Crafting a strategy and a foreign policy is harder for America than for other great powers because the United States has defined its interest as a healthy world order, not just as security for the homeland, surrounding waters, and the geographical locations that impinge on both. This expansive definition dates back to the 1940s, when American strategists built a liberal international order in Western Europe and Northeast Asia. They chose this path because isolationism had proven to be a catastrophe and they did not want to simply replace Imperial Britain as a master of realpolitik—because that too had failed and it offended the sensibilities of the American people. If the United States could not avoid the world by isolating itself, it would have to transform it. The United States would have to stand for something and against something—and on a global scale. And what it stood for would have to provide real benefits for the United States and the world. One key top-secret American national security document of the day summed up the strategic goal as to “foster a world environment in which the American system can survive and flourish,” which, in turn, necessitates “our positive participation in the world community.”1
U.S. strategists elected to create an international order whose institutions, policies, and values were liberal in character. Liberal in this context draws from the classical definition—distinct from its partisan meaning—which describes a system that safeguards rights and prevents tyrannical rule. The liberal international order had three components.2 On the security side, it entailed forward deployment of U.S. forces and creating alliances with the dual purpose of containing the Soviet Union and ending security competition between the major powers in the Western bloc. On the economic side, it consisted of an open global economy and the creation of cooperative international financial institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The third component was that in exchange for the cooperation and support of other countries, the United States would restrain itself: America would work within the framework of the order it created, and provide its friends and allies, even those that were relatively small and weak, with real influence. This order was tremendously successful. It did not just outlast the Soviet Union; it created an engine of prosperity and innovation that powered the Western bloc forward while political cooperation between the allies surged to new and historically unprecedented heights.
But such a broad American definition of interests and order also had extreme effects on U.S. foreign policy. During the Cold War, the United States had to convince the Soviet Union that it would respond to a conventional attack on Germany with nuclear weapons even though such a war would result in the incineration of American cities. It was a disproportionate and grotesque response by any measure, but it was deemed rational and necessary to maintain a liberal order that was otherwise vulnerable to a Soviet invasion of Europe.
Indeed, from the very beginning of the American led-liberal order, U.S. strategists had to convince other nations that they would react to aggression in a manner that greatly exceeded the direct threat to the American homeland. It was the Catholic theologian Reinhold Niebuhr who first put the central point clearly when he wrote about what he called “America’s Tragic Dilemma,” saying: “Though confident of its virtue, it must hold atomic bombs ready for use so as to prevent a possible world conflagration. It may actually make the conflict more inevitable with this threat; and yet, it cannot abandon the threat.”3 Every American president has tried to manage this dilemma and to ensure that the U.S. strategy is proportionate to the interests involved. But the Niebuhrian dilemma was a problem that could never be resolved. It could only be managed.
From the beginning of the postwar period, the United States also confronted a second, less terrifying but equally controversial, dilemma—whether to bear a vastly disproportionate share of the cost of proactively building the liberal order. While World War II was still raging, the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration carefully developed plans to build a liberal postwar order, but by 1946 these ideas—including an interest-bearing loan to Great Britain—encountered fierce resistance in Congress and appeared doomed. Many Americans wanted the United States to come home and mind its own business, to look out for its own narrow economic interests instead of rebuilding ruined nations, and to be unbound by international rules and norms. The rapid emergence of a Soviet threat provided the Truman administration with the opportunity to mobilize support for internationalism under an anti-communist banner. As Dean Acheson put it, Truman portrayed the threat as “clearer than truth” in order to secure passage of his program.4 Without anti-communism, it is possible that Truman’s Marshall Plan and alliance with Western Europe would have been defeated in much the same way that President Wilson’s Treaty of Versailles was rejected by Congress.
The communist threat sustained an outsized American strategy throughout the Cold War. After the Soviet Union collapsed, American leaders continued to make the moral case for upholding the order, and because no power sought to balance against the United States, the costs of upholding the order appeared to be manageable. It was easier to maintain the status quo than embark on a risky change. Today, we have reached a point where the costs of upholding the order have escalated considerably, although they are still far below those at the height of the Cold War. The post–Cold War expansion of the liberal order to a truly global scale widened the horizon of U.S. responsibility. Pushing back against Russia in Ukraine or China in the South China Sea seems to run the risk of war with a major power. Stabilizing the Middle East seems to require yet another ground war in an Arab country—something people are loath to do after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Even the cost of alliances has become more controversial when viewed against the backdrop of the Great Recession. A grandiose foreign policy seems like an indulgence to many.
These two dilemmas—deterring threats against nonvital interests and paying the costs for building a liberal order—have reemerged, but many people are tempted to argue that they are actually not dilemmas at all. Some say it is easy to deter aggression in faraway places without incurring great risk or that one can have a liberal order without paying a disproportionate share of the costs. But the essence of these dilemmas is that not all good things go together. There are important tradeoffs and no way of avoiding them. Further, understanding these tradeoffs is the essence of strategic thinking. The real debate in American strategy is between two schools of thought with very different ideas on how to manage the dilemmas—one favoring restraint and retrenchment, and the other, increased engagement and competitiveness. These dilemmas emerge in two strategic problems facing the United States.
