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Just this year, the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community completely missed the onset of the Arab Spring. Our intelligence agencies are no longer in the business of influencing foreign political outcomes. Institutions meant to bridge this gap, like the National Endowment for Democracy, are past their prime and shy away from supporting front-line dissidents.
The effects of this are on full display with the Arab Spring. As events of major consequence have transpired, Washington has been left dumbstruck. When the Obama administration has acted, it has done so erratically and arbitrarily. Can anyone doubt that an uprising in China, for example, would again reveal a Washington with little idea of how to act and with few tools to influence the outcome? As a result, such matters are unfortunately left to chance.
There has been no repeat of 1947, which was the year the U.S. government drastically reordered itself to fight the then-new Cold War. Indeed, many of the tools available to Washington today derive from that year and have been stretched to manage today’s threats, with mixed results.
A decade after 9/11, it is reasonable to ask government officials if there is a strategy or even a vision of ending — not just managing — the threat we have faced. To get there, we need to think again in terms of undermining or ablating a hostile ideology. While soldiers and sleuths have a key role to play in this, victory will again require organizing the full tools of national power and bringing them to bear against the enemy.
Christian Whiton was a senior advisor at the State Department during the George W. Bush administration. He is a principal at DC International Advisory. You can follow him in Twitter @WhitonDCIA.
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