Previous IFPA-Fletcher Conferences

National Security Strategy and Policy:
Planning for and Responding to Threats to the U.S. Homeland

October 28-29, 2004
Ronald Reagan Building
and International Trade Center
Washington, D.C.

Dr. David M. Abshire, President, Center for the Study of the Presidency, and Former United States Ambassador to NATO

Introduction By: Ambassador Stephen W. Bosworth

Dr. David M. Abshire: Thank you very much, Steve. It’s a pleasure to be here, and particularly to see you and many other old friends. I congratulate in the organization of this conference.

The small organization that I've been running since 2000 looks at Presidential leadership, organization for Presidential leadership. Eisenhower felt that was equally important, how you organize. And in a Washington that has so many disconnects and compartments in the Executive and Legislative Branch, it’s hard to think strategically. It’s hard to think strategically on homeland security. We look at the Presidential memory, how past Presidents succeeded and failed, and then we look out around the world in those things.

Now, in our Presidential memory, in our 76 case studies of Presidential leadership that we made available in the year 2000 to the new Administration, we had described how FDR and Vannevar Bush organized the country, the science communities, the research communities to so successfully prevail in the war. And you know, after the war, the Grand Admiral Donitz said, “We were defeated by American science.” Now, the Doughboys wouldn’t agree on that, but the submariners would have to admit to that.

Well, in the programs that we had after 9/11, that we put together on marshalling science and technology, and Dr. Marburger and Josh Lederberg, and many others were involved in that, when Tom Ridge came in, he read all of our materials and got me to his office and we talked about organizing in our conference room a round table where we had the think tanks and National Academy and the National Research Council, and others in a two-way street. We’ve done that for a year-and-a-half with him, and practically all of his deputies.

It was in the context of doing this, when we had Asa Hutchinson, where he was sort of knocking his head against the EU, and some of the problems there, and I brought up the possible use of a reinforced North Atlantic Council meeting, where in one place you can talk to 25 members, 46 if you’ve got the Partners for Peace. If you haven’t served there you can’t appreciate-- leadership is power, and the power of being able to communicate, since we are, we try often to do it by indirection when we’re at our best, but when the alliance moves, it’s because we are the leader.

It really shocked us, this disconnect, that the Atlantic Council and the various structures were not being used because-- in the 1985/’86 we were hit by terrorism. As Ambassador, I could only move about with five bodyguards. The NATO pipeline, the North Atlantic Assembly, a three-star general was assassinated in Champs d’Elysees. It wasn’t the Soviets, it was these Communist cells and Qaddafi. Bill Webster, the head of the FBI, came over and stayed at Vandenberg Guest House at Truman Hall. We marshaled all of his counterparts for an intensive-- we turned that around, we turned around these attitudes of these countries that had been allowing these terrorists to pass through.

So it was that, and my good friend and successor, Nick Burns, got me to come over and I took a team to Europe to further explore these things. I also run the Richard Lounsberry Foundation, which gives in science policy and education. And again, we’ve done a number of grants, because we feel the-- we’re a small $65 million foundation. We feel that a lot of these billion-dollar foundations have not adequately gotten into this war on terror and what they might do in some of these issues.

So anyway, the first initiative that we had-- and we explored these concepts in Paris, in Brussels, meeting with our full missions in all these places, and with the EU mission, and then in London. And then we also found there was something of a disconnect between EU and NATO and our own missions, and it’s not either/or, it’s both and the magnification of those efforts.

My Lounsberry Trustees, because my predecessor, Dr. Fred Seitz, President of Rockefeller University, Head of the National Academy, had been the Science Advisor to NATO in the 1950s, and they were worried that the science program was being discontinued, it was being cut. In its previous form, it should be cut, because it had no rhyme nor reason, and we are now attempting to rescue that. I go back to the Vannevar Bush case, because better rallying Europe, as we've tried to do through the things we do with Tom Ridge and the universities, and so forth, academies, now we’ve got the labs actually involved in some dimensions of that, in particular something we’re doing on smuggling weapons with Loy and Norm Augenstein, that this same type of thing needed to be better done in Europe, that we needed to bring them into the mix of science to better aid us in the war on terror.