THE PROBLEM OF REVISIONISM
Under the current international order, there is a distinction in international relations between status quo and revisionist states.5 Status quo states are generally satisfied with their position in the international system. They may have ambitions, or even desires for substantial changes, but they pursue them through the legitimate processes of the international order. Nor do they use their military power to seize territory or subdue other states. When all states are status quo states, war occurs only when miscalculation or a security dilemma ignites a serious conflict.6 For instance, if China were a status quo power, it may build up its military not for conquest but for the purpose of protecting its interests. Nevertheless, the United States may still find this threatening, and respond by balancing against China. This could lead to an arms race and spiraling tensions, a situation prone to crisis and war. The answer to a “security dilemma” is transparency, reassurance, and restraint, so it will be clear to all that neither state seeks to threaten the status quo.7
Revisionist states, by contrast, use their military power, or the threat of military power, to change the status quo. They seek to acquire more power, either by seizing territory, imposing their preferred form of government on other states, or by unilaterally and fundamentally rewriting the rules of the game.8 Transparency, reassurance, and restraint are ineffective in dealing with revisionist states. Revisionism is a recurring feature in world politics: consider the Spanish and Austrian Hapsburgs; Russia in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries; the United States in its hemisphere in the nineteenth century; Prussia in the 1860s; and Germany and Imperial Japan in the twentieth century. Revisionist policies often lead to conflict—usually of a limited nature, but sometimes in the form of a general war—because they invite collisions, either between the status quo and revisionist powers or between multiple revisionists. One of the remarkable features of the past quarter century is the near absence of revisionism. The post–Cold War international order is predicated on the assumption that all the major powers are essentially status quo powers.9
Today, though, revisionism is on the upswing. We often think of revisionist powers as countries hell-bent on global domination, like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. But revisionism rarely manifests itself with all-out world war; revisionists instead can aim for sizable regional gains that simply disrupt the status quo. Revisionist states traditionally go after the nonvital interests of their great power rivals, because doing so generally doesn’t provoke the retaliatory strike that would come from attacking a vital interest. Threatening nonvital interests—for example, by attacking a non-ally—leaves the status quo power torn over how to respond, debating whether it’s worth it to commit the blood and treasure.
Of course, the term “nonvital interest” is somewhat misleading. It only holds true when viewed narrowly and in isolation from a wider strategic picture. The way in which a state increases its influence affects the distinction between vital and nonvital interests profoundly. While annexation of territory and unprovoked invasion clearly constitute a breach of the peace and threaten vital U.S. interests, seizing small rocks or strips of territory is a more ambiguous threat. Such acts appear to be of limited strategic importance, until, in the aggregate, they acquire a much greater value. It is, in effect, a salami slicing strategy. At the outset, the fact that no treaty has been breached and the territory in question seems to be of limited importance shapes the psychology and dynamics of the crisis. It is precisely the small strategic value of the territory in dispute that causes the dominant power to refrain from going to war over it at an extraordinary cost that would be vastly disproportionate to the disputed territory’s value.
This is the great advantage that a revisionist power has, and one that it can ruthlessly exploit as long as it doesn’t overstep its mark. After all, what American president wants to risk nuclear war for the Donbass in eastern Ukraine? To put it another way, how many vital interests is a state willing to jeopardize for a nonvital one? Therefore, if the revisionist power is smart, and it usually is, it will pick territories precisely because they lack significant strategic value to great power rivals, even if they are important to the smaller country upon which the revisionist preys.10
This is not a new problem. It is textbook revisionism. Its purpose is to make deterrence extremely hard and to encourage rival great powers to accommodate the revisionist state diplomatically or to limit the response, rendering it ineffective. It was for this reason that the British Empire used accommodation as a pillar of its grand strategy for half a century prior to its catastrophic failure in the late 1930s. Indeed, until 1938, accommodation or appeasement was viewed very positively in Britain because it seemed to offer a way to stave off a major power conflict by making modest concessions from a position of strength.11
The revisionist challenge is the most complex problem with which a major power can be confronted. A regular security dilemma between two status quo powers can be addressed with reassurance and transparency, but a revisionist power will not be satisfied with the restraint of others. It needs major concessions so it can accomplish its objectives; at times regimes pursue revisionist policies for their very domestic survival. The return of revisionism has put the Niebuhrian dilemma right back in the center of American strategy. If Russia and China continue to pursue revisionist foreign policies, and if they are adept at choosing their targets, they will put immense pressure on American policymakers, who will be faced with the choice of risking conflict with a nuclear power or accommodating them and setting the stage for similar acts in the future.
BUILDING A LIBERAL ORDER IN A NATIONALIST AGE
America’s second strategic problem is how to continue to build and sustain a U.S.-led liberal international order in a more nationalist and geopolitically competitive age. After the Cold War, the U.S.-led Western order went global thanks to globalization, NATO expansion, democracy promotion, and the strengthening of human rights norms. The process was never easy but it was made possible by the forces of convergence. As we saw in Chapter 1, many nations embraced the U.S.-led order; Russia and China acquiesced to it. Today, as those forces of convergence wane, the United States finds itself with global responsibilities in an era heavily influenced by nationalism and populism.
There are multiple dimensions to this problem. One of the most severe is that some of the core goals of the U.S.-led order—including a prosperous global economy through globalization and democracy promotion—no longer appear to offer what they once promised. As we saw in Chapter 5, the international financial crisis of 2008 and 2009, the Great Recession and lack of economic growth, and the political salience of inequality have undermined public and elite support in the United States and overseas for measures to maintain, or increase, the openness of the global economy. It is telling that the actions taken in 2008 and 2009 to save the global economy remain highly unpopular today. Major trade deals have stalled. And populist politicians have become increasingly successful in Western democracies, most notably with Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Democracy promotion was also discredited in the eyes of many after the Iraq War. Humanitarian intervention is frequently perceived by other countries as a U.S. tactic to topple an anti-American dictator and replace him with a more amenable alternative. For their part, many Americans believe that their government is utterly incompetent when it comes to fostering positive change abroad. And it is not just American ideas that are in doubt. There is also a general sense—not necessarily true—that international governance has failed, whether it is in the form of the European Union, efforts to curb climate change, or the nonproliferation regime. This sense of failure strengthens those who want to focus exclusively on national solutions.
