Gary Hart is a member of the PSA Advisory Board, president of Hart International, Ltd. and chairman of the American Security Project. He served in the U.S. Senate from 1975 until 1987. This article originally appeared in The Hill on January 18th, 2012 and can be found here.

As an American with more than average interest and experience in Russia, it is a mystery to me why, unlike virtually every other country on earth, U.S. policy has tended to be so dependent on the personal relationship between the respective leaders.

This was especially true of Presidents Clinton, with the late Boris Yeltsin, and George W. Bush, with then-President Vladimir Putin (“I looked the man in the eye.”). This mystery of Russian relations is not totally confined to U.S. leaders: Remember Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s famous report to President George H.W. Bush on Mikhail Gorbachev as “a man we can do business with.” A humorist might call it the vodka syndrome, except Clinton was never known as a drinker and, of course, the second President Bush had sworn off alcohol.

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This article was written by two Fall 2011 Fellows in PSA’s Congressional Fellowship Program.  All CFP articles are produced by bipartisan groups of Democrat and Republican Fellows that were challenged to develop opinion pieces that reach consensus on critical national security and foreign affairs issues.

Cyber-based threats against information infrastructures in the United States have generated an increasing concern for national security. According to a Congressional Research Service report, these emerging threats consist of cyber terrorism, debilitating U.S. command over the electromagnetic spectrum, facilitation of terrorist operations, cyber crimes involving theft of intellectual property, patent violations, or copyright laws, and identity theft. These threats also involve unauthorized probing of tests that target a computer’s configuration and its system defenses and, in some instances, the unauthorized viewing, copying, and extraction of data files. The low expense of access to the internet combined with the ability to operate anonymously, are strong key factors that make information operations enticing for those who are unable to combat the U.S. in conventional warfare.  Understanding these real threats against our nation enforces the need for a shift in prioritization and funding to address any future cyber security threats in all capacities.

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Lee Hamilton, Co-Chair of the PSA Advisory Board, is director of the Center on Congress at Indiana University. He was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from the Indianna for 34 years. The original article appeared in the South Bend Tribune and can be found here.

There’s a Better Way to Gauge Congress

I suspect that most members of Congress will want to forget the year that just ended.

The institution that symbolizes our democracy finished 2011 plumbing depths of unpopularity it has never experienced before. Its low approval ratings set records — suggesting, as Gallup put it, “that 2011 will be remembered as the year in which the American public lost much of any remaining faith in the men and women they elect and send off to Washington to represent them.”

The poor jobs picture, the lurching from one brink-of-disaster deadline to the next, the polarization that keeps the parties from working together, the widespread sense that Congress is so dysfunctional it cannot meet the nation’s challenges — all play a role.
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Lee Hamilton is a Co-Chair of Partnership for a Secure America’s Advisory Board, Director for the Center of Congress at Indiana University, and also served in Congress for 34 years. This article originally appeared in the Taunton Daily Gazette and can be found here.

The failure of the congressional Supercommittee to reach an agreement on reducing the deficit was not just bad fiscal news. It was a significant failure of political leadership.

Not only did the committee move us one step closer to a genuine fiscal crisis, but also it put the dysfunction of Congress on full display. At a time of great economic stress, its members lost sight of what failure would cost the country in lost economic growth and foregone job creation. They did not fully appreciate that inaction ensures grave economic risks. Even worse, they sent a signal to the American people — who overwhelmingly wanted to believe that common ground is still possible in a divided age — that partisan politics is stronger than the national interest. Failure robbed Americans of hope at a time when they desperately needed some.

Where do we go from here? We did learn some important lessons from the Supercommittee’s many weeks of work.

An obvious one is how difficult it will be getting our fiscal house in order. The Supercommittee proved that deficit reduction is hard on the substance and even harder on the politics. The fact that its members could not salvage a formal agreement from their discussions, unlike special committees in the past, makes clear that it will take a supreme effort of political will to move the nation past this point. Though even in failure, the committee could have done much more to educate the American public on the hard choices necessary to get our fiscal house in order.
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PSA Advisory Board Co-Chair Lee Hamilton discusses why Americans have come to regard Congress so poorly, arguing that this mood is a result of a dysfunctional Washington mired in partisanship, secrecy, and a lack of accountability. This op-ed originally appeared in The Star Press.

The latest New York Times/CBS News poll had bad news for Congress, whose support is down to single digits. But it had even worse news for the Republic. Americans’ distrust of government, the pollsters found, is “at its highest level ever.”

A lot of this ire is focused on Congress, which an overwhelming majority believe is incapable of acting on behalf of the nation as a whole, but it has come to take in all of Washington. The poll’s findings can be summed up in the words of one respondent, a small-businesswoman from Arizona. “Probably the government in Washington could be trusted at one time,” she told the Times, “but now it seems like it’s all a game of who wins rather than what’s best for the people.”

