Our critical mission
The Robert M. Gates Global Policy Center (the Center) will tackle difficult national security issues, using focused and detailed research to convene leaders from all parties around nonpartisan solutions. The Center will convene two Gates Forums (Forums) per year. Unlike some conferences that only produce papers and studies, the output of each Forum will include actionable proposals to revise policy, organizational structures, or legislation. The Forum will focus on issues where improved data and analysis can move the ball forward, but with an eye toward selecting topics and policy solutions that can attract widespread support. The resulting action plan will inform subsequent advocacy efforts of the Center and its governing board to spur uptake of the recommendations with congressional and executive branch leaders.
Throughout our history, the greatest threats the Republic has faced have been solved with bipartisan solutions. As important as the solutions that will be forged is a return to the bipartisanship that has been key to U.S. world leadership. It is our hope that the spirit of bipartisanship promoted by the Robert M. Gates Global Policy Center will be replicated by lawmakers addressing our most pressing domestic issues.
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Robert M. Gates
Founder and Chairman of the Board
Our Vision
The need for reimagined solutions to national security issues
At the end of the Cold War, the United States stood at the pinnacle of global power – a country that dominated the world militarily, economically, politically, and culturally. Bipartisan policy development allowed the U.S. to develop a range of national security tools informed by our past successes and failures – tools that were strategically applied to accomplish a clear goal. The result was the dismantlement of the USSR – the first empire to fall without a major war. Throughout the Cold War, the U.S. was effective in its ability to conduct a symphony of power across multiple domains.
Today, our tools of national security are unbalanced, disorganized, and misused. A fortified military has become the focus of many contemporary leaders – even a keystone of political platforms - while our country’s global efforts in strategic communication, diplomacy, development finance, and leadership in multilateral forums have been left to atrophy. Our dependence on military force and our willingness to sacrifice life and treasure through the binary use of this instrument is too often the norm, not the exception. The reality is this: the non-military foreign policy tools we have today have not evolved to match contemporary risks, and our ability to reimagine and deploy new tactics is stalled in political discord.
The current state of our national security tools and the known threats to our global position should alarm us and spur us into action. Our near-peer competitors, China and Russia, are accelerating their influence through instruments we have failed to deploy systematically. Transboundary issues such as global health (Covid-19), climate change, leadership within international organizations (WHO, NATO, and IMF) and new information and communication technologies are real and present, and our national polarization only serves to increase our vulnerability. This national persona has eroded the trust and confidence of our allies, and signals weakness to our adversaries. Increasingly, our inability to forge non-partisan policy only adds headwinds to our already treacherous walk on the global security tightrope. Now, more than ever, our country needs national security policies that build on ideas from both parties to maintain America’s leading position in the world. We need a mechanism to gather the best minds around key topics of national security — broadly defined — with the sole intention of delivering actionable plans that have the best shot at gaining bipartisan approval. We need a policy organization dedicated to delivering more solutions and fewer papers bound for the confines of academic journals. We need to come together, in urgency, to tackle the most consequential global and national security issues of our time.
The Center and Forums aim to reinvigorate bipartisan national security policy development by tackling head-on the problems that have systemically plagued our contemporary global relations. With Secretary Gates at the helm, the Center will accelerate the policy development process and forge nonpartisan plans — leaning into Dr. Gates’ half-century of public service and work with both Republican and Democratic leaders.
Enabled by its proximity to the campus and resources of William & Mary (W&M), Secretary Gates’ alma mater, the Center and Forums will leverage the university’s immediacy to Washington and its research infrastructure while operating as an independent non-profit — allowing for active participation in advocacy. The Center will be directed by a Board of Governors who will advise the selection of topics in need of study and lead strategies to carry the Forum’s policy plans to Washington D.C.
