The Security Forum Culminates Year-Round Work on U.S. Strategy

Nicholas Burns presented the Aspen Security Forum as the gathering where the Aspen Strategy Group’s continuing work on foreign policy, defense, military affairs, and homeland security comes together. The Forum itself would run for three and a half days, beginning with a panel on the global economy and U.S.-China relations. But Burns’s opening frame was institutional: this was not a standalone meeting, but one of four major recurring gatherings through which the group organizes its work.

That model combines different kinds of engagement rather than treating “security” as one topic. Two weeks before the Forum, the group had convened the Army in the same building for two or three days of off-the-record discussion with leading journalists and academics. A different U.S. armed-service branch participates each year, Burns said, to consider its future. He described the arrangement as valuable both to the military and to the Strategy Group.

The following week, Burns, Brent Scowcroft, John Deutch, and the wider Strategy Group were scheduled to meet at the Aspen Institute’s main campus for three or four days on a single question: U.S.-China relations. Burns defined that subject as America’s future in East Asia—not only its dealings with China, but its relationships with Japan, South Korea, and other allies.

A third line of work, the Aspen Homeland Security Group, runs through the fall, winter, and spring under Mickey Edwards and Jane Harman. Burns called that effort “intimately linked” to the group’s other work. The structure he described connects service-level military planning, sustained attention to homeland security, and concentrated consideration of U.S. strategy in Asia, before bringing participants together at the Forum.

Burns used his acknowledgments to identify the people he regarded as responsible for sustaining that work. He called Scowcroft an original member of the Aspen Strategy Group and its “best friend,” crediting him with keeping the group funded and its focus “tight and strong.” Burns named Chuck Allen, the group’s director, as the “true intellectual leader” of both the Aspen Strategy Group and the Security Forum. Deutch, another co-chair, was part of the group scheduled to take up U.S.-China relations the following week.

The emphasis matters because Burns’s account was not of a forum assembled only for a few days in Aspen. Its annual calendar rests on continuing relationships: with military services willing to take part in closed-door discussions, with participants returning for focused deliberation on a single strategic question, and with a homeland-security group working across much of the year.

Burns also credited the staff that turns that calendar into a gathering. He said Nick Danforth had built this particular Forum over two years while working virtually from Washington, D.C., and thanked deputy director Jonathon Price and colleagues working from the Aspen Strategy Group’s DuPont Circle office and on site. The acknowledgments were brief, but they underscored the practical condition of the model: recurring high-level discussions require sustained organization between the public moments when they culminate.