Book Description

Over the last few years, the term "partnership" has spread like wildfire through official U.S. national security guidance documents and rhetoric. At the Department of Defense (DOD), which spearheaded the proliferation of the term, "partnership" has been used to refer to a broad array of civilian as well as military activities in support of national security. At other U.S. government agencies, and at the White House, the use of the term "partnership" has been echoed and applied even more broadly -- not only in the national security arena, but also to all facets of U.S. relationships with foreign partners. "Partnership" is not new in either theory or practice. To illustrate, U.S. strategy during the Cold War called for working with formal allies, through combined planning and the development of interoperable capabilities, in order to deter and if necessary defeat a Soviet threat. And it called for working with partners in the developing world to cultivate the allegiance of states and societies to the West, and to bolster their resistance to Soviet influence. Congress provided oversight in the forms of policy direction; resources and authorities for programs ranging from weapons sales to combined military exercises to cultural exchanges; and accountability. New in recent years is both the profusion of the use of the term partnership and -- in the aftermath of both the Cold War and the first post-9/11 decade -- a much less singular focus for U.S. global engagement. Recent defense and national strategic guidance clearly conveys the view that partnership is good. But as a rule, it provides much less sense of what partnership is designed to achieve and how that protects U.S. interests; it does not clearly indicate how to prioritize among partnership activities; it does not assign specific roles and responsibilities for partnership across the U.S. government; and it does not indicate how to judge whether partnership is working. A lack of sufficient strategic direction could raise a series of potential concerns for Congress.