US President Joe Biden has reportedly approved a new national security memorandum intended to serve as a “road map” for the Trump national security team on dealing with China, Iran, North Korea and Russia.
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The memorandum, which reportedly provides recommendations on such things as “improving US government inter-agency cooperation” and “speeding up the sharing of information with allies”, are really critiques on the Biden team’s performance. The question needs to be asked: if these were such important steps, why weren’t they fully implemented during the last four years?
What could really be of use to the incoming national security team are transition memos that provide a real road map on key specific foreign policy challenges. At the end of his presidency, George W. Bush tasked the senior staff of his national security council with writing 40 transition memos on the most critical foreign policy and national security issues.
Bush was concerned about the array of challenges the new administration would face and, as he later wrote, “was determined to help the new president get off to a fast start”. The memos, many of which were declassified in a book titled Hand-Off: The Foreign Policy George W. Bush Passed to Barack Obama (which former national security adviser Stephen Hadley worked to declassify) dealt candidly with what the White House felt it had accomplished – including successes and setbacks – and elucidated what still needed to be done.
The memos, naturally, addressed relations with China, Russia, Iran and North Korea but they also ran the gamut from “biodefence and pandemic planning” to “Africa conflict resolution policy”. One that I wrote on “East Asian architecture and alliances” explained how Bush assessed that post-Cold War neglect had allowed China and North Korea to exploit our weaknesses in East Asia and that we needed to act with our partners to hedge against the rise of a belligerent China.
We gave ourselves good marks for beginning alliance transformation and defence reforms, such as agreeing to relocate and consolidate US forces from Okinawa to Guam. However, we candidly disclosed to the Obama administration the specific steps we had not completed and felt were needed to ensure the progress did not unravel.
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