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The newspaper of The Johns Hopkins University June 23, 2008 | Vol. 37 No. 38
 
SAIS to Host Launch of CTR Book With Gen. Wesley Clark

By Felisa Klubes
SAIS

The School of Advanced International Studies will host a forum at 8 a.m. on Thursday, June 26, to celebrate the launch of Ideas for America's Future: Core Elements of a New National Security Policy, a book by Jeffrey P. Bialos, a senior fellow at the SAIS Center for Transatlantic Relations.

Wesley K. Clark, former supreme allied commander of NATO and author of the book's preface, will be the featured speaker.

Ideas for America's Future, a 500-page study published by CTR, explores the need for a strategy "reset" and offers a new national security paradigm with three overarching conceptual approaches, six core policy ideas and six approaches to revitalizing the United States' national security tool box. The study is the outgrowth of a symposium that CTR co-hosted last year with the American Security Project, a nonprofit, bipartisan public policy organization.

Bialos brings a unique perspective to the study from having served in senior positions at three U.S. government departments with national security responsibility: Commerce, Defense and State. Most recently he was deputy undersecretary of defense for industrial affairs during the Clinton administration.

The book is focused on the challenges for the next U.S. president in shaping a post-Iraq national security strategy that does three things: reflects the country's core values and restores moral leadership, can earn the trust of the American people and coalition partners, and will protect against a dynamic range of 21st-century threats posed by agile enemies. How, it asks, does the United States "re-balance" its national security investment portfolio, adjust to the emerging multipolar world and realign security capabilities to address the low intensity and asymmetric threats expected to be prevalent, from insurgency to stabilization and reconstruction to tsunamis?

In this study, Bialos and co-contributors Stuart L. Koehl, David M. Catarious and Suzanne E. Spaulding address the following:

The need to develop a holistic strategy of "constructive engagement" that includes a major focus on advancing the human condition and promoting good governance.

How to preserve the fabled U.S. openness to foreign ideas, people and investment capital to avoid a descent to second best in economic and security terms.

The need for a military and civilian "surge" to prevent Afghanistan from falling into chaos.

A renewed strategy of extended nuclear deterrence and an enhanced nonproliferation regime that better regulates the nuclear fuel cycle.

A plan to refocus and reshape the U.S. Army and the reserve components for low-intensity conflict and institutionalize the lessons of counterinsurgency efforts in Iraq.

A proposal to reshape the U.S. government's civilian agencies to achieve more effective national security outputs without creating new departments or bureaucracies.

A way to de-conflict the roles of NATO and the European Union in a manner consistent with European values and capabilities.

Ideas for ensuring better force interoperability among coalition partners likely to remain at different levels of capability, and for encouraging U.S. allies to develop constabulary forces for low- intensity, expeditionary conflict.

The event will be held in the Nitze Building's Kenney Auditorium. Non-SAIS affiliates must RSVP to CTR at transatlanticrsvp@jhu.edu or 202-663-5880.

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