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Forging a coherent grand strategy is difficult. This is particularly true in the United States, where the separation of powers and the lack of direct security threats create discord about how to manage foreign policy. Nonetheless, in the wake of the Cold War, a grand strategy consensus arrived in Washington around “primacy” or “liberal hegemony.” Both Democratic and Republican leaders see US military power as indispensable to stability everywhere. US military alliances, they agree, secure the peace between foreign powers, and armed interventions are needed occasionally to halt civil conflict abroad.
Partisanship masks this consensus. Political combat over issues like the Iran nuclear deal or Obama’s “red line” in Syria can give the impression that the parties greatly differ on how to deliver national security. But the distinction is one of degree, not kind. Republicans complained about Obama’s foreign policy because they wanted more of it—more energetic efforts to aid Syrian rebels, more troops in Afghanistan for longer, more Pentagon spending, and more vigorous efforts to demonstrate US fidelity to detering Putin through NATO. Most prominent intellectuals in Washington reflect these views. News reports, in turn, largely mirror the strategic consensus and the contours of elite discourse.
The consensus is unearned. There are a variety of feasible explanations for primacy’s dominance in Washington, but neither American foreign policy performance over the past twenty-five years nor its intellectual superiority justify continued pursuit of primacy. Indeed, the obvious failures of US policy, especially in the Middle East, have spurred pointed challenges to the consensus. Growing numbers of experts, especially outside the beltway, argue that America’s grand strategy is dangerous, costly, and counterproductive.
The case for restraint rests on three central arguments. First, the United States faces limited threats to its national security thanks to its geographic, economic, and military advantages. Military interventions, permanent alliances, and other military endeavors abroad are thus rarely needed to secure the nation. Second, the United States would derive significant benefits from a foreign policy involving fewer military engagements and commitments. Wars are costly and dangerous, and tend to produce unintended negative effects. Alliances entailing garrisons and defense commitments are costly to maintain, induce recklessness among some allies, and risk entangling the United States in avoidable conflict. Third, a grand strategy of restraint aligns with the values of the classical liberal tradition of the nation’s founding. A more restrained foreign policy would help constrain excess government power and protect civil liberties at home.
A healthy debate now rages between advocates of restraint and the intellectual defenders of primacy and liberal hegemony. The outcome of the debate matters a great deal. Primacists and restrainers provide very different answers to key questions in American foreign policy, such as: Under what circumstances should the US use military force? Should the United States maintain alliances established during the Cold War? How should the United States deal with the rise of China? What should the size and composition of the military be?
The start of a new presidency is a good time to take stock of American grand strategy and foreign policy. The case for restraint draws on a vast array of political science for its core arguments, and there are various works making the general case, including Barry Posen’s recent book (Ravenal 1973, Tucker and Hendrickson 1992, Nordlinger 1995, Gholz, Press, and Sapolsky 1997, Sapolsky, Friedman, Gholz, and Press 2009, Posen 2014). Still, the full brief has never been assembled in one place. This volume’s purpose is to combine the most recent critiques of primacy with positive arguments in favor of restraint and analysis about how to implement it.
Alternative grand strategies
Restraint is a grand strategy. Grand strategies are theories about how states should secure themselves against threats (Posen 1986). Strategy is logic for choices among options; it prioritizes resources. Strategy is “grand” when it aims to guide other state security choices.
Grand strategy is inevitable in that it is present whenever states have security policies informed by causal ideas, which is virtually always. On the other hand, grand strategy is never fully realized in practice. Various organizations, interests, and goals within states means that grand strategies compete for dominance. That is especially true in democracies with powers shared by different branches of government (Jervis 1998).
Grand strategies are distinct from paradigms like liberalism, constructivism, and realism. Paradigms are descriptive explanations of how politics works. Grand strategies are prescriptive. They typically use descriptive ideas about politics, often gleaned from paradigms, to make suggestions about what policy should be.
Today, there is one dominant grand strategy in US politics, which is primacy, also known as liberal hegemony.1 In Washington, among government officials and most foreign policy analysts, primacy is presented with limited theoretical backbone. The United States’ military endeavors are crucial to global stability, we are told, without much underlying causal logic explaining how that works exactly (Campbell and Flournoy 2007, Kagan 2012). A more fulsome statement of primacy’s logic requires undergirding that argument with the works of its academic proponents.
That approach suggests that primacy has two components. One is geopolitical in its focus on the balance of power among states and trade. The other is liberal because it is concerned with the internal conditions of foreign states and the spread of liberal values, especially democracy.2
Primacy’s geopolitical component holds that US military power is crucial to the maintenance of “the global order,” which refers generally to peace among great powers, international commerce, and state cooperation through international organizations (Ikenberry 2011). Here primacy builds on hegemonic stability theory, a theory centering on the claim that the global order is a public good. As such, nations will try to enjoy it without contribution—free-riding—causing the order to atrophy, unless there is a state—the hegemon—that compels other states to protect it (Kindleberger 1973, Gilpin 1987). Primacy says that the United States provides this hegemonic leadership chiefly through its military commitments and deployments, which protect allies and their trade routes. Under US protection, states can worry less about their security and forgo balancing against rivals by forming alliances and increasing military capacity. That makes their rivals more secure and less prone to arming in response (Brooks, Ikenberry, and Wohlforth 2012). Also, because they fear attack less, states can trade freely without worrying much about enriching potential rivals (Krasner 1976). US leaders can also essentially trade protection for concessions, compelling allies to cut better trade deals and to be supportive of the global economic system (Brooks, Ikenberry, and Wohlforth 2012).
