JHU SAIS to Host Book Launch Event on National Security Featuring General Wesley Clark

The Johns Hopkins Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) will host a forum, "Ideas for America's Future: Core Elements of a New National Security Strategy" on Thursday, 06/26 at 8 a.m.

The forum celebrates 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 (CTR) and a partner at Sutherland, Asbill & Brennan.

Wesley K. Clark, former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO and author of the book's preface, will be the featured speaker at this discussion. Bialos also will provide remarks.

Ideas for America's Future, a 500-page study published by CTR, explores the need for a strategy "reset" and offers a thoughtful, 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 non-profit, bipartisan public policy organization dedicated to fostering understanding on national security.

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 under secretary 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: 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 does the United States "rebalance" its national security investment portfolio, adjust to the emerging multi-polar 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 his co-contributors Stuart L. Koehl, David M. Catarious and Suzanne E. Spaulding address the following topics:

• 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 non-proliferation regime which 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 counter-insurgency efforts in Iraq. The plan is designed to generate 96,000 additional forces for low intensity combat without adding substantially more troops.
• 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, culture 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, free and open to the public, will be held in Kenney Auditorium located on the first floor of the school's Nitze Building, 1740 Massachusetts Ave., N.W., Washington, D.C. Members of the public must RSVP to CTR at [email protected] or 202.663.5880.

Media who want to cover this event should contact Felisa Neuringer Klubes in the SAIS Communications Office at 202.663.5626 or [email protected].