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Pentagon in the Middle as Congress Returns to Partisan Budget Battle
Kate Blakeley, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments who previously worked at the Congressional Research Service, said Democrats are in a good negotiating position. “Democrats have some leverage, because you need eight Democrats to pass this spending bill in the Senate,” she said. “The Democrats are keeping mum, but they would have a hard time not passing a relatively clean bill that keeps non-defense discretionary spending at the [2011 Budget Control Act] level, without deep cuts. Democrats might also accept more OCO money than the $5 billion in the House appropriations bill if that’s the price of a good, clean bill.”
In the News
Carried Away: The Inside Story of How the Carl Vinson’s Canceled Port Visit Sparked a Global Crisis
It would have been a quick and easy fix if the military had simply sent out a press release detailing Vinson’s plans and clarifying the initial release, said Brian Clark, retired Navy officer who was a senior aide to former Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jon Greenert and analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. A flawed narrative might have been stopped in its tracks and prevented rattling a region on the brink of conflict, he said. “It’s really shocking that they let this go for nearly two weeks without trying to correct the record,” he said.
Analysis
U.S. Grand Strategy in an Age of Nationalism: Fortress America and its Alternatives
America is an exceptional nation, but not when it comes to the wave of nationalism sweeping the globe. Across multiple continents, leaders and polities are pushing back against globalization and integration; they are reasserting national sovereignty as a bulwark against international tumult. In the United States, this nationalist resurgence has manifested in a sharp and potentially existential challenge to the internationalist project that has animated U.S. grand strategy since World War II.
In the News
If DoD Gets Its Money Next Week, It Will Know How to Spend It in a Hurry
The five months DoD has to spend its newly appropriated funds really won’t be that hard, Katherine Blakeley, a research fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments told Federal News Radio. “They’ve been anticipating this [money] for literally over a year at this point. They submitted the fiscal 2017 request way back in February of 2016, we are not almost seven months through the fiscal year. They’ve had a lot of time to think and to plan and to prepare,” Blakeley said. “They have a really good sense of where all this funding is going to go.”
In the News
Bold, Unpredictable Foreign Policy Lifts Trump, but Has Risks
“It was aimed at both our allies and adversaries, and it appears to have worked, to some degree,” said Eric S. Edelman, a former undersecretary of defense for policy during George W. Bush’s administration who now teaches at Johns Hopkins University. But Mr. Edelman drew some critical distinctions between the two presidents. Nixon’s “madman” act generally masked a calculated strategy, which is not yet evident in Mr. Trump’s approach. Nixon’s national-security team was better coordinated than Mr. Trump’s, at least so far. And even in Nixon’s case, the madman strategy worked better later in his presidency, when he and his aides were more seasoned.
In the News
James Mattis Defends Use of ‘Mother of All Bombs’ in Afghanistan
“The Trump team certainly has opened the aperture,” former Pentagon adviser Hal Brands, now at Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies in the District, told The Washington Times in March