Even before President Obama’s “no strategy” gaffe and this week’s major speech laying out a plan to confront the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, White House staffers were working to update a long overdue national security strategy doctrine.
Last November Obama told Congress he would present a new national security strategy in early 2014, a formal document outlining his priorities for the remainder of his time in office.
The new policy document would build on the previous one, released in May 2010. Senators say the White House has not provided a reason for the delay, and, they argue, a formal document outlining Obama’s broad national security strategy vision is needed now more than ever.
“It’s critically important — the world is on fire,” Sen. Susan Collins, a centrist Republican from Maine who previously chaired the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, told the Washington Examiner.
“I cannot remember a more dangerous and turbulent time in the world since right after 9/11, so it’s essential that we have the benefit of the best strategic thinking in our government and the benefit of the best military and diplomatic advice.”
Political timing, she argued, should play no role in White House decision to release the formal national security strategy.
“This analysis should not be delayed in any way,” she said. “It’s absolutely essential that politics not intervene.”
A 1986 law requires the president to present Congress with an annual national security strategy document. Presidents have regularly failed to submit the statement annually, but Obama has waited the longest to update his initial doctrine delivered in May 2010.
By comparison, George W. Bush was nearly as delinquent, providing only two during his eight years in office, one in 2002 that laid out his case for pre-emptive strikes, what became known as the Bush doctrine, and another in the spring of 2006 in the middle of his second term. Bill Clinton updated his every year except 1999, and George H.W. Bush submitted three during his four years in office.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who sits on the Armed Services Committee, chalked up Obama’s delay to what he called the administration’s “complete disdain for the Constitution and their responsibilities to Congress.”
“They’re required to consult with Congress — it’s their responsibility and they’re ducking it — that’s what’s really unfortunate,” he said. “This president shows more disdain for Congress than any I’ve dealt with — and that’s a number of them.”
Before the ISIS threat commanded the administration’s attention, senators expected the new written strategy to reflect many of the points Obama made in a speech last spring at the National Defense University.
They thought it would lay out plans to shift the country away from war footing and to make a stronger case for Obama’s long sought pivot to Asia, as well as his next phase in combating a splintered al Qaeda — all within the context of a leaner budget era.
Capitol Hill also expected it to reflect the controversy over Edward Snowden’s disclosures of the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance practices, as well as concerns about the administration’s use of drones to kill terrorist suspects in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.
But the rise of ISIS and its rapid advance across Iraq in June threw a monkey wrench into the document’s development, and the White House National Security Council was forced to go back to the drawing board again this year, according to an administration source and another on Capitol Hill familiar with the process.
A White House spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said only that “we expect the national security strategy to be ready for release later this fall.”
“Politics has not connection to the timing of its release,” she said.
After Russia seized control of Crimea and started making moves in Eastern Ukraine, and ISIS went on a barbaric rampage in Iraq, polls showed Obama’s handling of foreign policy taking a nosedive.
In the late summer, NSC staffers started wondering whether releasing a new national security strategy doctrine amid the global unrest before a critical November midterm election would inevitably entangle the document — and the president’s overall national security strategy — in partisan politics.
But Obama’s admission in a press conference in late August that “we don’t have a strategy yet” for a broader confrontation with ISIS — especially with respect to Syria — created the biggest headaches for his staff.
Any attempt to release the document in the immediate weeks or months after the “no strategy” statement would undoubtedly turn it into a partisan football, so the NSC has continued to quietly work on it.
Along with Republicans, prominent Democrats say the White House should simply follow the law and submit the strategy document regardless of the political environment.
Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., who chairs the Armed Services Committee, said Obama’s “no strategy” comment should have no bearing on whether and when the NSC should wrap up work on the document and release it to Congress.
“They ought to do it, period,” Levin said. “They ought to abide with the requirements not because the president made a comment. I don’t think that’s added to it at all.”
“The whole situation that we’re in makes it more essential that we have that kind of national strategy laid out,” he said, referring to the ISIS threat and other areas of international unrest.
