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The United States must deploy all its instruments of power, not just military might, as it seeks to lead the world in the future while drained physically and financially after a dozen years of war, Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel said.
The Pentagon chief planned to tell a leading Washington think tank on Tuesday that while many Americans, including elected leaders, are becoming skeptical about foreign entanglements, the United States would err if it retreated from the world.
"Looking inward is just as deadly a trap as hubris, and we must avoid both in pursuing a successful foreign policy in the 21st century," Hagel said in remarks prepared for delivery to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
"No other nation has the will, the power, the capacity and the network of alliances to lead the international community. However, sustaining our leadership will increasingly depend not only on the extent of our great power, but an appreciation of its limits and a wise deployment of our influence," according to excerpts of his speech released by the Pentagon.
Hagel's remarks come as the Defence Department is winding down a 12-year-old war in Afghanistan and is struggling to meet demands to cut nearly a trillion dollars from its budgets over the next decade.
The Budget cuts have eroded military training and readiness, and Pentagon officials have warned that spending reductions would eventually force department to reassess the global military strategy it outlined two years ago.
A senior defence official said the speech was the second by Hagel, who took office early this year, to deal with how the defence Department must adapt to "a changing strategic and fiscal landscape."
The official said Hagel would use the speech to lay out the six priorities he thinks are critical to the military as it tries to adapt to the financial challenges.
With the end of the Iraq war and the winding down of the Afghanistan conflict, Hagel said President Barack Obama has been moving the United States off a "perpetual war-footing" in which "priorities, policies and relationships around the world" were dominated by the response to the September 11, 2001, attacks.
"Our success ultimately depends not on any one instrument of power. It depends on all of them. And it depends not only on how well we maintain and fund all of our instruments of power - but how well they are balanced and integrated with each other," he said in the prepared remarks.
