Strategic Plan, not the Foreign Policy Strategic Plan. The distinction is significant. International affairs is a big tent that covers the full range of U.S. national interests. These range from traditional high policy issues related to ensuring national security and maintaining international economic stability, to protecting American citizens abroad and responding to global challenges to health and the environment. In contrast, foreign policy as used here is the integral part of international affairs that focuses on the conduct of relations with other nation states and international organizations in pursuit of these national interests.
National Interests and Strategic Goals
In this revised version of the IASP, we have recast the relationship between national interests and strategic goals, but have not fundamentally changed the Plan's structure. Whereas the original IASP viewed interests and goals hierarchically, the current version breaks this direct link between the two. The 16 strategic goals portray what we want to achieve through our strategies, programs, and activities, while the seven national interests portray why we do so on behalf of the security, prosperity, well-being, and values of the American people. To illustrate, the United States spends about $900 million each year on programs that support democracy around the world. Although our democracy goals are similar across countries, the interests we pursue vary greatly. Our investment in Russia's democracy stems primarily from our national security interests, whereas in Haiti it is our concern over immigration, and in Sri Lanka our values lead us to support democracy for its own sake. This logic applies to all seven of the national interests and goals in the Plan.We have also introduced the general principle in the IASP of linkages among multiple strategic goals and national interests. Thus, in Russia the democracy goal supports not only our interests in national security, but in human rights, democracy, and law enforcement as well. In the IASP, these general linkages are identified in the national interest statements.
A principal intent of the Plan is to help maintain focus on fundamental long-term goals in a constantly changing and complex foreign policy environment, filled with crises, contingencies, and short-term events. This is part of the reason why most of the strategic goals remain highly general. Neither does the Plan, at the global level, set targets for most of the goals, fix priorities, or set an arbitrary time frame. Goals become sharper and priorities clear when they are disaggregated into constituent objectives and programs as they apply to specific regions and countries, with related time frames. For example, it will take decades to achieve final outcomes for our population and environmental goals. The goal of protecting American citizens is an ongoing responsibility. Goals for increasing U.S. exports and halting the entry of illegal drugs, on the other hand, lend themselves to achieving targets within specific time frames.
Post-Cold War parlance is often used to boost the apparent importance of an issue by labeling it a "national security" interest. While all U.S. goals potentially have a national security dimension, the IASP uses it in a more limited sense. National security in the Plan refers to vital U.S. interests related to territorial integrity, military defense, and economic survival (e.g., access to oil and freedom of navigation.)
This definition helps highlight the intersection of national defense and international affairs, and helps discriminate clearly which national interest is being served in specific regions and countries. This is particularly important for determining priorities in regions and countries where U.S. national security is not directly challenged, but the U.S. military is actively employed on humanitarian and other, frequently multilateral missions.
The four economic goals in the Plan are related, but their contributions to U.S. prosperity are distinct. Whereas the export goal refers to direct efforts to promote U.S. sales and support American business abroad, the opening markets goal concerns efforts to liberalize world trade, where benefits may flow to other nations as well as the U.S. The economic growth goal refers to strategies that promote global macroeconomics growth and stability. The economic development goal, on the other hand, relates to economic reform and development to create the conditions for sustainable, broad-based growth, and to alleviate poverty.
The revised IASP maintains the high priority given to the three goals of environment, population, and health that are placed together under the national interest of global issues. What distinguishes these three from other transnational issues, such as crime, narcotics, and terrorism, is their focus on the relationship between humankind and the global environment, and their concern with protecting and improving the quality of life on the planet for future generations, as well as in the present.
The strategy section for each of the Plan’s strategic goals combines statements of key sub-goals with an outline of how the USG employs its diplomatic, military, economic, and other national assets to achieve desired outcomes around the world. The strategies also take account of the impact of major global trends on the conduct of international relations. Globalization of the world economy, the information and communications revolutions, increased democratization and multilateral cooperation, and the rising importance of non-governmental organizations and other non-state actors all demand strategic changes in the foreign affairs institutions of the 21st Century.
These trends, combined with the recent expansion in goals beyond the national security focus of the Cold War, are having a major impact on how the foreign affairs agencies conduct international affairs. The role of the State Department must evolve, both through adopting new strategies in diplomacy and, for example, by making better use of information technology and giving higher priority to diplomatic readiness. This has become critically important as other USG agencies expand their own international roles and station their people at U.S. missions overseas. New legislation authorizing the integration of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and the U. S. Information Agency into the State Department, and mandating a closer working relationship with the Agency for International Development is part of this dynamic.
Because so many new dimensions of international affairs are no longer exclusive to government, but are in the public realm, public diplomacy is moving to the core of foreign policy. As a result, public diplomacy strategies are inherent components of all the goals in the IASP. In complementing other USG programs and activities, public diplomacy aims to influence foreign publics and leaders directly on specific U.S. objectives, or to exercise an indirect influence by increasing the free flow of information and building trust with foreign leaders and publics.
