STRATEGIC

CODA
The Challenge of Leadership: Aligning Vision,
Values, Interests, and Resources
This volume—indeed, the entire Strategic Rethink project—has been
organized to answer the question, “What is America’s role in the world
of the early 21st century?” and to see if there is a guiding concept—
a “grand strategy”—that would give direction and coherence to our
diplomacy, defenses, and economic engagement in a turbulent world.
The other five volumes of the project, along with this overview
volume, have explored in considerable detail the many challenges and
policy choices of this new era in world affairs. We have outlined three
alternative strategic concepts, each of which is reflected in the contemporary
domestic political debate. Each has its own rationale for
meeting today’s diverse challenges; each has its own objectives and
priorities, resource and financial requirements, and degree of risk to
national interests.
It is clear that the complexity of contemporary international relations
does not lend itself to any simple strategic concept or statement.
In the early years of the Cold War, in George F. Kennan’s time, 1 the
existential security threat from the Soviet Union focused attention and
resources around the strategic concepts of containment and deterrence.
Amid vigorous policy debate and impelled by the security crises in
Berlin and Cuba, there developed a measure of coherence and alignment
between values (anticommunism and the institutions of the free
world), and countering the Soviet threat to U.S. and allied security (a
nuclear and conventional deterrent and a global network of alliances)
1 George F. Kennan was the State Department official who first proposed the policy of containment
in an anonymous Foreign Affairs article in 1947.
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