3. The Foreign Affairs and National Security Strategies

We need to devise correct and clear strategies to bring to fruition our stated objectives regarding foreign affairs and national security. Based on that, we have to define policies in greater detail and identify tactics. The strategies we need to devise in this regard are presented as follows.

3.1 Devoting the prime focus to activities at home

The objective of our foreign and national security policy is the realization of our vision of democracy and development and creating an enabling environment to this end. Our vision for development and the building of a democratic order can succeed only if we examine seriously our country's objective reality and decide on ways of achieving our goals and moving in this direction, in the framework of globalization. We ourselves need to decide what to do, how to do it and when to promote democratization and development, as foreign prescriptions cannot lead us to successful outcomes. We can succeed in our endeavours only so long as we design our own path, by forging a common national understanding and consensus and doing what needs to be done as a united people.

Our foreign and national security policy can create favorable conditions for our vision of democracy and development if a correct path of democracy and development is charted and is able to be implemented by the people. With an idealistic vision where the people are just bystanders, a foreign and national security policy has no relevance. Focusing on serious work within the country to bring about development and democracy is the priority of a successful foreign relations and national security endeavour. We also need to focus on the efforts at the domestic front. Being preoccupied with external activities at the expense of what needs to be done at home risks turning into a futile exercise.

If we ourselves chart our course of democracy and development, engaging the entire people and resources and obtaining requisite help, we ourselves can identify the elements that can work for us. We can accurately define how best and to what effect we can utilize external assistance. External support is necessary only to fill in the gaps, and to identify what is needed. We have to see what we can do by ourselves. This will enable us to make effective use of the prevailing international situation. The absence of such an approach would hobble the foreign relations and national security policy and limit it only to mobilizing external support, whether needed or not. Our priority should therefore be to do our homework properly. We can succeed in ensuring that external conditions would be favourable and yield positive results if we ourselves carry out successful efforts to build democracy and promote development.

In sum, because the success of development and democracy - the goals of our foreign and national security policy - rest mainly on our own efforts; because we can correctly identify areas of need for foreign aid and accordingly utilize it only if we can do our best in this direction; because the international community is encouraged to create favourable circumstances only if they are convinced of our practical commitment, our foreign and national security policy will succeed, depending mainly on our own domestic efforts. We need therefore to focus our efforts on the domestic front.

If our priority is to rely on external assistance, we will be concerned mainly with attempting to meet external demands and requirements. Our approach will be limited to obtaining foreign aid and our policy designed for just that purpose. This approach is unlikely to result in our receiving satisfactory levels of aid. Furthermore, whatever aid has been obtained will have been donor-driven and not consistent with our interests. If however, our priority were based on using our own means first, we would be compelled to do our homework (i.e., identify what we need), and our foreign and national security policy would take into account what we can do for ourselves. The rationale for that policy would therefore rest on realizing our own objectives and vision thereby yielding positive results.

Therefore the strategy we use to reach our foreign relations and national security objectives is based on the "domestic first, external second" approach. The idea is to focus on what can be done by ourselves, and to meet the need of our domestic requirements.