In these areas, we’re dealing in the least controversial side of our problems with the Europeans. The Spanish know that from the terrorism that was hit with them. So we feel this new initiative, it’s not fully under way, but Deputy Secretary Loy will be at NATO in early December to meet with the NAC, that this is a very important initiative.

You know, unless you’ve served NATO, you don’t understand the creativity of what can be done. The Weapons Cooperation Program, in my time, we turned around the Senate, Sam Nunn and Ted Stevens, and you’ve got flexibility because we’ve got different perceptions on the terrorist threat, all over Europe. I mean, with some people we’re the biggest threat.

We face those in the counterdeployment of missile. The special consultative group, which Rick Burt chaired, which would meet outside of the Council with people from capitals who could talk beyond their instructions again enabled us on counterdeployment to turn three countries around.

So if we better use the creativity of the alliance and better marshal our departments back here on some of these things, I think we’re going to greatly benefit. So that’s my contribution to your discussion.

Questions and Answers

AMBASSADOR BOSWORTH: Thank you very much, Mr. Whiteside. I would like to ask if anyone on the panel has a comment or question that they would like to address to any of their fellow panelists. David?

DR. ABSHIRE: I’ll make a comment. First, I want to say on this last presentation, your presentation, NATO, we spent three days at NATO, yours is the best I've got. So that’s terrific, and I commend you.

I might say when I met with the perm reps, the Canadian representative was very anxious to move forward and wrote us directly on this reinforced NAC, where all of these countries could share best practices and Marshall Billingsley, who is the Assistant Secretary General of NATO for Defense Investment, felt that the reinforced NAC, this discussion at the top political level, not just with ambassadors, but with deputies from capitals, would help drive defense investment away from the heritage Cold War investment to more active confrontation of the investment, what would help the fight against terror.

Let me just say, Ambassador Dinger, you're so correct on track two, it’s of course track one. It’s the essential thing. Napoleon said the moral is the physical. The perception is three times more important than the armies. Now, I was on the-- the Congress is, I’ll be blunt, certain elements of the Congress has been so far ahead of the Executive Branch, not just Senators Lugar and Biden, but Chairman Wolf of the House Appropriations Committee, and he had set up the Djerejian Committee Report, on which I served, to put much more resources and better organization in this whole thing of global communications. And as I said in a meeting I had, I think about six weeks ago, with Condi Rice and Steve Hadley, this is not public diplomacy, it’s not soft power; this is core power. As General Petreus says, if we don’t change minds, we will lose. And the most absurdity in our strategy is our lack of priority. I'm assured by the White House after the election that they will move into this. We’ve got members of the Congress that are trying to move.

This gets back to the Mexican presentation of common perceptions, but I hate to harp back to the old times, as old-timers do, but we got diverse perceptions together at NATO with our net assessment. That’s how we changed the Congress. And what we would like to see is a group, and we’re going to get part of this with the Royal United Service Institute in London, with some partners in Europe, to sort out outside of NATO these perceptions because of the political time bombs.

When that’s done, we’ve got the agreement of Secretary General de Hoop Scheffer, and we’re going to take this to him so that he can set up something similar to this special consultative group connected to the Council, ordained by the Council, but outside of the Council that could carry this forward.

And, by the way, I think that might give then the confidence to my own government to move on a new strategic concept. My government’s afraid of that, because why? Because people are not together on the perceptions.

DR. ABSHIRE: I just wanted to conclude. We’re talking today about how you think strategic, it’s so hard to do around Washington, and I commend Bob Pfaltzgraff. I don’t want to date us, but going back to my days when I first knew you ... (inaudible), you were on the strategic mark and you’ve done a marvelous in pulling this conference together.