Since the election, President Obama has focused the debate about the fiscal cliff on taxes. This tactical political positioning is putting at risk the strategic objective of a pro-growth budget package to reduce U.S. debt. Unless the president pushes to slow the growth of spending, he will fail to strike a deal, undermine U.S. growth prospects and ultimately erode America's safety-net programs. The country's global standing would falter, too, because the president would not have led in demonstrating America's "governability."

On November 6 Americans will vote for their next commander-in-chief, the first of the duties assigned to the president by the constitution. The security outlook he will face is in flux. There are plans for a “rebalancing” of military attention to the Asia Pacific region, new tensions over old islands in the western Pacific, and even speculation over a novel “Air-Sea” operational concept, which would integrate air force and navy capabilities to deter – and, if need be, to counter – precision missiles and other weapons that could threaten America’s projection of power across oceans.

Robert B. Zoellick, former president of the World Bank and senior fellow at the Belfer Center, delivered an address at the JFK Jr. Forum October 3 titled “Economics & Security in American foreign Policy: Back to the Future?”  In his presentation, Zoellick offered a strategic perspective on the connection between economics and security, drawing on “an earlier American foreign policy tradition to offer a revision to the standard post-World War II history.”

Robert B. Zoellick, outgoing president of the World Bank, will join Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs in July as a senior fellow.  Zoellick, whose five-year term at the Bank ends June 30, is a former Belfer Center research fellow and an alumnus of the Kennedy School. He has also been named a distinguished visiting fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C.