A Grand Strategy for America

A Grand Strategy

for America

Robert J. Art

A CENTURY FOUNDATION BOOK

Cornell University Press   ITHACA AND LONDON

For Suzanne, who has always been there for me

Contents

List of Figures and Tables

Foreword by Richard C. Leone

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1   The International Setting

2   America’s National Interests

3   Dominion, Collective Security, and Containment

4   Selective Engagement

5   Isolationism and Offshore Balancing

6   Selective Engagement and the Free Hand Strategies

7   Implementing Selective Engagement

Appendix A. Civil Wars Active between 1991 and 2000

Appendix B. International Wars Active between 1991 and 2000

Notes

Figures and Tables

FIGURE 1.1  World Exports as a Share of Gross World Product, 1830–1913, 1950–2000

FIGURE 1.2  Annual War Occurrence, 1945–2000

TABLE 1.1  Foreign Assets of Deposit Banks as a Share of Gross World Product, 1960–1994

TABLE 1.2  World Direct and Portfolio Investment Flows, 1960–1999

TABLE 1.3  Investment Flows as a Share of Gross World Product, 1970–1999

TABLE 1.4  Daily Currency Turnover, 1986–2001

TABLE 1.5  The G-7 and International Trade, 1937–2000

TABLE 1.6  World Exports among and between Industrial and Developing States as a Percent of Total World Exports, 1960–2000

TABLE 1.7  International and Civil Wars by Region, 1991–2000

TABLE 1.8  International Conditions and America’s Interests

TABLE 2.1  Ranking America’s National Interests

TABLE 2.2  Energy Dependence and Oil Import Dependence, 1970–1999 (selected countries)

TABLE 2.3  Percent of Total Primary Energy Supply by Fuel Source, 1973 and 1999 (selected countries)

TABLE 2.4  America’s Interests and the Prime Threats to Them

TABLE 3.1  A Comparison of Eight Grand Strategies

TABLE 4.1  U.S. Merchandise Trade by Region, 1950–2000 (percent of U.S. total world trade)

TABLE 4.2  U.S. Merchandise Trade by Region, 1950–2000 (value in millions of U.S. dollars)

TABLE 4.3  U.S. Export Markets by Region, 1950–2000 (merchandise trade in millions of U.S. dollars)

TABLE 4.4  America’s Top Fifteen Trading Partners, 1980–2000 (merchandise trade)

TABLE 4.5  U.S. Trade in Services, 1999 (in millions of U.S. dollars)

TABLE 4.6  U.S. Direct Foreign Investment (DFI) by Region, 1950–2000 (historical cost in millions of U.S. dollars)

TABLE 4.7  America’s Top Fifteen DFI Recipients on a Historical Cost Basis, 1980–2000

TABLE 4.8  U.S. Oil Imports by Region, 1947–2000 (thousands of barrels and percent of total)

TABLE 4.9  U.S. Oil Imports by Selected Countries, 1947–2000 (thousands of barrels and percent of total)

Foreword

During the 1990s, most Americans got comfortable with the fact that foreign policy and national security issues were drifting gradually to the back of the line in terms of both media and political attention. Victors in the cold war, champions of free trade, exemplars of prosperity, and marketers par excellence, America seemed to be embarked on a new era of self-absorption and even complacency after a half century of global conflict and tension. Some rough spots needed to be tidied up, but history, some said, was over, and it was only a matter of time before everybody caught on to the advantages of emulating the American way of, well, just about everything. Then, the United States awakened to the nightmare that was September 11, 2001.

For those most involved in making or analyzing U.S. policy, the dislocation wrought by September 11 was especially acute. These experts had shared a common belief that this historical period would be defined by American preeminence. Their pronouncements had reinforced a belief in American invulnerability and underpinned the attitude known as American triumphalism. Their judgments were largely unchallenged, although pretty much the same group of scholars, analysts, and officials had been disquietingly off base a decade before when almost all of them failed to foresee the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the 2000 presidential election campaign, for example, foreign policy was far from a major focus of either party—and of little interest to the public. Of course, there also were scholars and policymakers at work who were aware that decisions on broader international issues and America’s role as the preeminent world power were long overdue.

At The Century Foundation, as at other organizations concerned about our nation’s foreign policy, we were beginning to understand and reflect on the complexity of the interests and challenges confronting the United States in the new century. As the Soviet Union began to collapse, we commenced a new series of studies aimed at enriching the quality of future debates about foreign affairs that we felt were inevitable. Robert J. Art, Christian A. Herter Professor of International Relations at Brandeis University, a former member of the secretary of defense’s Long Range Planning Staff, author of The TFX Decision: McNamara and the Military, and coeditor of and contributor to a number of books, including Reorganizing America’s Defense, U.S. Foreign Policy: The Search for a New Role, and The United States and Coercive Diplomacy, was one of those we selected to analyze these issues and make recommendations for the future.

In this volume, Art raises what is turning out to be one of the central questions of our time: How does a power like the United States deal with both the problems and the opportunities that derive from its unique position? He reminds us that it is in our hands to decide what role we want to play in the world, and he emphasizes that it is incumbent on us to understand that that role inevitably must extend far beyond the defense of our homeland, as important as that task will be. He points out as well that great powers have never lived for security alone.

