Two weeks ago the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) released a report entitled “Extending American Power: Strategies to Expand U.S. Engagement in a Competitive World Order.” It could just as easily have been entitled “What Hillary Should Do When She Gets Elected, and Why She Should Hire Us to Do It.” The report’s authors run the gamut from interventionist Republican neocons like Robert Kagan to Democratic hawks like Michele Fluornoy, the co-founder of CNAS and a possible candidate for Secretary of Defense in a Hillary Clinton administration. There is not a fresh or independent voice in the lot. As Stephen Walt rightly points out in his take-down of the report in Foreign Policy, this is at best a status quo document, and at worst a doubling down on the failed policies of the past two decades. And why should we expect otherwise? After all, as Walt notes, “the report’s signatories helped create many of the problems they now seek to fix, so you’d hardly expect them to cast a critical eye on their own handiwork.”
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