American Grand Strategy in the Age of Trump

Hal Brands

• Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780815732792
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Géopolitique

Looking beyond the headlines to address the enduring grand strategic questions facing the United States today

American foreign policy is in a state of upheaval. The rise of Donald Trump and his "America First" platform have created more uncertainty about America's role in the world than at any time in recent decades. From the South China Sea, to the Middle East, to the Baltics and Eastern Europe, the geopolitical challenges to U.S. power and influence seem increasingly severe—and America's responses to those challenges seem increasingly unsure. Questions that once had widely accepted answers are now up for debate. What role should the United States play in the world? Can, and should, America continue to pursue an engaged an assertive strategy in global affairs?

In this book, a leading scholar of grand strategy helps to make sense of the headlines and the upheaval by providing sharp yet nuanced assessments of the most critical issues in American grand strategy today. Hal Brands asks, and answers, such questions as: Has America really blundered aimlessly in the world since the end of the Cold War, or has its grand strategy actually been mostly sensible and effective? Is America in terminal decline, or can it maintain its edge in a harsher and more competitive environment? Did the Obama administration pursue a policy of disastrous retrenchment, or did it execute a shrewd grand strategy focused on maximizing U.S. power for the long term? Does Donald Trump's presidency mean that American internationalism is dead? What type of grand strategy might America pursue in the age of Trump and after? What would happen if the United States radically pulled back from the world, as many leading academics—and, at certain moments, the current president—have advocated? How much military power does America need in the current international environment?

Grappling with these kinds of issues is essential to understanding the state of America's foreign relations today and what path the country might take in the years ahead. At a time when American grand strategy often seems consumed by crisis, this collection of essays provides an invaluable guide to thinking about both the recent past and the future of America's role in the world.

ONE

THE PRETTY SUCCESSFUL SUPERPOWER

The post–Cold War era has now lasted over a quarter century—longer than the period between the world wars and more than half as long as the Cold War itself. This period, moreover, has been no quiet or restful time in American grand strategy. The United States did not withdraw from the world after the Soviet collapse, or even become a more “normal” country, as some observers advocated at the time. Rather, it recommitted itself to pursuing a globalism every bit as ambitious and energetic as during the bipolar era. Today, at a time when the international order is often thought to be reaching a new inflection point, when the debate over America’s global role is more heated than at any time since the early 1990s, and when the political rise and presidency of Donald Trump have injected great uncertainty into U.S. policy, it is worth considering what insights the experience of the post–Cold War era has to offer.

Unfortunately, discussions of America’s post–Cold War grand strategy are afflicted by three misconceptions that have become conventional wisdom among critics of U.S. foreign policy. The first is that, with the end of the Cold War, America broke dramatically with its previous grand strategic tradition and undertook a radically new approach to the world. The second is that America’s post–Cold War grand strategy has been ineffective and even quixotic—that Washington has essentially squandered the position of preeminence it attained with the Soviet collapse. The third is that this period of U.S. primacy is now over, and that American leaders have no choice but to retrench fundamentally as a result.¹

All three ideas are more myth than reality; they obscure more than they illuminate. The United States did not embrace a radically new grand strategy after the Cold War; it simply adapted its long-standing post–World War II grand strategy to a new era of American dominance. That endeavor was hardly fruitless or self-defeating; on balance, it has helped ensure that the post–Cold War system has been far more stable, more liberal, and more congenial to U.S. interests than many leading observers predicted as that era began. Finally, although Washington currently faces more—and more pressing—challenges to its international superiority than at any time since 1991, it is premature to conclude that the age of American primacy has passed. The time has not come for radical retrenchment of the sort proposed by many leading academics and championed in Trump’s campaign rhetoric. The proper course, rather, is to do what is necessary to sustain the grand strategy that America has pursued, more or less successfully, over the past quarter century.

NOT SO RADICAL

We often think of the end of the Cold War as a fundamental point of departure in America’s approach to the world.² Yet the grand strategy that successive administrations pursued after 1991 is best seen as the logical extension of an approach that originated decades before, following World War II. For U.S. officials, World War II demonstrated the basic interdependence of the world environment and the corresponding need to define national security in broad, indeed global, terms. Accordingly, the postwar decades saw a sustained American activism designed to mold the external environment—to construct an overarching international order congenial to America’s security as well as to its liberal values.