A second element to this problem is when and how to intervene to stop mass atrocities and uphold basic standards of human rights. Later in this chapter, we will see how in recent years the United States has distinguished between problems that pose a direct threat to U.S. interests and those that do not but are matters for the international community to address. Military action was judged to be justifiable in cases where direct threats to U.S. interests were involved; other situations very rarely were deemed to require a military response. The difficulty is that it is not always possible to identify clearly what poses a systemic threat to core U.S. interests.
This problem is particularly acute in the Middle East where there is widespread disagreement on the systemic risk that disorder in parts of the region poses to the region as a whole and to vital U.S. interests elsewhere, especially in Europe. Those who believe that disorder can largely be contained are wary of increased U.S. engagement, of potentially throwing good resources after bad, whereas those who worry that the disorder is highly contagious want to increase engagement if only as a means to put a lid on the region’s problems.
A third element is how to balance those global issues requiring cooperation with other nations—especially climate change, terrorism, and nuclear proliferation—with geopolitical concerns. Sometimes it may seem as if there is a tradeoff to be made between the two. Perhaps the United States needs to make a concession on a regional issue in exchange for cooperation on a global issue. Or it may have to choose which to invest its time and energy in. The regional issues, as we have seen, are critically important to the global order but transnational challenges are also absolutely vital.
This problem of juggling cooperation around global issues with geopolitical concerns has come up before. In 1943, U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull let it be known that his number one priority was the new United Nations. Hull wanted the Soviets to join but worried that they would stay out. The Soviets had no strong opinion one way or the other but they saw an opportunity for leverage. At the Moscow Conference in October and November of 1943, the Soviets played hard to get and criticized the United Nations, only finally to “concede” in exchange for what they wanted on Poland. Hull was none the wiser and assumed he had extracted extremely difficult concessions for what he saw as the secondary issue of territory in Eastern Europe. In reality, the Soviets had played him and “given up” something they never cared much about in the first place.12
The trick is to be able to increase cooperation across a wide range of areas—globally and regionally—without leaving one hostage to another. The lesson is as pertinent today as it was in 1943. The building of a liberal order advanced in leaps and bounds after the Cold War, largely because the environment was permissive. Today, it is anything but. The United States has to cope with mounting opposition at home and considerable skepticism overseas. Overcoming this problem is a key challenge for U.S. strategy.
These two strategic problems, and the dilemmas inherent in them, run through today’s debate on U.S. foreign policy. Although it is rarely explicitly framed in this way, how one approaches these dilemmas shapes one’s response to the problems, and, by extension, to U.S. foreign policy as a whole. But before we look at America’s strategic options, we must first ask, What is the United States capable of? Is it a power in decline, with less capacity than before, or can it still uphold a liberal international order if it so chooses?
HOW POWERFUL IS THE UNITED STATES?
Over the past ten years, many people, including Donald Trump, have argued that the United States is in decline, either in absolute or relative terms.13 If true, this has enormous implications for U.S. strategy. After all, a superpower in an inexorable decline will soon find itself overextended and in retreat on multiple fronts. There are certain things it cannot do. Americans have been terrified by the prospect of decline since the United States became a global power after World War II. The Soviet acquisition of the atomic bomb, Sputnik, the mythical missile gap of the 1960 election, the supposed emergence of a multipolar world in the late 1960s and 1970s, the rise of Japan in the mid-1980s, and now the ascension of China have all induced high levels of anxiety in the American people. And just because Americans have been unduly alarmed in the past does not mean that alarm is an inappropriate response this time around. After all, in the end the boy who cried wolf did meet the wolf.14
Assessing power is a tricky task. The seventeenth-century British philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon famously warned that nothing is “more subject to error than the forming of a true and right valuation of the power and forces of an empire.”15 Power is usually conceived of in relative terms, which complicates matters further. Analysts tend to rely on metrics like GDP and military spending, although less tangible and often overlooked factors—including strategic competence, military innovation, and the attraction of a country’s model to others—are often crucial.
Let’s start with relative power. Surely it is stating the obvious to say that the United States is in relative decline given China’s rapid economic growth, isn’t it? Not necessarily. For one, GDP growth is a very narrow metric. As William Wohlforth and Stephen Brooks explain, “GDP was originally designed to measure mid-twentieth-century manufacturing economies, and so the more knowledge-based and globalized a country’s production is, the more its GDP underestimates its economy’s true size.”16 China’s success is largely explained by the size of its population and the fact that it is starting from a low base so it can take advantage of so-called catch-up growth. But the United States enjoys long-term advantages in key industries, patents, and higher education. In terms of military clout, too, the United States is an unrivaled global power. True, America’s military advantage is somewhat blunted by the fact that China, as well as Russia, have the edge in contested areas, like eastern Ukraine and the South China Sea. But what matters is not overall military power but that the United States possesses the ability to deploy effective forces in a crisis. With enough political will, the United States could choose to have the most military might overall in almost any crisis or conflict. Finally, when compared on a global scale of relative power, it is clear that the United States is surpassing most other nations. The GDP gap between the United States and Russia is growing, and the United States has outperformed European countries following the financial crisis.
