Amid compounding concerns about an increasingly threatening China, many Americans wonder how our government left them so catastrophically vulnerable to a pharmaceutical embargo by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) or how they’ve remained so defenseless against the greatest theft of personal information and intellectual property in history. They question how it’s possible that the world’s greatest military and our Homeland Security officials can leave our electrical grid so defenseless against an electro-magnetic pulse, a method of attack that could fry most electrical circuits in the nation, erase nearly all data on every hard drive, and cause the loss of an estimated 100 million lives.
The answer lies in the failure of the U.S. government to develop an integrated national security strategy. Integrated strategy uses a “whole-of-government” approach that leverages all the instruments of power, including material instruments such as military strength, trade and finance, and non-material instruments such as public diplomacy, humanitarian aid and counter-influence.
Each of these is like an instrument …