American Grand Strategy after Iraq

To the extent that a grand strategy can be discerned in the first year of the Obama Administration, its defining features are not a break from the past but continuity. As the President himself has analogized since taking office, crafting grand strategy is like parallel parking. He has only been able to make changes to grand strategy around the margins since a number of existing commitments limit his freedom of action. This article first identifies the structural determinants of grand strategy, pointing to the international distribution of power, American bureaucracy, and public as the key sources of strategic constraint and opportunity. It then shows how shifts in these factors—comparatively less U.S. power, an overstretched military organized around counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and an American public weary from an aggressive grand strategy—produced a shift in grand strategy that predated the 2008 election and that remains consistent with the current strategic setting. It is for these reasons that the 2008 “change” election has produced considerable continuity in American grand strategy.     

Applied Grand Strategy: Making Tough Choices in an Era of Limits and Constraint

This article hopes to contribute to the strategic content of U.S. foreign policy by offering a definition of grand strategy and case for reorienting U.S. policy around it. Rather than advocate a specific grand strategy—a matter still open for debate—the analysis concludes with a set of attributes to assess whether a proposed grand strategy constitutes a “good” grand strategy. It concludes by introducing the concept of an applied grand strategy approach, which may help to identify and assess the strategic implications of foreign policy choices.     

Dangerous Revisionism: On the Founders, ‘Neocons’ and the Importance of History

Debates regarding the Bush Administration's grand strategy began long before the forty-third president left office. A group of distinguished historians and political scientists have argued over the course of the last few years that the Administration's grand strategy did not represent a major break with historical precedent, as is sometimes argued, but continued the evangelical support for liberty that has always made the United States a “dangerous nation” to tyrants. Along the way, this revisionism creates straw men, and co-opts or redefines terms that are central to the traditional understanding of U.S. foreign policy. It also seems to misunderstand grand strategy itself, focusing almost entirely on continuity of ends while ignoring the rather glaring discontinuities in the ways that generations of U.S. presidents have chosen to pursue them. Overall, the revisionist project fails in both of its tasks, which are: To make the case that the Bush administration took actions of which the Founding Fathers would have understood and approved; and by implication, to justify the unnecessary, tragic war in Iraq.     

Beyond Primacy: Hegemony and ‘Security Addiction’ in U.S. Grand Strategy

The George W. Bush administration embraced a particularly aggressive counter-terrorist and counter-proliferation strategy after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The “Bush Doctrine,” as it became known, reflects a “primacist” approach to grand strategy that aims not only to eliminate global terrorist networks and cowl rogue state proliferators, but also to dissuade potential near-peer competitors from challenging the American-centred international system. Critics expect that this ambitious approach to strategic affairs has become unsustainable in the face of the growing quagmire in Iraq. But “security addiction” in the post-9/11 environment has instead created conditions for a bipartisan consensus on the overall direction, if not the particular modalities, of “primacist” grand strategies. Despite the unpopularity of the Bush administration and significant American commitments to Afghanistan and Iraq, it is highly unlikely that President Barack Obama will heed calls for military retrenchment or strategic restraint.     

Towards a Balanced and Sustainable Defense

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates defines “balance” as the critical principle of his defense strategy. This emphasizes achieving a balance between current conflicts and dangerous and more conventional wars in the future. But finding the right balance between types of war is only one form of balance. We also need to balance the nation's checkbook, and define the balance between what we spend on defense and what we can afford for the long term. Balance is not enough, our defense investments must be sustainable. Defense spending today, in inflation adjusted dollars, is at an all time high and exceeds Cold War levels. This has helped sustain the world's finest military, but the funding for this buildup and two wars has been borrowed from foreign sources. The accumulated debt and subsequent interest payments have reduced our ability to weather the current economic crisis and will drag on our economic recovery for years to come. The Obama administration must craft a grand strategy to get us out of the red—strategically and fiscally. This essay offers a set of strategy, structure and investment shifts to that end.     

The Information Confrontation with Radical Islam

Information has emerged as a critical—potentially the decisive—front in both the global war with violent radical Islam and the overlapping but so far largely unadmitted Cold War with nonviolent radical Islam. In fact, the information front is undoubtedly the closest thing that al Qaeda has to a strategic center of gravity. Unfortunately, America faces an extremely hostile information environment in the Middle East and al Qaeda has proven far more effective at getting its message across than has the United States. A more effective U.S. information strategy would be one that stresses three themes: a democratic critique of radical Islam; an Islamic critique of radical Islam; and a critique of the crisis in Middle Eastern civilization. While these will not necessarily make the U.S. or its policies more popular, they may drive a wedge between radical Islam and potential supporters.     