Contrary to predictions of decline, then, in many respects the United States is actually a power still on the rise. The United States continues to grow economically and demographically year over year. It continues to benefit from an influx of immigrants, particularly those with high levels of education and expertise. One result of large-scale immigration in the United States is that U.S. demographic trends are much healthier than for other Western societies, many of which are aging. The shale gas revolution has reduced U.S. dependence on foreign oil and has given U.S. industries a competitive edge. The United States is at the cutting edge in key sectors, particularly technology. To take just one example offered by Wohlforth and Brooks, “The United States has an enormous advantage as a source of innovative technologies, with $128 billion in receipts in 2013 for the use of its intellectual property compared to $1 billion in receipts for China.”17 The U.S. military had a tough decade in the 2000s, but out of adversity came major military innovations, particularly in the use of unmanned technologies. The return of revisionism also amplified U.S. soft power as other nations sought to deepen their ties to the United States; even if the U.S. model wasn’t necessarily attractive, the ability to balance their regional rivals was.
Yet the United States does have a power problem. Since World War II, U.S. power has always been bound to its alliances, and now some of America’s key allies are in decline in relative, or in some cases even in absolute, terms. As we have seen in earlier chapters, Western European nations are stuck in an economic lost decade with no end in sight. Low growth has led to continental lethargy. Britain, France, and Germany slashed their militaries and have only recently begun to arrest this trend. As discussed in Chapter 2, Brexit has deepened Europeans’ introspection and sense of crisis. Meanwhile, in Asia, Japan has fallen behind China over the past decade and is still struggling to overcome a prolonged period of stagnation and economic malaise. Shinzō Abe’s efforts to kickstart Japan’s economy and strengthen its national power offer reason for hope, but there is no doubt that the balance of power between China and Japan has tipped in China’s favor.
So the picture is complicated. America’s allies are struggling. The United States continues to grow, but the balance of power with China is complex and multifaceted. Russia is in decline economically but has increased its military and diplomatic power. The binary concept of decline is simply not very helpful for describing and assessing the strategic situation. A more fruitful and useful conceptual frame is to ask what advantages and disadvantages the various competitor nations have in the emerging geopolitical competition for the future of the world order. Looking at advantages and disadvantages allows us to deal with contradictory evidence broadly and in particular circumstances.
The United States has two advantages over its rivals. The first is that it enjoys preeminence over global systems. It has no peer in the international financial system. It is the only country that can project its military power around the world supported by command and control systems that are second to none. America’s second advantage is its soft power. With the exception of its strategic rivals (Russia, China, and Iran) and maybe a few emerging powers like Brazil and South Africa, other nations see their interests as best served by a U.S.-led order compared to any other model, be it a spheres-of-influence system dominated by regional hegemons or a global alternative led by China. This gives the United States an enormous advantage because other countries will act as power multipliers for it.
America’s rivals, however, also have several advantages when it comes to regional competition: proximity to a likely crisis, superior resolve, and the initiative. Despite having far less power than the United States, Russia, China, and Iran often have the ability and political will to deploy power more quickly and in greater quantities to a crisis in their region than the United States does, because the United States is both far away and constrained by Congress. These countries also have the advantage of being able to take the initiative, which means that they can choose to challenge the U.S.-led regional order with scenarios that maximize their relative advantage. Globally, they are at a distinct disadvantage, but they may be able to benefit if other nations feel that the United States is abusing its influence in the international order: for instance, if the United States is seen as too willing to opt for sanctions or is perceived as using humanitarian intervention for geopolitical purposes.
THE NECESSITY OF STRATEGIC CHOICE
It is easy to get distracted by definitions and critiques of national security and grand strategy. The concept of national security was devised by U.S. strategists after World War II to signify something broader than military policy.18 As Henry Kissinger explained, “In its widest sense,” national security “comprises every action by which a society seeks to assure its survival or to realize its aspirations internationally.”19 This fits neatly into the notion of grand strategy, which MIT professor Barry Posen insightfully defined as a state’s theory about how to cause security for itself.20 The art of American foreign policy is not to devise a strategy for how to defend the homeland or key sea lanes. It is much broader than that. It entails having an overarching vision for advancing the state’s long-term national interest and a plan for realizing it even as other countries work to frustrate it. To be useful, a grand strategy also must address the challenges that policymakers confront on a daily basis. It should help guide and shape the decision-making process and not be just a collection of self-help bromides.
To apply these ideas today means that the United States needs a strategy for a more geopolitically competitive world. The post–Cold War strategy is based on assumptions of convergence that are no longer applicable. A new strategy must provide a theory and narrative about what the United States needs from the world to realize its long-term interests. It must have something to say about Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia. And it must offer a solution to the two strategic problems outlined earlier: deterring revisionism and continuing to build the liberal order. It must also be cognizant that other powers are working to ensure that the U.S. strategy will fail. A strategy does not need to be one-size-fits-all, but it must be coherent. For example, one cannot simultaneously claim that the United States should prioritize East Asia above all else without identifying which region can be safely neglected and how the United States should cope with the consequences of that neglect.
As we seek strategic options, it is useful to keep in mind an analytical distinction made by Stephen Sestanovich, a scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations. In his book Maximalist, Sestanovich argued that there are two types of American grand strategies—maximalist approaches and retrenchment. Maximalists seek a broad array of ambitious countermeasures against threats, whereas retrenchers look to “shift responsibilities to friends and allies, to explore accommodation with adversaries, to narrow commitments and reduce costs.”21 Presidents Truman, Kennedy, and Reagan were maximalists, while Eisenhower, Nixon, and Carter were retrenchers. The impulses that Sestanovich identifies are alive and well today although the context has changed.