The role of U.S. foreign assistance has also evolved beyond the traditional focus on economic development, humanitarian relief, and security assistance. For example, USAID today directs its expertise and program resources to achieving democracy, rule of law, population, environment, and other goals. The U.S. military offers training in democracy building and environmental protection. There is a growing effort to focus humanitarian efforts on preventing conflict, not just aiding its victims. From a strategic planning perspective, foreign assistance strategies are critical investments, not in foreign aid, but in advancing American interests and values.
We have made an initial attempt in this IASP to include strategies related to science and technology. There are two inter-related dimensions to this issue: the contribution of science and technology as a tool to help achieve our international affairs goals, and the role of international affairs in furthering scientific and technological progress. To illustrate, our ability to implement and verify arms control treaties or to set targets for global climate change is acutely science driven. At the same time, global medical research, advances in agricultural sciences, and space collaboration benefit from international scientific exchange.
Given the complex factors that influence international affairs, the job of understanding how best to determine whether the United States is achieving its goals -- whether our policies and strategies are succeeding -- is exceedingly difficult. This will take time and effort, but it is clear that flexibility and qualitative judgments about the value of USG programs and activities are essential. Understanding in most instances does not result from a mechanistic approach that relies exclusively on quantitative measurement of performance. Because most of what the USG does in widely varying countries around the world involves multiple programs and agencies, as well as the participation of other governments, multilateral organizations, and NGO’s, attempts to isolate the contribution of any particular program or agency will have limited value for evaluating overall results.
In this revised IASP, the indicators that are presented with each of the strategic goals represent only those few that apply to overall strategic goal outcomes, where there is reasonable agreement among concerned agencies, and where data are at least in principle available to track them.
Serious problems in measuring international affairs performance remain, notably the problems of objectivity and attribution. For example, while it is possible to determine the impact of USG programs in lowering narcotics production in specific countries, it is much harder to know the impact of this reduction on the overall amount of illegal drugs entering the U.S. since that amount is unknown. Similarly, we assume that U.S. foreign policy increases regional stability. However, there is no direct, objective method of determining the value to U.S. security and leadership of full participation in the UN or the influence of diplomacy on conflicts which do not occur and are inevitably the product of many factors. Foreign and domestic opinion surveys offer one of the principal ways to evaluate how well the U.S. is doing on its international affairs goals, with the important caveat that what are being measured are perceptions of progress.
Another drawback of focusing exclusively on achieving specific goals is that much of the conduct of international affairs is derived from American values and has collateral benefits that accrue only indirectly over long periods of time. Many diplomatic activities, such as developing contacts and access to foreign governments or public diplomacy exchanges to build foreign understanding, falls into this category. In another example, as a unique voluntary agency, the Peace Corps is not a direct instrument of foreign policy, but it does serve national interests by building understanding and good will.
The perspective of the IASP is what the United States wants to achieve in the world today. The Plan's central premise is that successful conduct of international affairs constitutes America's first line of defense. Because the demands of world events on U.S. interests are so complex and involve so many agencies of the USG, this cannot be the province of a single executive agency or institution. The Secretary of State is charged with coordinating the international activities of the USG and serving as the President's primary foreign policy advisor. To support these roles, the State Department Strategic Planning Team drafted this Plan. In providing a comprehensive framework for the international goals of the United States, the purpose of the IASP is first and foremost to advance a shared vision of our international affairs goals.
Strategic Planning Applications
In application, strategic planning for international affairs is a powerful tool for coordinating among USG agencies, setting priorities, aligning resources to policy, making tradeoffs when necessary, measuring performance, and informing Congress and the public.
Using the national interests and strategic goals in the IASP as its framework, Mission Performance Plans (MPPs) are comprehensive and authoritative USG strategy documents prepared by country teams representing all USG agencies and approved by Chiefs of Mission at over 160 Embassies and international missions around the world. The MPP helps set priorities, requests resources, and ensures consistency among agencies in-country and with Washington headquarters.
In Washington, the IASP provides the framework for Regional Performance Plans that are prepared in the State Department and coordinated interagency. Reviews of the MPPs and Regional Plans culminate in interagency reviews chaired by the Secretary of State prior to preparing the next year's International Affairs (Function 150) budget request. These performance plans are deliberative USG documents. However, versions of them are available to the public in the President's FY 2000 International Affairs budget request to Congress.
The IASP is consistent with the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA), which requires all USG agencies to prepare strategic and performance plans linked to resources, and to report on performance. However, the Plan is not intended to serve as a GPRA compliance document or for tracking individual agency performance. USG international affairs results from the collective influence of many agencies, programs with multiple collateral benefits, and interaction with other nations, international organizations, and NGO’s. Because of this, the IASP necessarily aims to measure the value of USG performance in broader terms.
Without a doubt, much can be done to improve the Plan. Its true import lies not in its existence as a finished document, but in its use as a tool for better government in carrying out our international affairs.
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