Report from the Blue-Ribbon Princeton Project

The Princeton Project on National Security released its final report last week, entitled Forging a World of Liberty Under Law: U.S. National Security in the 21st Century. Headed up by Anne-Marie Slaughter and John Ikenberry, the project involved more than 400 participants, the list of which reads like a who’s who of the new (mostly Democrat) foreign policy establishment. The recommendations are eminently sensible (though there appears not to be a single reference to international law as such in the entire report), including the following:

Building a liberal order does not mean placing our faith in any one institution, such as the United Nations, or even a set of institutions. The U.S. commitment at the heart of liberal order should be to work with other nations, to constrain our own power in order to reassure others, and to be able to demand the same restraint of them. That commitment to multilateralism can be realized through a wide range of formal and informal multilateral tools: alliances, institutions, bilateral relations, treaties, public and private networks, rules, norms, and shared expectations – all of which provide multiple arenas for cooperation and action.

Finding ways to link these different types of institutions, arrangements, mechanisms, and networks is central to the construction of a liberal order. They must be linked in ways that avoid centralization and hierarchy and encourage flexibility and innovation. The habits of cooperation and stable expectations that comprise an order ultimately reside in the minds and movements of individuals – individuals who can only benefit from being aware of one another’s knowledge and activity in the service of common goals.

The best way to create a liberal international order in the information age is to link as many individuals and institutions together as possible through networks – forming a world wide web of cooperation. Formal treaty-based institutions need the eyes and ears that can be provided by issue-based networks of national officials; those networks, in turn, can often benefit by creating one or more central nodes that provide a secretariat function. And networks of corporate and non-governmental actors can be connected as well. Taken together, a networked order can provide the global collaboration we need while preserving the national freedom we want.

One would have to assume that the report is aimed at the next administration rather than this one, since it’s unlikely that President Bush is going to be taking advice from these quarters.

One might also wonder about the function of these sorts of blue-ribbon efforts in a decentralized world. Policy influence was so much more easily effected where the targets where institutionally concentrated. It’s no longer just a matter of getting to a few top-level officials in the USG; now one has to bring a polyglot group into line. The report self-consciously aims to supply the collective equivalent of George Kennan’s early Cold War “X” article in Foreign Affairs. Surely if any group can pull that off, it will be this one. But is it really possible these days to compose a single policy document that will corral decisionmakers toward a common objective?