Download or read book Whither Command of the Commons? written by Sameer Lalwani and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 31 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Command of the commons is a critical feature of U.S. grand strategy, and as American grand strategy has expanded, so too has the U.S. approach towards commanding the commons. For much of the last 30 years, the United States has pursued a grand strategy of 'primacy, ' particularly after the Cold War. American economic and military preeminence preserves the peace, it is believed, by dissuading potential threats from challenging U.S. interests and simultaneously reassuring alliance partners they will be defended. Primacy thus calls for the United States to retain its dominant economic and military position relative to other states for as long as possible and mandates intensive U.S. involvement in international affairs to maintain the status quo. This paper offers an alternative approach to control, one we term 'security of the commons.' Under a security of the commons approach, the United States would maintain sufficient command of the commons to defeat military threats to U.S. interests and ensure the provision of global public goods such as trade and commerce. But it would recognize that America's current commitments and force capabilities far exceed what is necessary to achieve these goals. The United States therefore can scale down the reach of its international activities and force presence without jeopardizing the key objectives of the command of the commons. It can do so because the United States faces few unequivocal challenges to its command of the commons. Moreover, by pursuing a security of the commons approach, it can actually increase U.S. national security while lowering its costs. This is the case because under the current control approach, the U.S. tendency to over-provide the military forces to retain command can trigger 'spirals of insecurity' and breed the very challenges to command of the commons it seeks to prevent. By contrast, a security of commons approach offers the possibility that by doing less, the United States can encourage other regional powers to do more in protecting the commons, thereby discouraging free-riding. Yet, at the same time, the United States would retain more than ample military capability to defend the commons should a credible threat emerge by scaling up in critical regions, thus acting as a security guarantor of last resort. This paper proceeds in eight parts. Following this introduction, in part two, we define the scope of our analysis. Third, we offer a brief analysis of the origins of U.S. command. Fourth, we discuss the present state of U.S. strategy towards the commons and the military enablers of the approach. This section also discusses the costs of the current U.S. approach and the reasons the United States may want to change this strategy. Fifth, we contrast the control of the commons approach with our proposed 'security of the commons' strategy. Sixth we examine the regions of the world where U.S. command of the commons is believed to be under stress to evaluate what would best maintain U.S. command. The seventh section then discusses some policy shifts required to follow a security of the commons approach. We conclude by highlighting additional implications of this argument.