Grand Strategy: The Fundamental Considerations

Grand or national strategy has emerged as a critical issue in security studies. Adam Garfinkle recently opined that American grand strategy has died a silent death. Too much attention has been devoted to definitions, or debates over the utility of strategy. Not enough consideration has been given to the complexities of actually building a robust strategy amidst that effectively integrates all elements of national power within a complex bureaucracy. Oddly, the exclusion of politics contradicts our understanding of war and conflict. Likewise, not enough attention has been applied to the fundamental components of building a competitive strategy that can be sustained over time. This essay offers an introductory discussion of the basic considerations or components of national strategy.     

NGOs: A ‘New Class’ in International Relations

Nongovernmental organizations have attempted to take control of civil society, displacing traditional governing institutions. This serves the interests of the terrorists, warlords, and mafia dons, who benefit from weak central government, and hinders the West's ability to mobilize allies to participate in the war on terror. NGO leaders who are hostile to the nation-state itself seek to transform a voluntary system of participation in international organizations by sovereign member-states via a “power shift” to an unholy alliance of multinational corporations and NGOs. Since they do not possess the traditional sources of legitimacy enjoyed by nation-states, they seek to impose their will by financial or forceful means—for example, “sanctions” or “humanitarian intervention.” A new class of NGOs has thus emerged that is essentially opposed to the diplomatic, legal, and military measures required for dealing with civilizational conflict.     

American Grand Strategy in a World at Risk

If there is no single long-standing American grand strategy, one nonetheless sees through the course of U.S. history the tracks of a grand strategy. It started with the idea of a U.S. monopoly in the Western Hemisphere, along with balances of power in the chief theaters of the world; with belief in the primacy of sea and air power and the need for an economic system to support these; and the objective of transforming international politics. Since 9/11, even if the strategic hierarchy, intensity, and political basis have changed, the Bush administration has largely been continuing in this same project, with a sensible strategy but poorly considered tactics.     

钱文荣文英译文

A year of anti-terrorist war has passed since President Bush declared war on Afganistan on October 7,2001. In the course of the war, Bush's anti-terrorist strategic thinking has been enriched and perfected gradually as the war develops in greater depth and was finally formed as so-called "Bushism" ,which has become the guideline not only for the American war on anti-terrorism, but also for the Bush administration's external strategy. It is exerting profound impact on international politics and international relations.     

Hybrid Strategies: The American Experience

The United States has never followed only one grand strategy at a time. In this article, I develop the concept of “hybrid” grand strategies—strategies that vary by time and place, and combine the advantages (or disadvantages) of pure strategic archetypes such as containment, integration, regime change, bargaining, or non-intervention. I argue that hybrid strategies have been ubiquitous in American history, varying more by emphasis and degree than by absolute contrast. Moreover, U.S. hybrid strategies have often succeeded in accomplishing their major goals.     

Regime Change and War: Domestic Politics and the Escalation of the Ethiopia--Eritrea Conflict

The 1998-2000 war between Ethiopia and Eritrea seems to defy rationalist explanations. This paper contends that the escalation of the war, from an isolated border clash to the largest conventional war of the past decade, has its roots in the domestic politics of each of the two states. Quasi-democratisation in both countries created environments in which political elites were able to bolster their popular legitimacy by utilising nationalist and aggressive foreign policy rhetoric. The Eritrean leadership believed that a rapid escalation of the border clash to full-scale war would undermine domestic popular support and topple the Ethiopian People's Democratic Front (EPRDF) regime. War escalation had the opposite effect, strengthening the EPRDF domestically and provoking a massive Ethiopian retaliation. War thus served nation- and state-building goals in both countries. This paper provides a theory of the domestic political roots of international conflict in transitional regimes and applies this theory to explain the escalation of a localised border conflict into a highly destructive, full-scale war.     

Stumbling into the Future? The Indirect Approach and American Strategy

The United States has yet to reconcile its strategic culture to the realities of the post-9/11 era. In the absence of a consensus on grand strategy, America's military and civilian leadership is arguing that in a world of “persistent conflict,” America must exercise its power in increasingly indirect ways. This essay explores the current surge of interest in the so-called “indirect approach” and its possible relevance for the strategic environment of today and tomorrow. We briefly consider a strategic framework for an indirect approach, what true implementation would take, and the attendant risks of such a path. Pursuing a global indirect approach in the absence of such a framework could send America stumbling to the farthest corners of the globe only to harm her own strategic interests.     

Global Debate and the Limits of the Bush Doctrine

The "Bush Doctrine" asserting the right to preemptively attack states that support or harbor terrorists and pursue weapons of mass destruction (WMD) has bitterly divided world opinion. Many seemingly long-settled questions of international politics, especially involving the unilateral use of force, have been reopened. Although we are concerned about the implications of the Bush Doctrine, we do not agree that it fundamentally changes world politics as some have asserted. Instead, we argue that the global debate leading up to the war in Iraq signals widespread support for existing international norms. Most states continue to see force as a last resort, properly subject to multilateral control in all but the most urgent cases of imminent self-defense. The nature of American diplomatic maneuverings in the United Nations and the public statements of high-level officials suggest that even the United States continues to recognize the importance of these norms.     