To this end, and throughout the postwar era, American officials consistently promoted an open, liberal economy that would foster U.S. and global prosperity, and they sought to preserve a peaceful international environment in which democracy and human rights could flourish. They worked to create stability and security in key regions from Europe to the Middle East to East Asia, to bind key countries in these areas to the United States both geopolitically and economically, and to prevent any hostile power from dominating these regions either by force or otherwise. They strove to maintain an overall global balance of power that favored America and its Western allies, and to contain and ultimately roll back the influence of aggressive authoritarian states that threatened these various objectives. In support of this basic design, U.S. policymakers undertook a range of global commitments, from security guarantees and forward military deployments to leadership of international trade pacts and institutions. These commitments were unprecedented in U.S. history, and they were designed to project American influence into key regions and issues around the world. During the Cold War, these endeavors helped to foster a thriving international order in the noncommunist world, and to contain—and ultimately defeat—the rival order Moscow sought to create in the socialist bloc.³

When the Cold War ended, then, U.S. officials did not have to go back to the drawing board or chart a radical new course in America’s approach to the world. They needed, rather, simply to adapt the country’s successful postwar grand strategy to a new age of U.S. and Western supremacy. The United States emerged from the Cold War with clear military, economic, and diplomatic primacy, and at the head of a Western coalition that commanded a vast majority of global power. In these circumstances, Washington effectively doubled down on the core objectives—and many of the specific initiatives—that comprised its postwar statecraft.

The long-standing goal of maintaining favorable balances of power both globally and within key regions, for instance, became one of locking in the remarkable U.S. and Western overmatch that the Soviet collapse had produced. The goal of fostering an environment in which democracy could flourish evolved to include more actively and directly promoting democratic institutions in countries around the globe. The goal of creating a robust liberal economy in the noncommunist world became one of promoting ever-deeper integration in the “first world,” while spreading market concepts and institutions into the former second and third worlds. And the goal of containing and ultimately defeating the Soviet Union became one of preventing any new threat—international terrorism, nuclear proliferation, the actions of aggressive “rogue states,” or the potential resurgence of tensions within key geopolitical regions such as Europe or East Asia—from rising to the level of the former Soviet menace or otherwise bringing the good times to an end.

In sum, America’s post–Cold War grand strategy might best be characterized as one of preserving the geopolitical primacy that America’s postwar statecraft had helped deliver, deepening and extending the liberal order that had taken hold in the West during the superpower competition, and suppressing those dangers, whether extant or prospective, that threatened to disrupt such a benign international environment. This strategy was first explicitly spelled out in the Pentagon’s 1992 Defense Planning Guidance, a document specifically intended to chart America’s course for decades to come. And despite the hysteria at the time, stimulated by the leak of an early version of the document, recent scholarship has emphasized that this approach was subsequently adopted—with some variation in focus, tone, and emphasis—by every post–Cold War administration that followed.⁴

This strategy, moreover, was pursued by concrete means and initiatives that represented continuity as much as change. For a quarter century, every post–Cold War administration remained committed to maintaining America’s globe-straddling military posture, so as to deter or defeat emerging challenges and provide the hard-power backbone of the unipolar international order. Similarly, every post–Cold War administration preserved and even extended America’s Cold War–era alliances and security commitments, in order to lock in stability and U.S. influence in key regions, to hedge against the reemergence of hostile great powers, and to provide a security envelope to enable additional countries (in eastern Europe, for example) to integrate into the liberal order. In fact, the first four post–Cold War leaders—George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama—all presided over successive expansions of NATO while affirming U.S. guarantees in other regions as well.

With respect to the global economy, each of these administrations pursued international economic integration through the institutionalization of liberal economic practices, the liberalization of global currency and capital flows, and the pursuit of free trade agreements, from NAFTA in the early 1990s to the Trans-Pacific Partnership under Obama. And all of these administrations continued to contain and confront aggressive actors that threatened the smooth functioning of the international system, from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to a perpetually provocative North Korea, through a mixture of economic, diplomatic, and military means. Finally, even in those cases where U.S. policy did become more assertive following the Cold War—as in the case of promoting democracy—that policy followed essential precedents set by Cold War–era initiatives from the Marshall Plan to the encouragement of liberal political reforms by the Carter and Reagan administrations.⁵ American statecraft from the early 1990s onward did not break sharply with the past; it simply built upon the foundations laid by a successful, multidecade postwar grand strategy.

Of course, none of this is to say that there was no change in American strategy after the Cold War or that there was perfect consistency across post–Cold War administrations. The U.S. government did certainly take on some new endeavors in the unipolar era, perhaps the most notable being the practice of humanitarian military intervention—which had generally been deemed an unaffordable luxury during the Cold War—in countries ranging from Somalia to Libya. After 9/11, moreover, the assertiveness with which the United States pursued many of its goals—from democracy promotion to counterterrorism and counterproliferation—jumped significantly, as manifested most clearly in the invasion of Iraq. And from George H. W. Bush to Barack Obama, U.S. presidential administrations differed on many things, from their rhetorical styles to their approaches to using military force.

