Recommendations: What We Should Do About the Gap

Reconceptualize security policy for a highly polarized society. International relations theories assume a national consensus, or at least a consensus to allow elite experts to take the lead on security goals and approaches. Those conditions simply don’t obtain; the experience of the pandemic suggests that even very serious challenges are unlikely to produce them in the near future. Our survey analysis highlights increasing public polarization over foreign as well as domestic policy issues. Policymakers and theorists would be well served by rigorous and realistic attention to what few shared foundations can be teased out, and how they might be maintained against polarization. For the broad swath of policy that will remain outside consensus, questions of durability and achievability against a polarized backdrop are now fundamental to policymaking.

Develop paradigms to talk about new national security issues. We will need to develop new language, frameworks, and policy solutions to address these new security issues, or those dimensions of them that we decide truly constitute security issues. This may involve both new security tools and the choice to work with some issues in a non-securitized framework.

Reevaluate international institutions. Today, the international order consists largely of twentieth-century international institutions that are not equipped to respond to the complex twenty-first-century challenges that this report identifies. International institutions have always been the sites of competition among the major powers, but they were designed for a world in which military, political, and economic power were overwhelmingly held by states—and disproportionately held by the United States and its allies. With power redistributed, but the institutions still in their old forms, COVID-19 confirms the last decade’s experience that it has become dauntingly difficult to achieve transformative results. We are no longer looking at adjusting institutions at the margins—rather, this moment calls for a more systematic approach to reforming international institutions. Researchers and practitioners must drive conversations about what a renovated international system might look like, and which international institutions need to be jettisoned or revamped to confront this new set of security and foreign policy challenges.

Encourage democratic participation in foreign policymaking: The changing nature of our national security challenges suggests not just a rethink of what national security is, but who it is for. Since the post-World War II period and the creation of the modern liberal world order, American politicians have typically insisted that “partisan politics stops at the water’s edge,” while political scientists have dismissed the impact of public opinion on foreign policy as largely irrelevant. At the same time, advocacy coalitions have recently emerged around foreign policy issues like U.S. support for the war in Yemen and efforts to combat climate change. We should encourage such efforts to engage Americans in conversations about reimagining national security.

Expand the discussion about what it means to integrate domestic and foreign policy. This report notes that increasingly, these critical security challenges require an integrated foreign and domestic policy approach. But lip service to this idea has so far failed to grapple with challenges: Does this mean reconfiguring institutions such as the Foreign Service or the National Security Council? Retraining professionals to be able to take on and manage integrated portfolios? Remaking oversight, including that of Congress? Redefining or jettisoning the construct of foreign policy?