Wachenheim Center for Peace and Security

Insurgency-related conflicts often start without warning and can last over a decade, making the pre-crisis and early crisis phases crucial for U.S. policymakers seeking to prevent national security threats and humanitarian disasters from emerging. Effective responses involve a complex set of legal authorities and international frameworks and require the sustained support of the American public and local communities.

When a coup occurs abroad, the early hours of the crisis are most crucial for preserving and promoting U.S. interests—whether countering terrorism, checking adversaries‘ regional influence, upholding human rights norms, or maintaining diplomatic and economic relationships. Policy planners should therefore prepare for the unexpected.

When a U.S. partner state faces a hybrid attack by an unknown aggressor, the United States should draw on various available response options to protect its treaty commitments, credibility, and commercial interests.

When armed conflict disrupts a critical maritime trade route, the United States can monitor, contain, or escalate the situation economically or militarily.

The United States lacks a rigorous, routinized approach to managing foreign policy crises. The Wachenheim Center for Peace and Security has developed a set of Crisis Response Playbooks and a Crisis Management Checklist to serve as quick-reference guides for policy planners during the immediate pre-crisis and active crisis phases, when bandwidth is limited and decisions are most consequential. The playbooks are designed to support practitioners with structured protocols and provide recommendations for managing recurring types of crises so that policymakers facing the next challenge will not have to start from a blank slate.

Suzanne Maloney, vice president and director of the Brookings Institution’s Foreign Policy Program, recommends that the United States reconsider its assumptions around eventual leadership change in Tehran, revive regime accountability efforts, prepare for opportunistic escalation by proxy groups, and ready itself for renewed nuclear diplomacy.

CFR International Affairs Fellow in National Security Roxanna Vigil argues that the United States should engage early with Colombia’s next administration to signal support for full implementation of the 2016 Peace Accords and provide targeted assistance.

Assumptions about how a potential conflict between the United States and China over Taiwan would unfold should urgently be revisited. Such a war, far from being insulated, would likely draw in additional powers, expand geographically, and escalate vertically.

The United States faces growing dangers of nuclear escalation, a new arms race, and proliferation. This report recommends an improved strategy for “optimal deterrence” and a path to rebuilding relationships with allies without allowing them to dictate U.S. force requirements.