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On Monday, September 19^th, Partnership for a Secure America along with the Stanley Foundation and the Hudson Institute hosted Ambassador Linton Brooks in a series of events at the Howard H. Baker Jr. Center, which focused on the nuclear challenges facing the United States. Ambassador Brooks, currently a senior analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, was the lead US negotiator on the first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I) and also served as Director of Arms Control for the National Security Council and as an administrator for the National Nuclear Security Administration.

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Last week, the highest level extra-governmental group ever convened to address any public policy challenge met in Washington, D.C. to announce the launch of their new organization – the United States Energy Security Council – formed to advance American energy security. This bipartisan group of 20 influential former cabinet officials, military personnel, retired Senators, and prominent business leaders, includes three PSA Advisory Board members – Robert C. McFarlane, former National Security Advisor, John Lehman, former Secretary of the Navy, and Gary Hart, former Senator (D – Colo.).

At their launch event, USESC founders emphasized the importance of finding solutions to the nation’s current energy dilemma and described the risk associated with America’s reliance on oil as a sole transportation fuel. Across the bipartisan panel, members agreed that, in the interest of national and economic security, America must pursue strategies to diversify the fuel sources used in transportation – eliminating the decades old monopoly that oil has enjoyed in the U.S. transportation sector and diminishing the strategic importance of this resource. McFarlane was certain to point out, however, that the group is not “anti-oil,” but more accurately “pro-fuel choice.”

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William S. Cohen, former Secretary of Defense under Clinton and PSA Advisory Board member, recently wrote an opinion article in Politico discussing the use of drones in modern warfare. Cohen has always supported bipartisan action on issues of national security and as a member of Congress (R-Maine) took a nonpartisan stance on security policy. Since leaving the pentagon, Cohen has penned numerous articles and books and even appeared on the Daily Show. In his most recent article, Cohen focuses on the critical role drones have played in Afghanistan and their place at the center of counter-insurgency vs. counter-terrorism debate.

Among the many issues that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta must ponder in the coming months will likely be whether to recommend shifting U.S. strategy in Afghanistan from counterinsurgency to counterterrorism.

Some critics argue that our current policy of deploying large numbers of ground troops puts more of our men and women at risk for questionable gain and even encourages more Afghans to join the Taliban, fighting against what they claim is an invasion force. Yet the recent gains in clearing out Taliban strongholds and helping to build schools, medical facilities and other civic institutions argue, instead, for staying the course for several more years.

Former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill famously noted that “Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing…after they have exhausted all other possibilities,” and the recent debt debate was no different. Proving true to form, Congress passed the Budget Control Act of 2011 at the zero-hour. The bill raises the debt ceiling by $2.4 trillion, cuts spending by more than $900 billion over 10 years, and establishes a 12-member bipartisan House-Senate “supercommittee” to recommend up to an additional $1.5 trillion in long-term savings before the end of the year.

The rest of the world, though, didn’t like the soap opera we just went through. Foreign reaction was less than congratulatory after the last-minute agreement and focused on the intractable American political process. Following the passage of the bill, the Economist criticized all sides, calling the debt debate “kabuki-like.” Chinese credit ratings agency Dagong Global “blamed a shaky and untrustworthy political system” as it downgraded US debt. And the Russian press noted that “the obvious inability to reach an agreement that was demonstrated by political forces in the US has had an equally damaging effect on the country… The image of the country as a responsible borrower has suffered most.”

Now that the US has been on the brink of default, an unthinkable proposition until recently, it has changed the way that the rest of the world views us. There is, of course, griping that to some extent has allowed others to take a break from dealing with their own problems to criticize ours. Yet, dismissing foreign viewpoints entirely ignores the importance of taking these viewpoints into account as we burnish our global image, especially if how we go about finding solutions to our long-term challenges is starting to affect the American brand nearly as much as what solutions we find. (more…)

Partnership for a Secure America mourns the passing of Warren Christopher, the Secretary of State during President Bill Clinton’s first term and an esteemed member of PSA’s Advisory Board. From the hostage crisis during the Carter administration to the ethnic conflict in the Balkans during the Clinton administration, Christopher was a major presence in U.S. foreign policy for nearly four decades. Known for his patient and diligent style of diplomacy, President Carter called him “the best public servant I ever knew.”

Mr. Christopher also served as Deputy Attorney General and as Deputy Secretary of State, and he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1981. PSA is honored to have had Mr. Christopher as a signatory on eleven of PSA’s past statements, and joins his family in celebrating his distinguished career in public service.