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Is America safer today than it was on Sept. 10, 2001? Is there a grand security strategy? To better understand these questions, AFJ assembled a round table of analysts from across the political spectrum. Richard Danzig, a Navy secretary in the Clinton administration, gives low marks to Bush-era security thinking, concluding it has made us less safe today. Johns Hopkins professor Francis Fukuyama criticizes overreactions to the Sept. 11 attacks and calls for a more a more balanced grand strategy that puts the terrorist threat in perspective and adjusts policies to take account of China’s rise. Harvard professor Stephen P. Rosen says the U.S. has national objectives, not a national strategy. And AEI fellow Tom Donnelly is confident that a grand strategy does indeed exist: The problem lies in articulating that strategy.

An Army Special Forces officer when he wrote this article, Lt. Col. Scott Morrison crystallizes the broad debate down to the specifics. His examination of the National Strategy for Combating Terrorism comes to the chilling conclusion that our understanding of the nature of our adversaries might be disastrously out of sync with reality.