Beyond the Hawk Consensus: Toward a Balanced Foreign Policy

This report examines the rise and decades-old reign of a pervasive foreign policy consensus which holds that military strength is the preeminent form of national power and why it continues to hold presidential candidates, who fear the perceived political risks, hostage to a faulty and counterproductive doctrine that makes America less safe.

The result: A lack of productive dialogue about the emerging risks we face, including radical Islam, failed and failing states, countries incompletely integrated into a globalizing world, rogue regimes intent on acquiring nuclear weapons; and policies that "remain stuck in the language, concepts and mindsets of a passing era as we grope our way through the national security challenges of an emerging one."

"Beyond the Hawk Consensus: Toward a Balanced Foreign Policy," finds that, in the shadow of the "domineering and tyrannical gospel" known as the "Hawk Consensus," the discussion of national security in American politics is badly distorted by rewarding rhetoric that is aggressive and belligerent; that the national security challenges of the new century require a wiser response; and that America needs a new national security strategy that balances military and non-military elements of national power.

Michael J. Mazarr is a professor of national security strategy at the U.S. National War College in Washington,D.C., and an adjunct fellow at the American Security Project. He is the author of Unmodern Men in the Modern World: Radical Islam, Terrorism, and the War on Modernity (Cambridge, 2007). The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect the policy or position of the U.S. Department of Defense.