Yet focusing on these differences obscures the basic continuity of purpose running through U.S. post–Cold War grand strategy, as well as the extent to which that grand strategy and many of its specific manifestations have been rooted in the broader tradition of postwar statecraft. In 1950, the authors of NSC-68 stated that efforts “to foster a world environment in which the American system can survive and flourish” constituted “a policy which we would probably pursue even if there were no Soviet threat.”⁶ The trajectory of American grand strategy after the Cold War, as well as during it, illustrates the truth of this statement.

NOT SO BAD AFTER ALL

A second myth regarding America’s post–Cold War grand strategy is that this strategy has proved quixotic and even “disastrous”—that Washington has wasted its remarkable primacy by tilting at geopolitical windmills.⁷ The same critique was often made by Donald Trump on his road to the White House in 2016.⁸ This verdict, of course, is influenced heavily by America’s long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, embroilments that consumed much American power but produced unsatisfying and, on occasion, remarkably counterproductive outcomes. And in the post–Cold War period, as in any other, it is easy to identify mistakes of omission and commission, failures of conception and implementation, examples of hubris and consequent blowback. From the humiliating failure of U.S. intervention in Somalia in 1993 to the fallout from an initially successful intervention in Libya in 2011, there is plenty to lament and criticize.

But if self-criticism is generally an admirable quality—and Americans are practiced from of old with the jeremiad—there is also a more positive, and more accurate, way of viewing the past quarter century. And that is to note that, for all its travails, American strategy has played a central role in making the post–Cold War international system more stable, more liberal, and more favorable to U.S. interests and ideals than it would otherwise have been—and certainly in bringing about a more benign international environment than many expert observers expected when the post–Cold War period began. Just as it is now widely accepted that America’s Cold War grand strategy was broadly successful despite the myriad frustrations and failures that occurred along the way (a catastrophically counterproductive war in Vietnam being the most significant), it is clear that, when it comes to shaping the international system, the overall record of America’s post–Cold War engagement has been fairly impressive.

To grasp this point, go back to some of the most prominent forecasts about the future of international politics made just after the Cold War’s end. There were certainly some sunny predictions, Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis being the most prominent.⁹ But there were also some very dark and pessimistic ones.

Most leading international relations theorists initially believed, for example, that the unipolarity America enjoyed following the superpower conflict was inherently unsustainable—that it would promptly cause renewed great-power balancing and the rise of countervailing coalitions.¹⁰ Many such observers—and also policymakers from around the world—worried that the end of the Cold War would lead not to a stable, liberal peace, but to vicious, multipolar instability. The argument was, in essence, that bipolarity had suppressed sources of violence and anarchy in international affairs; its collapse would unleash a flurry of destabilizing influences. A revanchist Japan and Germany, the emergence of febrile security competitions in Europe and East Asia, rampant nuclear proliferation and aggressive behavior in the world’s key strategic theaters: these were among the pernicious phenomena that leading analysts expected to materialize after bipolarity’s demise. “We will soon miss the Cold War,” John Mearsheimer famously warned. “The prospect of major crises, even wars … is likely to increase dramatically now that the Cold War is receding into history.”¹¹

Yet whatever the imperfections of the post–Cold War era (and there have been many), what is striking is that these dogs mostly did not bark. By most meaningful historical comparisons, the quarter century after the Cold War was a time of relative international peace, stability, and liberal progress. Until recently, for instance, great-power tensions remained remarkably low-key compared to the Cold War or to any period dating back to the Concert of Europe. Regions such as East Asia and Europe have been mostly free of interstate conflict, and German or Japanese revanchism has been conspicuously absent. Nuclear proliferation, both extant (North Korea) and prospective (Iran), remains a serious concern, but on the whole it has advanced much more slowly than many predicted. Several countries actually gave up their nuclear weapons or weapons programs in the early and mid-1990s, and the proliferation spirals that were feared in key regions have yet to materialize.

Meanwhile, democracy continued its advance after the Cold War, with the number of electoral democracies growing from 76 in 1990 to about 120 in the early 2000s.¹² Economic integration and the spread of free markets continued apace, and global living standards continued to rise in the aggregate, even as the gains of that prosperity were shared unequally. Not least, predictions of a rapid return to unstable multipolarity proved mistaken. Instead, the United States retained a vast economic and military lead over any competitor through the end of the millennium and beyond, and many of the world’s second- and third-tier powers generally chose to cast their lots with rather than against it.¹³ There remained opposition to American power, of course, some of it murderously violent, and some of it partially generated by America’s own policies. And from mass-casualty terrorism to ethnic violence, there also remained significant sources of tension and conflict. But relative to what many expected—and certainly relative to previous eras—the post–Cold War period wasn’t half bad.

There were numerous reasons for this, some of which had li...