THE UNITED States cannot afford to maintain its current strategy, planning for both traditional war and the entire spectrum of stability operations, without making it a top priority to double the current size of its armed forces. Since such an expansion of our military is unlikely, the incoming administration and Congress must seek to reduce the scope of our global commitments, redefine the War on Terror, and give the country a strategy that it can pay for and that its armed forces can implement at sustainable force levels.
Until the creeping democracy agenda of the Clinton years and the outright universalism of the neoconservative program, generations of American leaders implicitly recognized that the key to national security is regional stability, and that it rests not so much on shared democratic values but on legitimate regimes, regardless of whether they are based on democratic franchise, historical accident or simply sufficient strength to impose order.
The crucial step on the road to redefining the core requirements for the U.S. military must be rethinking the assumptions that have informed U.S. post-Cold War strategy under both Democratic and Republican administrations. We should not view American values as the immediate driver of policy. The promotion of democratic universalism in the past two decades-especially the upsurge in the regime-change strategy of the "neoconservative moment"-has put an unsustainable strain on the U.S. military.
