National security tests for the next president.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.
• Position: Defense Watch

* Republican presidential candidates have blasted the Obama White House for its handling of foreign crises and for weakening the military. But few, if any, potential nominees have put forth any concrete policy prescriptions.

Talk is cheap on the campaign trail, especially on issues like military strategy and defense planning. Over the coming months, presidential hopefuls will continue to badger the current administration for making the nation vulnerable, alienating allies and emboldening enemies. Meanwhile, members of the Washington foreign policy establishment--as they generally do in advance of every presidential election--are looking to bring a dose of sanity into the debate.

Russian aggression in Ukraine; the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria; and the expansion of other violent extremist groups in the Middle East, South Asia and Africa have sparked worries that current American responses are inadequate, although no consensus has yet emerged around any alternative.

Panic and hysteria aside, the world is not falling apart and none of the current foreign crises are beyond the United States' ability to manage, says James Dobbins, former U.S. ambassador and leader of a RAND Corp. project called "Choices for America in a Turbulent World."

For the next president, the challenge will be setting priorities and balancing resources at a time of declining military budgets, suggests Dobbins, who along with a group of RAND analysts will be part of a cadre of think tanks that will seek to inject some level-headedness into the political discourse on national security.

Despite mounting chaos in the Middle East that has fed wider, more-exaggerated anxieties, on balance, predictions of disaster are overstated, he says. "Prior eras have seen much greater shifts in the global power balance than those underway today."

America will come under pressure to make strategic foreign policy choices on multiple fronts, Dobbins says. "The problems the United States faces today are not greater in scale than those it mastered in the past." Dealing with future crises, he says, will require efforts comparable to those made in decades past.

Chaos in the Middle East, Russian intervention in neighboring states, Chinese assertiveness in the South China Sea, climate change and a decline in U.S. military readiness have raised fresh questions about how America envisions its role in the world.

"Many feel that the pace of technological change is quickening, that the...