STRATEGIC

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Strategic Choices for a Turbulent World: In Pursuit of Security and Opportunity
cise to be summarized by probabilities.” 7 Uncertainty is an intractable
problem for a nation that spends more than $600 billion per year to
defend against security threats, actual and anticipated.
How can the U.S. government improve its ability to make better
decisions in an uncertain and perhaps incoherent environment? Three
policymaking approaches are particularly relevant in highly uncertain
environments and can be improved: anticipation, deterrence, and resilience.
We must anticipate what we can, and act on this foresight; rethink
how to deter those threats we can anticipate; and build resilience to
withstand and rebound from those attacks, surprises, or calamities that
we cannot anticipate or deter. The United States needs a comprehensive
strategy that includes investments in anticipation (to manage risk, allocate
resources wisely, avoid or minimize shocks, prevent conflicts, and
prepare for foreseeable outcomes), deterrence (to prevent politico-military
competition from escalating into war), and resilience (to withstand
shocks that were not prevented or perhaps preventable). The United States
could also benefit from working on a number of elements of the anticipation
equation, including understanding surprise; improving intelligence
collection, analysis, and absorption; creating bureaucratic mechanisms
to combat cognitive bias and integrate thinking about low-probability,
high-consequence problems into the policymaking process; distinguishing
between long-term problems and low-urgency problems; and using
decision aids, including teaming up humans and computers.
Many of the assumptions that animated U.S. foreign policy in the
Cold War period no longer apply. The instruments of warfare and the
character of economic competition have evolved. So have the strategic
orientations of Russia and China. These changes require a reexamination,
and in a fundamental sense, a (re)learning of what it means to
deter. One of the foremost, if not most pressing, reasons for such a
7 Ian Goldin and Mike Mariathasan, The Butterfly Defect: How Globalization Creates Systemic
Risks, and What to Do About It, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, May 11,
2014, p. 25. In the early 20th century, the economist John Maynard Keynes and the statistician
Frank Knight were among the first to formally distinguish between risk, which can be
quantified, and uncertainty, which cannot. In recent years, the term deep uncertainty has been
used for information that is too imprecise to be summarized with confidence or expressed by
quantified probabilities.