The United States faces a choice between retrenchment, or restraint as it is often called, and a more forward-leaning, competitive approach designed to strengthen and enhance the U.S.-led liberal order. Advocates of retrenchment and restraint believe that the risks of broadly defining vital interests to include much of the world outweigh the benefits. They also worry that the United States is becoming overstretched and weakened by the extent of its obligations. Supporters of a competitive approach to uphold liberal order worry that reduced U.S. engagement will lead to the unraveling of the order and a deterioration in America’s strategic environment that will be hard to reverse. They argue that over the course of seventy years, the risks that the United States undertook were worth it given the outcome.
In their own unique ways, the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations pursued a forward-leaning and expansive foreign policy; but the invasion of Iraq and the financial crisis created an opening for a swing toward restraint, one that the 44th president was willing to take.
The Obama Doctrine of Restraint
Many Americans, feeling a heightened sense of risk and economic pressures at home, want to reduce the U.S. role in upholding the liberal order, even as they simultaneously want the benefits of that order. Consequently they are looking for ways of doing less in the world without causing a significant deterioration in it. The search for this middle path was, in many ways, the core mission of President Obama during his two terms in office. Obama saw it as America’s responsibility to uphold the liberal inter-national order. He believed that the United States provided indispensable leadership for solving problems the world shared—problems like climate change, terrorism, and economic volatility. He also believed that the U.S. alliance system was a force for stability in Europe and East Asia. “For all of our warts,” he told Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, “the United States has clearly been a force for good in the world. If you compare us to previous superpowers, we act less on the basis of naked self-interest, and have been interested in establishing norms that benefit everyone. If it is possible to do good at a bearable cost, to save lives, we will do it.” “I am,” he went on, “very much the internationalist.”22
Obama was also of the view, however, that the United States was prone to overextending itself in pursuit of the goal of upholding the liberal order. He told Goldberg, “There’s a playbook in Washington that presidents are supposed to follow. It’s a playbook that comes out of the foreign-policy establishment. And the playbook prescribes responses to different events, and these responses tend to be militarized responses. Where America is directly threatened, the playbook works. But the playbook can also be a trap that can lead to bad decisions.”23
For Obama, the United States is a relatively secure country. The long-term trends domestically are positive and there is plenty of good news in the world. Yes, the Middle East may be in flames, but America can find wonderful opportunities in Southeast Asia and Latin America. Yes, there are threats, but they are not existential and the greatest risk they pose is that they could elicit an overreaction. Obama was clearly frustrated with America’s overextension in the post–Cold War period, particularly during the George W. Bush administration. But his real complaint was with U.S. strategy from the late 1940s on, which, as we saw earlier, relied on the notion of a blurring of vital interests and interests in the order as a whole.
Obama also resented that other nations did not carry their weight in upholding the order, acknowledging that “free riders aggravate me.”24 He tried to play hard to get so that others would be compelled to do more. Foreign-policy analyst Nina Hachigan, who would go on to become President Obama’s ambassador to ASEAN, and foreign-policy analyst David Shorr, called this the “Responsibility Doctrine.”25 Obama complained about how the United States was the first nation others called in a security crisis, regardless of where that crisis was happening. European governments had slashed their defense budgets but relied on the United States to take care of nearby threats in North Africa. Sunni states wanted the United States to wage war with Iran. Obama’s solution to this problem was to set a high threshold for U.S. action in those cases when what he saw as core interests—the security of the United States or its citizens, of surrounding territories, and of U.S. allies—were not directly threatened. For these threats, such as mass atrocities and the security of non-allies, the United States would act only multilaterally, if others did their fair share, and if the costs were relatively low. He explained that “one of the reasons I am so focused on taking action multilaterally where our direct interests are not at stake is that multilateralism regulates hubris.”26 Obama was essentially trying to define U.S. interests as other major powers do by distinguishing between core and peripheral concerns.
The Obama administration did accept that the world was becoming more geopolitically competitive, but it was determined not to be defined by that fact. It would push back against Russia by imposing economic costs on it for its aggression against Ukraine. Obama acknowledged, however, that Ukraine, as a non-NATO country, “is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do.”27 Obama was aloof from Europe’s struggles and the European Union’s existential challenges and saw little reason for the United States to become more involved. In dealing with Russia, Obama tolerated its intervention in Syria and even rewarded Putin by making him the centerpiece of his diplomacy. In East Asia, the Obama administration conducted freedom-of-navigation operations and deepened cooperation with regional partners to counteract Chinese assertiveness in the South China Sea, but it stopped short of trying to deny China its strategic objective. Concerned by rising tensions, the White House even instructed the Pentagon to drop the term “great power competition,” which had been a staple of speeches by senior military officers and of the secretary of defense, Ashton Carter.28 Meanwhile, in the Middle East, as we have already seen, Obama argued that Saudi Arabia and Iran must share power in the region, but he trusted the Saudis and Iranians to reach this conclusion on their own as the United States reduced its involvement in the regional competition.
Obama’s strategy of restraint encountered several problems. The first is that the design of the liberal order requires an outsized American role for its maintenance and nobody has come up with a perfect formula for how to provide clarity as to when the United States will act and when it will not. When clarity is provided, as it was in 1950 when Dean Acheson said that South Korea was outside the U.S. defense perimeter, or in 1990 when U.S. Ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie signaled U.S. indifference to Saddam Hussein over the Iraq-Kuwait dispute, conflict has followed. The converse is also true; the blurring of the lines led to several egregious mistakes—the Vietnam War in particular—and it created the mindset that led to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. But this ambiguity also led to many successes—the defense of non-allied South Korea in 1950, the liberation of non-allied Kuwait in 1991, intervention in Bosnia in the mid-1990s, intervention in Kosovo in 1999, and even the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, which rested on the disproportionate strategy of Mutually Assured Destruction. One could argue, as Niebuhr did, that the very existence of the liberal world order rested on this irrational threat. The ambiguous expansion of U.S. interests can lead to policy mistakes, but it also performs an indispensable role in reducing conflict by providing a credible deterrent to aggression.
