The Princeton Project

In The Nation May 4, David Milne argued that the recent report prepared by the Princeton Project on National Security may one day have tremendous influence on foreign policy in the new Democratic administration --comparable to the influence often attributed to the 1997 neoconservative report by the Project for a New American Century.

future historians may identify [the Princeton Project] as a blueprint for President Obama's foreign policy--in the same way that the 1997 Project for the New American Century foretold the direction of the Bush administration.

I'm not sure that's true, but it's something to think about when preparing a new course on U.S. foreign policy.

Here's a good press synopsis of the report's view of US grand strategy:

The new strategy seeks to absorb the rising powers like China, India, Brazil and others into a law-based global economic and diplomatic structure that avoids open conflict by making them stakeholders within the system, and thus encouraged in their own interests to play by the rules...

The strategy they have devised, titled 'Liberty Under Law," seeks to chart of long-term course in the way that George F. Kennan in 1946 drafted the concept of "containment" that broadly defined U.S. policy in the Cold War for the next 45 years.

"The difference is that we soon came to realize that there is now no single threat as there was in 1946, so there can be no single theme like "containment," Anne-Marie Slaughter, dean of Princeton's Woodrow Wilson school of public and international affairs and one of the directors of the project, and a former president of the American Society for International Law.

"There are now a series of threats, including global terrorism, nuclear proliferation, pandemics, the rise of Asia, the energy crisis and threats emanating from the Middle East becoming too numerous to count," Slaughter added.

Slaughter is now the Director of Policy Planning at the State Department.

The elite press noted Obama's link to the Princeton Project some 18 months ago.

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