Without alliances backed by US military forces, three threatening results might occur, according to primacy. First, some aggression could go unchecked, as smaller states capitulate to stronger ones, either by conquest or by alliance formation. Powerful states like Russia or China would thus develop greater ability to directly attack or coerce the United States. Second, absent US protection, states might balance each other more—arming more heavily or allying to prevent aggression. Primacy sees such balancing as unstable because it produces security dilemmas—self-reinforcing dynamics of mutual alarm—which lead to war or tension disruptive to commerce (Brooks, Ikenberry, and Wohlforth 2012). Those risks, primacy reasons, are more costly to the United States than maintaining the alliances that mitigate them (Egel et al. 2016). Third, primacy says to worry that would-be allies deprived of US protection will become strong and independent and thus less inclined to accept US leadership, or will even become outright rivals to the United States (Principal Deputy Under Secretary of Defense 1992).
Twenty years ago, one could accurately describe primacy using only the geopolitical logic above (Posen and Ross 1996). Primacy’s advocates focused on interstate relations, especially among big powers. Today, primacy has fused with what was a distinct grand strategy: cooperative engagement, sometimes called liberal internationalism, which centers on the need for multilateral cooperation to promote peace, democratic government, and free trade (Posen and Ross 1996).
The fusion was a long process but turned on two relatively recent developments. First, Democratic foreign policy elites grew more enamored of US military predominance. The difficulty of organizing multilateral actions in the Balkans and the failure to intervene in Rwanda boosted their enthusiasm for unilateral US action. The Cold War’s end and the swift victory in the Gulf War encouraged their enthusiasm about the effectiveness of US military power. And with the Soviet Union gone, the possible uses for US force multiplied and overseas commitments needed new justifications. As a result, Democratic foreign policy elites became less enthralled with international institutions, more hawkish, and prone to celebrating the transformative virtues of US military power. As Clinton’s secretary of state Madeleine Albright said in 1998, “If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.”3
Second, the right became more liberal in its foreign policy thinking, particularly after the September 11, 2001, attacks. Republicans long had among their ranks those that shared the Wilsonian idea (named after President Woodrow Wilson) that the United States should use force not just to secure its citizens and interests but also as a means to redeem humanity by giving it liberal government (McDougall 1997). That thinking grew popular among Republicans as neoconservatives gained power starting in the 1970s. It bloomed into full flower after the 9/11 attacks. Much of the right saw the cause as disorder and illiberal governments abroad and the solution in forceful reordering and democratization (Schmidt and Williams 2008, Monten 2005, Desch 2007).
So Democrats grew more comfortable with the virtues of unilateral US military power as Republicans got more willing to use force to liberalize states’ internal politics. As result, they joined in supporting a more muscular version of primacy (Posen 2014). Primacy’s backers on the left and right still disagree on some things, especially whether international endorsement is a hindrance or a useful way to legitimize war. But they agree on far more. That includes the geopolitical component of primacy discussed above and an additional liberal component, which has three tenets.
First, states’ internal conditions can be inherently dangerous to distant powers like the United States. State failure and civil war create wider danger by nurturing terrorists, destabilizing neighboring states, and resulting in losing track of weapons. States lacking democracy and the rule of law are inherently threatening because they are more aggressive, especially toward democracies, and prone to collapse.
Second, security is highly interdependent—insecurity anywhere is a threat everywhere (Posen and Ross 1996). Modern communications and transport technologies mean that people, resentments, and arms of growing deadliness travel easily across borders and oceans, so that geographic barriers aid defense less than they once did. Because security is interdependent, distinctions between moral and security goals collapse (Rice 2008, Slaughter 2011). Protecting civilians from mass killing is not just a humanitarian good but a way to limit threats from failed states. Installing democracy, even by force, is not just a good deed but a way to make the United States safer.
Third, the United States and its partners have considerable ability to mitigate these dangers through military intervention. That includes multilateral state-building missions, capacity-building through military training, and airstrikes that threaten or decapitate the leadership of nefarious regimes, insurgencies, or terrorist organizations. The unhappy US experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan have shaken foreign policymakers’ belief in the effectiveness of intensive state-building efforts but not their general conviction that US security requires US military efforts to reshape states’ internal politics (Friedman and Logan 2012).
The geopolitical and liberal components of primacy create a capacious idea of US interests and thus threats. Primacy’s advocates worry about the credibility of the many promises that the United States makes to defend allies. They fear proliferation of weapons technology, especially ...