The second problem is that smaller threats can pose a systemic risk to the international order even if they do not immediately endanger core U.S. interests. For example, Obama would be pilloried for downplaying the threat posed by ISIS in 2013, calling the group the “jayvee team,” but the episode illustrated the difficulty of correctly diagnosing long-term threats to U.S. interests. Obama was right that ISIS was focused on local sectarian issues, but he underestimated the risk that instability in Iraq and Syria would pose to the region as a whole and beyond to the European Union.
The third problem is that once the president stops making the case for why the United States has a special obligation to act when the stability of the order is threatened, even in faraway lands, the public tends to seek ever-greater levels of retrenchment. For instance, in August 2013, Obama tried to rally the public for strikes on the Assad regime in Syria after it violated his red line on using chemical weapons. But after over a year of hearing that Syria was of marginal importance and there was little the United States could do, they were unwilling to support strikes. With Congress restless, and with his own doubts about striking, Obama reversed course. This was the same problem that President George H. W. Bush had in Kuwait in 1990 and that President Bill Clinton had in the Balkans in the 1990s—only by using the bully pulpit of the presidency could they secure sufficient public support for their foreign policy. If the presidents did not frequently make the case, the public would be difficult to convince when they wanted to act.
As we look past the Obama administration, one obvious path for future presidents is to maintain an approach that is deeply skeptical about the use of military power in pursuit of interests that do not entail a direct threat to Americans, and seeks to shift the burden to others, while preserving the liberal order. Such a strategy will be difficult to sustain, however, because it tries to do two things simultaneously that will likely prove to be mutually incompatible. It tries to reduce the burden on the United States, while maintaining the liberal international order as it is today. Yet the recalibration of U.S. strategy to limit the U.S. response to indirect threats may destabilize the international order over time. As President Obama acknowledged in his interview in the Atlantic, U.S. allies were unable to adequately cope with the additional responsibilities that he tried to shift onto them in Libya. As a result, postconflict operations in Libya were a failure, the terror threat increased, and U.S. interests in Europe were badly damaged.
Looking forward, eventually the United States will be presented with one tough choice after another by revisionist powers. Washington will rightly want to avoid a great-power war, but in pursuing this aim it will by definition avoid any steps that could increase the risk of one—which will leave very few options for responding to revisionism. In a relatively short period of time, a future president will be compelled to make a choice—to compete with rival powers or to concede a sphere of influence to them. It is for this reason that policymakers inclined toward restraint and retrenchment will be increasingly drawn to alternative strategies. Two such strategies are waiting in the wings.
The Strategy of Offshore Balancing and Neo-Isolationism
Some experts, scholars, and policymakers believe that the Obama administration did not go far enough in scaling back America’s commitments overseas. They agree with Obama that other nations free-ride on American security guarantees, but they ask why then did he deepen U.S. alliances and not put real pressure on the allies. They question the forward positioning of U.S. forces and whether it really matters if China controls the South China Sea or if Russia is in charge of Ukraine. This school of thought is rooted in the realist school of foreign policy. Realists tend to define U.S. interests narrowly, and feel skeptical of international institutions and of the liberal order.
The name most commonly given to realist foreign policy is offshore balancing. Offshore balancers believe that the United States ought largely to withdraw from Northeast Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. America should intervene only if another major power is poised to conquer and dominate one of these regions. As University of Chicago’s John Mearsheimer and Harvard University’s Stephen Walt have written: “The aim is to remain offshore as long as possible, while recognizing that it is sometimes necessary to come onshore. If that happens, however, the United States should make its allies do as much of the heavy lifting as possible and remove its own forces as soon as it can.”29
Those who adhere to a realist foreign policy believe that power is sufficiently dispersed in each of these regions so as to make conquest unlikely, if not impossible. The key element to understand about offshore balancing is that it accepts as a necessary byproduct increased security competition between regional powers. For instance, if the United States leaves NATO or dramatically reduces its role, European nations can and should rearm to balance against Russia. They may even fight a limited war against Russia. The United States should intervene only if Russia is poised to overrun the rest of Europe. Similarly, in East Asia, Japan could rearm, including by acquiring nuclear weapons, and work with its neighbors to check China’s rise. Only if China were poised to deal a crippling blow to Japan would the United States intervene. Offshore balancers see the 1930s as a model to follow. At that time, the United States let others fight it out, intervened late into World War II, and took most of the spoils.
Other realists call for an even more sweeping retrenchment of U.S. power, something like a twenty-first-century version of isolationism. The most advanced and sophisticated case for this approach appears in the 2014 book Restraint by Barry Posen, a professor at MIT and perhaps America’s top academic defense expert.30 Restraint explains in detail why and how the United States should divest itself of its international security commitments and give up the liberal international order. Posen argues that the United States should pull out of NATO and out of alliances in Asia over a ten-year period.
