Oversight Hearing on US Security Strategy

November 6, 2007

The Oversight Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs is currently holding a hearing, "Six Years Later (Part II): 'Smart Power' and the U.S. Strategy for Security in a Post-9/11 World." Witnesses are Richard L. Armitage, President George W. Bush's first Deputy Secretary of State, and Joseph S. Nye Jr., Ph.D. Former Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs and Chairman of the National Intelligence Council in the Clinton Administration. CSIS convened a high-level, bipartisan commission chaired by Armitage and Nye that included national leaders in government, elective office, the military, NGOs, media, academia and the private sector to produce a report on "smart power."

Watch the hearing live via committee webcast or on C Span 3.

Former Deputy Secretary of State Armitage gives opening testimony:

Armitage: "Mr. Chairman, as you mentioned, after 9/11 we started exporting something that was foreign to us, it was strange, we were exporting our fear and our anger, showing a sort of snarling face to the world rather than the more traditional exports -- that Ms. McCollum spoke about -- of hope, of optimism and opportunity. Now we, on the commission, believe at the core of the problem is that we have made the war on terror or the central component of our global organization. To be sure terrorism is real, and it's a growing threat. But the fact of the matter remains that absent access to WMD the terrorists do not pose an existential threat to our way of life. They can hurt us, they have hurt us, they will try to hurt us again but they can't change our way of life. However, we can change our way of life by the way we react to them. We react through the excessive use of force, or rejection of policies that are important to our friends and to our allies, we appear to put ourselves above the international legal norms -- that encourages rather than counters terrorist recruitment overseas."

Subcommittee Chairman John Tierney questions the witnesses:

Armitage: "I'm not arguing, none of us in this commission would argue, that terrorism isn't a real and -- as I said -- a growing threat but absent WMD is not an existential threat, it is not like fascism was in the thirties and forties, it wasn't like communism was throughout the Cold War. This is a different phenomenon we ought to be able to do two things at once."

Joseph Nye: "I agree with that and I don't think that one should read the commission recommendation here as saying we should let down our vigilance in the struggle against terrorism. What we've seen over the twentieth century is that terrorist movements generally tend to last a generation; we're not done with this. But what we've also seen is that they burned themselves out over time if you don't overreact to them. Terrorism it is a little bit like jujitsu, you have a weak player who can only defeat a large player by using the strength of the large player against himself. So what we do to ourselves is often more important than what they do go us directly and that means that we have the very careful how we react."