Grand Strategy after the Vietnam War

The perceived history of the Vietnam War profoundly influenced American discussions on grand strategy during the postwar period. The two largest schools of thought, one favoring confrontation with the Soviet Union and the other favoring engagement, drew lessons from the war based upon differing historical interpretations and used those lessons as support beams in constructing grand strategy. Compelling world events during the Carter presidency caused only a few individuals to shift positions in the debate, but one of those individuals was Jimmy Carter himself. Subsequent discoveries by historians indicate that the confrontation school understood the war's history and the postwar world better than did the engagement school and consequently crafted a superior grand strategy. The post-Vietnam debate contains numerous parallels to present-day discussions of grand strategy and offers a variety of lessons salient to contemporary strategic formulation.     

Getting to the Goal in Professional Military Education

Professional Military Education (PME) has been under fire from a broad range of critics for a variety of reasons, including credibility, intellectual rigor and administrative mismanagement. But PME provides an invaluable learning and growth experience to those beyond the select few of America's fighting forces who attend elite civilian graduate programs. The practitioner and security oriented curriculum, and inter-service and civilian mix of seminar students, is not available elsewhere. Therefore, PME must be fixed, not abandoned as some have suggested. A first step in fixing the problem is to identify gaps between what is intended by Congress and military leadership and what is being executed. This article proposes and outlines a study to identify those gaps.     

China's ‘Peaceful Rise’ Enters Turbulence

This article seeks to place recent developments in China in a larger context through three arguments. First, Chinese military policy has indeed made a major turning over the past decade; second, this turning is based on a fragile and unrealistic strategy that is already eliciting counterreactions that will make achievement of its apparent goals increasingly difficult. Finally, this strategy's failure will present China with unwelcome choices about how far to take her use of force. The “rise” of China is now encountering turbulence that may undo it.     

The Invincible Wilsonian Matrix: Universal Human Rights Once Again

A conservative or realist approach has little appeal in the present debate over American foreign policy. In the twentieth century, according to George F. Kennan, the United States succumbed to “the evils of utopian enthusiasms.” In recent years, this worldview has been associated most closely with the neoconservatives, but even the Clinton administration leaned in the same direction. Crusading moralism has been the recurrent theme of America's self-image as a global power. Whether or not neoconservatives and liberals today are really dedicated to the same democratic political culture as the one that Wilson idealized, a recognizable Wilsonian manner of conceptualizing international relations has come to dominate American politics, reflected in a shared rejection of any foreign policy that is not based on the temporal salvation of humanity. Yet many Wilsonians seem unable to imagine that one can be “moral” without trying to make everyone resemble one's self.     

Restoring Deterrence

While the strategy of deterrence has faced considerable criticism since September 11, it needs to be reexamined. This article addresses serious challenges to the deterrence strategy. It also considers the deterrence strategy as it relates to states such as Iraq, North Korea, Iran and others. Ultimately, it argues that deterrence is a security policy offering a way forward for the United States that is not only more effective because more tailored, but is also more moral than its alternatives.     

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.     

The Rise and Demise of the Two-State Paradigm

The conventional wisdom recommends the establishment of a Palestinian state to bring about an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (the two-state paradigm). This article first reviews the confluence of domestic and international factors that led to the resurgence of the two-state paradigm. Next, it concludes that a peaceful outcome in accordance with this paradigm is unlikely to emerge in the near future: the two national movements, the Palestinian and the Zionist, are not close to a historic compromise, and the Palestinians are not able to build a state. Finally, the article analyzes the policy options available to policymakers. State-building is unlikely to succeed. Similarly, a binational state, where Arabs and Jews live peacefully together is not within reach. A regional approach that advocates a greater role for Arab states in Palestinian affairs has better chances of stabilizing the situation than the previous options. Finally, in the absence of a solution, the most realistic policy appears to be conflict management.     

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.