The 'Everything Everywhere All At Once' Strategy
There has always been “a lot happening in the world,” but it doesn’t follow that the U.S. has to deal with all of it.
The Biden administration released its delayed National Security Strategy yesterday. There were a few welcome improvements, including an explicit rejection of regime change via military intervention, but on the whole the document suffers from the overreaching, overstuffed nature of U.S. foreign policy and the administration’s refusal to set priorities. The president asserts at the beginning of the text, “There is nothing beyond our capacity.” That false conceit that the U.S. can and must do everything is the central flaw of the document and the “strategy” that it describes. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan endorsed what we might call the “everything everywhere all at once” approach in the speech he gave to lay out the “strategy”:
I know that National Security Strategies often get criticized for not setting priorities. And frankly, as the United States, we can’t be overly rigid about this. Because there’s a lot happening in the world, and we have got to deal with all of it. We have to keep our eye on more than one ball at one time.
There has always been “a lot happening in the world,” but it doesn’t follow that the U.S. has to deal with all of it or that the U.S. isn’t going to rate some things as being far more important than others. The U.S. has limited resources and doesn’t possess omniscience, so it has to make choices and tradeoffs about where it concentrates its energy and attention. The administration isn’t doing that here because they know that setting priorities will involve challenging and antagonizing entrenched interests somewhere, and as we have seen over the last eighteen months they would prefer to take the path of least resistance.