Why States No Longer Declare War

Why have states stopped issuing declarations of war? Declaring war was a norm of international politics for millennia, but now appears to have exited states’ behavioral repertoires. I argue that the proliferation of codified jus in bello, the law of war governing belligerent conduct, has created disincentives for states to issue formal declarations of war. The increasing number of codified international laws that govern belligerent conduct during warfare has made complying with the laws of war extremely costly. One way for states to limit these costs is to avoid admitting they are in a formal state of war by refraining from declaring war. I test this claim, as well as others, using an original data set. I also discuss several cases of nineteenth and twentieth century wars that illustrate the logic of this argument.     

Chinese warfare and politics in the ancient East Asian international system,CA. 2700 B.C. to 722 B.C.

Ancient East Asia is the second oldest “protobellic area” and pristine state system of international relations within the global international system, after West Asia (ancient Near East). In a previous study Cioffi‐Revilla and Lai (1995) reported the first findings on the origins and evolution of war and politics in ancient China (Legendary, Xia [Hsia], Shang, and Western Zhou [Chou] periods), ca. 2700 B.C to 722 B.C In this paper we make public an expanded data set (N = 104 cases, 12 variables; version 2.0), explaining our sources, measurements, and data quality control procedures. The new data set will permit investigators to test hypotheses about warfare distributions, ethnic and protracted conflicts, time series, periodicity, system dynamics, and structural relationships (e.g., war‐polarity theories). This new long‐range data set should also promote a new stage in comparative analyses of the universal and particular properties of warfare and international systems, both cross‐polity and longitudinally.     

The failure of a liberal peace: Sri Lanka's counter-insurgency in global perspective

The victory by the Sri Lankan government over the LTTE in 2009 apparently ended over 25 years of civil war. However, the ramifications of the government's counter-insurgency go far beyond Sri Lanka's domestic politics. The military campaign against the LTTE poses a significant challenge to many of the liberal norms that inform contemporary models of international peace-building—the so-called ‘liberal peace’. This article suggests that Sri Lanka's attempts to justify a shift from peaceful conflict resolution to counter-insurgency relied on three main factors: the flawed nature of the peace process, which highlighted wider concerns about the mechanisms and principles of international peace processes; the increased influence of ‘Rising Powers’, particularly China, in global governance mechanisms, and their impact on international norms related to conflict management; and the use by the government of a discourse of counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency to limit international censure. The article concludes that the Sri Lankan case may suggest a growing contestation of international peace-building norms, and the emergence of a legitimated ‘illiberal peace’.     

AVOIDING TRAGEDY IN POWER POLITICS:

When and why do states adopt new grand strategies? According to a “neoclassical realist” model, changes in international conditions are the chief cause of long-term adjustments in grand strategy, while domestic political-military cultures help specify the precise grand strategies chosen by state officials. What results are outcomes that appear surprising or skewed from a realist perspective. I test the neoclassical realist model against the cases of u.s. strategic adjustment in 1918–1921 as well as 1945–1948 and find that the long-term trajectory of America's rise to world power is best explained by international pressures. The precise strategies chosen in each period, however, were heavily influenced by American political-military culture. The implication is that theoretically inclusive forms of realism can provide convincing explanations for changes in grand strategy; furthermore, states can remain somewhat “differentiated” in terms of their foreign policy behavior, for cultural reasons, and in spite of international pressures to the contrary.     

Two-Level Security Management and the Prospects for New Democracies: A Simulation Analysis

Most new democracies face serious internal, ethnic/separatist conflicts; in addition, some face international threats. The literature on the growth of democracy in the global system and its impact on world politics does not fully account for the dual threats all states must address in managing their security. Based on theoretical work by Starr (1994) which describes the "common logic" of conflict processes in war and revolution, we outline a model of how states respond to security threats from both external and internal sources. Using computer simulation, we analyze the model and evaluate the relative importance for state security of factors such as system size, numbers of democracies in the system, extraction/allocation strategy pursued by new democracies, and government legitimacy level. Our results show that new democracies thrive in systems that are predominantly democratic. Also, ally support can provide crucial resources for new democracies facing internal threats. Finally, "endangered" democracies can recover security by attempting to buy off domestic threats rather than deter them, and by improving legitimacy.     

U.S. Grand Strategy Following the George W. Bush Presidency

Debates over U.S. grand strategy have devoted a disproportionate level of attention to the War on Terror itself rather than the evolving strategic environment. Challenges including an impending shift in the balance of power, structural deficits, and divided public opinion will significantly impact the policy options available to government leaders, but they have not been adequately addressed. This article analyzes the options available for U.S. grand strategy following the George W. Bush presidency by relating key U.S. national interests with domestic and international policy constraints on the horizon. The analysis concludes that the United States must adopt a defensive grand strategy to rebuild popular consensus, to prevent further strain on the military, and to consolidate its gains in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, this strategy will require flexible coalitions, not formal international organizations, because of a significant divergence of security interests and capabilities with its European allies.