The case for restraint has made it into the wider public debate on foreign policy. For instance, Ian Bremmer, CEO and founder of the Eurasia Group, has proposed a strategy he calls Independent America, whereby the United States would dramatically reduce its international commitments by ceasing to be the security guarantor of last resort for NATO and Japan, and by withdrawing entirely from the Middle East.31 Neo-isolationism unexpectedly reemerged as a force in American politics during the Republican primary campaign in 2016 with the rise of Donald Trump. Trump questioned America’s alliances and its leadership of the international order. He harkened back to the days of a more isolationist and mercantilist United States.32 Trump even embraced the slogan “America First” used by Charles Lindbergh, a leading isolationist in the 1930s. Trump’s foreign-policy message was crude and often strewn with factual errors, but it was unmistakably different—the United States would no longer provide security or economic growth for the rest of the world. It would look out only for itself. As we will see in the Epilogue, if Trump governs as he campaigned, the implications for world order could be severe.
These views could not be further from the U.S. postwar tradition. For over seven decades, the United States has sought to quell and reduce regional security competition in Western Europe and East Asia. Yes, the alliances were intended to contain the Soviet Union. But they were also intended to create a community of nations that did not fear each other. And they were designed so that the United States could restrain its allies and prevent events from spiraling into conflict. Thus the United States provides for much of Japan’s security so Japan will not build capabilities that worry South Korea or others. And even after the Soviet threat disappeared, the United States has gone to extraordinary lengths to promote regional integration and cooperation in Asia and Europe—expansion of the European Union and NATO, for instance, has helped to consolidate democracy in Eastern Europe and reduce the potential for rivalries and territorial disputes.
Realists believe that many of these steps, including NATO’s expansion, were mistakes. When it is pointed out to them that if the Baltics were not in NATO today, Russia may have invaded, their response is that the United States has no interests there. They recognize that retrenchment may make the world a much more dangerous place. They just believe that these regional conflicts will not affect the United States, asserting that America can protect itself behind its oceans and nuclear deterrent and would have time to intervene if a rival power was poised to dominate Europe, East Asia, or the Middle East.
Full-scale retrenchment will inject unprecedented risk and uncertainty into world politics. It is a revolutionary strategy. The day after the president of the United States adopts a neo-isolationist strategy will be the day that every defense planner and diplomat the world over scrambles to understand how to survive in the post-American world. Alliances will be worthless. The glue that held everything together will no longer stick. The United States would have created the mother of all vacuums. Japan would likely rearm, and may even go nuclear, to defend itself against China. China would see a window of opportunity to establish its dominance over East Asia. In Europe, Russia would likely move on the Baltics to put the final nail in NATO’s coffin and would establish full control over Ukraine. Some Western European countries would rearm, but the overwhelming impulse would be to seek a balance of power. It is unlikely that globalization would survive the return to full-throated rivalry, which in turn would result in massive economic costs for the United States.
It is unlikely that any president—even Donald Trump—will voluntarily take the risk associated with neo-isolationism without being under overwhelming pressure to do so. To proactively dissolve America’s alliances and retrench from the world would not only be geopolitically dangerous; it would also be politically dangerous because any crisis would be seen as self-inflicted. For these reasons, a president with retrenchment or isolationist tendencies is much more likely to seek a more orderly means of retreat—which brings us to accommodation.
Accommodation: Another Strategy of Restraint
One strategy that may make a comeback as tensions between the major powers rise is strategic accommodation. Strategic accommodation means negotiating with China, Russia, and maybe Iran to grant them a sphere of influence in their region in exchange for respecting a more limited U.S. role in their regions and U.S. leadership on global issues. The logic is that it is better to share power deliberately and through negotiation than by means of a disorderly retreat, as would occur if the United States unilaterally withdrew from its global role. The United States would remain a global power but it would be less hegemonic than it is now.
There is no doubt that this strategy would be highly contentious. For almost a quarter of a century, the United States has said that it opposes a return to a spheres-of-influence order of the kind that existed in the Cold War or prior to World War II. In fact, in 2013, Secretary of State John Kerry even formally repudiated the Monroe Doctrine.33 Successive presidents have endorsed a Europe “whole and free” and the principle that states should be able to decide their own foreign relations.34 This policy has had real and positive consequences, especially in Europe—since the collapse of the Soviet Union, NATO has expanded from sixteen countries to twenty-eight and the European Union from eleven to twenty-eight. But it was relatively easy to oppose a return to spheres of influence when no other major power was actively trying to reconstitute it. Now that revisionism has returned, some scholars and experts believe that accommodation offers a way of avoiding a great-power war.
