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Ogden Journal
Utah

Utah has ‘strategic competence,’ and the U.S. should take note

By Mariah WheelerNovember 15, 2020
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UTAH – Since the very first days that intrepid pioneers entered the Salt Lake Valley with virtually nothing but the clothes on their backs and an indomitable spirit, global engagement has been part and parcel of Utah’s DNA.

On a hot summer day shortly after arriving, those early leaders climbed Ensign Peak, an otherwise undistinguished hill less than a mile from where the Utah State Capitol building now stands. They looked out across the barren valley and declared their intent to build a city that would have a leavening effect on the rest of the world and to which “all the nations of the earth” would come. They then climbed back down the hill and went to work, forging a vision that has shaped generations of Utahns who first worked to make Utah the “Crossroads of the West” and are now equally committed to making Utah the “Crossroads of the World.”

“Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World” deploys anecdotes from the co-authors’ time serving in President Trump’s White House to call for improved strategic competence. Foundational to achieving that goal is a deliberate effort to replace strategic narcissism with strategic empathy. Strategic empathy is apparent in Utah’s tremendous success in calibrating its global engagement to advance the interests of the state and its people, companies and institutions.

As America grapples with a quadruple trauma at home — the pandemic, a recession, outrage over unequal treatment under the law and vitriolic political divisions that threatened our democratic institutions — there is much we can learn from how Utah companies, institutions and individuals endeavor to understand challenges and opportunities from the perspective of others to avoid the self-referential view of the world that has undermined U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Cold War.

So, what is strategic narcissism, and how does it weaken strategic competence? It is the tendency to define the world and other actors solely in relation to ourselves and our own actions. It creates fatal flaws in foreign policies and business plans alike due to a disregard for the agency and influence that others exert over the future. Strategic narcissism leads to wishful thinking that produces strategies based on what the purveyor prefers rather than what the situation demands.

The end of the Cold War and decisive victory against Saddam Hussein’s military in the Gulf War ushered in an era of over optimism concerning an anticipated “new world order.” Many assumed that the arc of history had guaranteed the primacy of free and open societies over closed, authoritarian systems. Over-optimism in the 1990s was a set up for strategic shocks and disappointments that came in the form of the mass murder attacks of 9-11, the unanticipated length and difficulty of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the financial crisis of 2008-2009.

In recent years, strategic narcissism contributed to extreme pessimism about American power and increasingly loud voices for America to disengage from the world, with many arguing that the world’s problems are merely reactions to the United States. Paradoxically, the pessimistic orthodoxy of retrenchment today and the over-optimism of the 1990s share the same fundamental flaw, the tendency to define the world only in relation to the United States and assume that U.S. decisions and actions are the principal determinants of the future.

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Mariah Wheeler

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