ABSTRACT
In 2011 the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) published a National Strategic Narrative. This was a 15-page document (“Mr Y” 2011) with an introduction by Anne Marie Slaughter, recently returned to Princeton after a stint as Director of Policy at the State Department. The author was described as “Mr Y,” although no attempt was made to hide the actual identity of the two authors. They were both serving officers, Navy Captain Wayne Porter and Marine Colonel Mark “Puck” Mykleby, who had been “strategic assistants” to the former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), Admiral Mike Mullen. The faux-anonymity was intentional. As was carefully explained the reference was to the famous 1947 “X” article of George Kennan (X 1947) that identified “containment” as the grand strategy for the developing cold war (see Kennan 1967). The narrative of containment had worked for some four decades but the claim behind this pamphlet was that there was now a need for something new. More implicit was the need for a replacement for the compelling but flawed narrative of a decade earlier. President Bush’s “Global War on Terror,” had become something of a liability even to his own administration. Attempts to replace it, with such alternatives as SAVE (Struggle against Violent Extremism)1 and “the Long War” (Office of the Secretary of Defense 2006), had been notably unsuccessful. Kennan’s anonymity as “X” was in 1947 a real requirement for a serving diplomat; “Mr Y” ’s was a gimmick. The fact that in both cases publication had official blessing was significant, as perhaps was that the first came from the State Department and the second from the Joint Chiefs of Staff (Ruff and Horn 2013). The methodology of the “Y” document reflected an appreciation that strong assertions of a new direction might have more credibility with a personal touch and without the leaden prose of a government statement agreed by means of an extensive inter-agency review. A narrative was seen as a way to meet the need to “attain the necessary consensus to craft and implement a national strategy in the absence of an existential threat” in a democracy. The plot was one that would “transcend our political divisions, orient us as a nation, and give us both a common direction and the confidence and commitment to get to our destination.”