Hugh White, an Australian strategist who is one of the leading advocates of sharing power with China, summed up this approach, writing that when the balancing strategy fails, “I fear that Washington will be left with only two disastrous options: either withdrawal from Asia or war with China. It is to avoid either of these outcomes that I advocate a new order to accommodate with China.”35 For White, the answer is an exchange: the United States would give China much greater influence in its neighborhood, and China would agree to respect vital U.S. interests, such as the U.S.-Japan alliance and the presence of the U.S. Navy in the western Pacific. The United States, in his view, should use its current standing in Asia as leverage to negotiate with China, India, and Japan a Concert of Asia, along the lines of the Concert of Europe. This arrangement would, he argues, mean that the United States “can remain in Asia on a new basis, allowing China a larger role but also maintaining a strong presence of its own.”36
In a book titled Meeting China Halfway, Lyle Goldstein, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College, argues that the United States must make the first move in offering China concessions that will create a spiral of cooperation that can lead to a sharing of power in East Asia. U.S. concessions would start out small but lead to major compromises, including a downgrading of the U.S.-Japan alliance in exchange for Japanese permanent membership in the UN Security Council and a withdrawal of U.S. forces from South Korea in exchange for North Korean denuclearization.37
The same logic has been applied in Europe. Samuel Charap and Jeremy Shapiro, two think-tank scholars who have questioned the strategy of confronting Russia, ask, “Are the principles at stake—the right of every country to make its own foreign-policy choices and freely choose its own alliances—really worth” war with a nuclear power?38 They argue that Obama’s strategy of punishing Russia for its aggression while seeking to cooperate with it on global issues is unsustainable. Putin will not accept a return to a status quo that he sees as threatening his regime. As Charap and Shapiro put it, “Politics in Washington and Moscow, and the interaction between them, will make it impossible to sustain. Obama’s middle way will likely devolve into the very new Cold War he is seeking to avoid.”39 In their view, then, the United States must be proactive and reach a power-sharing agreement with Moscow that meets some of its demands. The first element of such a power-sharing agreement with Russia in Europe would be for the West to formally end the expansion of NATO and the European Union. The second element would be to open a dialogue with Russia on creating a new, more inclusive European security architecture that would replace, or at the very least downgrade, the role played by the European Union and NATO as the cornerstones of European security. The third element would be to recognize a special role for Russia in its neighborhood. Ukraine would be Finlandized at best. If Russia managed to wrest control of the government in Kiev, a more formal Russian role in Ukraine, including military bases, may be recognized. There would be an understanding that Russia would have a sphere of influence throughout the former Soviet Union. This influence would be more constrained in the Baltic states, but even there Moscow would be allowed a say over the treatment of ethnic Russians.
Accommodation with a view to sharing power sounds like an attractive strategy. It offers the prospect of a managed retrenchment, cooperation with rivals, a continuing U.S. role overseas in the regions, and a global leadership role. It would create a spheres-of-influence order, which, despite being very different from what we have had for the past twenty-five years, has been implemented before. But perhaps the greatest advantage of sharing power is that it will offer a way out in a time of crisis when rival powers appear on track to fight over a territory of marginal significance. As tensions rise, more people will become drawn to this strategy as an option. It is a coherent answer to a set of strategic problems.
A strategy based on power sharing and a spheres-of-influence order may be destined for popularity, but that does not make it wise or prudent. It is true that we have been here before. Sharing power always emerges as an option when a country is confronted by a revisionist rival. So it is important to look back on history and see how things went. It turns out that the only case in which accommodation ever truly “worked” was Britain’s appeasement of the United States in the late nineteenth century. But it worked for a very particular reason. British appeasement of the United States certainly did not satiate the Americans. The United States pocketed the concessions and kicked Britain out of the Western Hemisphere. Instead the story had a happy ending only because the United States acted in a way commensurate with Britain’s long-term interests. Specifically, the United States intervened on Britain’s behalf in two world wars. American hegemony worked out pretty well for Britain, if not for the British Empire.
For a similar strategy to work for and with Russia or China, one would have to believe that these countries are as well-disposed to protecting long-term American interests as the United States was with Britain. To pose the question is to know the answer. For whatever hope there is of thinking that a democratic Russia or a democratic China would uphold the rules of the international order, there is no reason to think that Russia’s dictatorship or China’s authoritarian regime would do so. Instead, they would likely build on their gains, albeit gradually, and challenge the regional order in Europe and Asia.
It is one thing to say that the United States ought to sit down with its rivals and agree on spheres of influence. It is entirely another to specify where the lines of demarcation between those spheres should be. There are some places that would neatly fit into one sphere or another, but others would be heavily disputed. Moreover, there is no assurance that as the power balance continues to shift, the revisionist powers will not seek to renegotiate or update the bargain in the future. The prospect of further changes will unnerve even those countries that are outside of the revisionists’ initial sphere of influence. So which countries are we willing to betray and designate as part of a sphere that they want nothing to do with?
This brings us to another reason that accommodation won’t work: we live in a postcolonial world in which subjugated peoples are no longer passed around to satiate great powers. Britain pursued appeasement because it was an empire and existed in an age of empires. It had possessions it could give away, regardless of what the locals felt, and it felt little compunction about selling out small states in Central and Eastern Europe—since the very existence of these states struck them as odd, more the result of an idealist American president than of clear-headed, balance-of-power thinking. On other occasions, formal concerts had emerged after major wars, when the victorious powers sat down and ratified the status quo or some version of it.
We, by contrast, live in a post-imperial age. The United States leads an order in which it enjoys a privileged position, but it shares the dividends of this privilege with other states in an unprecedented manner. Most countries are satisfied with the status quo and their position in it. They see no compelling reason for major change. In an order dominated by democracies, the United States cannot just sit down with its competitors and rewrite the futures of independent countries and their populations. The very spectacle would be stomach-turning and hugely damaging to the legitimacy of the order. Moreover, the states affected would take matters into their own hands. There is no reason to believe that they would simply accept the revised international order. Some would most likely rearm and even seek nuclear weapons. This may even be true of countries that would remain in the U.S. sphere, since they would worry about being cast out in the future.
Accommodation is a real strategic option for dealing with the return of revisionist powers in world politics. Usually rejected in the abstract, it will become more attractive to presidents when they find themselves stuck in difficult crises with few good options. Accommodation deserves to be taken seriously, but the critique offered here is that its consequences could be calamitous. It may not succeed in turning revisionist powers into cooperative partners, and moreover pursuing accommodation would deal a devastating blow to principles that the United States has upheld since World War II.
Restraint is a powerful impulse within U.S. foreign policy and it is sure to shape one or more strategic options in a more geopolitically competitive world. But restraint tends to be most compelling as an option when it is perceived as a necessity, rather than a choice. In other words, its appeal depends in large part on whether there is a viable alternative to pursue a more competitive and forward-leaning foreign policy.