Art writes at a time when it is clear that there is no broad national consensus about America’s goals and strategies in international affairs. For five decades, we had known what our foreign policy objectives were: we understood who the enemy was, and our responses fell within an agreed-upon policy framework aimed at containing the threat posed by that enemy. Today, enemies can seem to lurk around every corner, the strength of alliances has become unclear, and the way to proceed is fraught with dangers that are almost impossible to weigh.

In this careful examination, Art looks not only at the range of foreign policy goals that America should set for itself but also at the grand strategy needed to achieve those goals. The scope of his analysis is sweeping, exploring most major questions concerning American interests and the threats to those interests. In his conclusion, Art puts forth a strategy of selective engagement as the best choice for our times. Such a strategy requires continuing to pursue our major alliances and maintaining a military presence that will enable us to influence developments in those regions he considers critical to our future interests—Europe, East Asia, and the Persian Gulf. He offers thoughtful arguments and detailed analysis of the costs and benefits of the options our nation is weighing.

This book is timely because, within the overall topic of grand strategy, Art’s focus is on the military option. That is only appropriate given the preponderance of military strength the United States now enjoys and the unusual willingness of the current administration to employ that force in order to achieve its ends. But, as Art points out, Military power is the most expensive and dangerous tool of statecraft.

Art’s study joins a number of other Century Foundation books on this critical subject that have been released over the past few years, some of which also have taken on the issue of creating a broad framework for foreign policymaking, most notably Walter Russell Mead’s Special Providence and Henry Nau’s At Home Abroad. Some of our efforts have been aimed at specific areas that pose problems that contribute to uncertainty and conflict—Karl Meyer’s Dust of Empire and Morton Abramowitz’s two edited volumes on Turkey and Selig Harrison’s Korean Endgame—as well as a number of examinations of ethnic conflicts that threatened to engulf whole regions, including David Callahan’s Unwinnable Wars and Barnett Rubin’s Blood on the Doorstep. Other Century Foundation books, such as Michael Mandelbaum’s The Dawn of Peace in Europe, examine the future of our foreign policy alliances, while some, such as David Calleo’s Rethinking Europe’s Future, look at alliances among other nations. The new calculus of national security, not only militarily and economically but also socially and politically, has been a major focus of our work over the past year and a half.

Critics of the present administration believe that the projection of power whenever and wherever we wish has set the world’s teeth on edge. Supporters see us as performing a historic mission, something well beyond mere selfdefense. This gulf suggests the urgent need for a serious national dialogue on American grand strategy for the next decade and beyond. On behalf of The Century Foundation, I thank Robert Art for his contribution to the coming debate.

Richard C. Leone, President

Acknowledgments

This is a big-picture book. It concerns the fundamental direction that the United States should take in its foreign policy and grand strategy. No one person can write, unaided, a book that deals with as many subjects as this one does. Consequently, I have relied on so many people for so many things that this book is as much a product of their efforts as mine, even though many of them are not aware of this fact.

My first debt is to three role models. In writing this book, I have consciously tried to follow in the footsteps of these distinguished predecessors: Nicholas J. Spykman, Walter Lippmann, and Robert W. Tucker. Each was provoked to write by a great challenge in his particular era. Spykman’s America’s Strategy in World Politics: The United States and the Balance of Power was published in 1942, Lippmann’s U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic in 1943, and Tucker’s A New Isolationism: Threat or Promise in 1972. Spykman and Lippmann were writing during World War II, before its outcome was clear, and both called for an internationalist policy on the part of the United States. Tucker wrote during the peak of public disaffection with the Vietnam War, and made an extremely powerful case for an isolationist foreign policy for the United States, even though he did not ultimately embrace it.

Although these books differ in their style, substance, and prescriptions, all three stand as models of how to do grand-strategic analysis, and for that reason they remain, in my judgment, perhaps the best books written on American grand strategy in the last half century. Each is a classic because the author delineated the big geopolitical picture: the broad contours of the international environment, America’s national interests that flowed from them, the basic choices available to the United States, given that environment, and lastly the profound effects that America’s choices would have not only on itself but also on that environment. In this book I have tried to follow the big geopolitical tradition set by Spykman, Lippmann, and Tucker. I am indebted to all three of them for showing the way.

My next debt is to The Century Foundation and especially to its president, Dr. Richard C. Leone. He probably thought I would never finish this book, and sometimes I wondered, too. But he never said so, and he always showed me remarkable courtesy, respect, and patient faith that I would succeed. His backing has been critical to the book’s completion, and I am proud to be associated with the fine work of the Foundation.

I also owe much to my close friend and colleague, Stephen Van Evera. He told me to write this book, and then drove me crazy while I was writing it. When I asked him, does this outline look sensible? he said: let’s talk some more about it. When I said, how does this chapter look? he said: it needs more work. When I said, is this manuscript finished? he said: have you thought about this? Stephen Van Evera set for me an intellectual standard that I could not meet. For that I will be ever grateful. If I have failed, I failed more successfully because of his ruthless commitment to clear thinking and concise writing.

My debt to my wife Suzanne, to whom this book is dedicated, can never be repaid. She did more than simply support and sustain me. She showed me by example how to bring a large project to completion. When I complained incessantly that I would never finish, she said: work on it every day, even if for only ten minutes, and it will get done. I figured that because she wrote eleven books in as many years, she must know what she was talking about, and so I followed her advice. It was the wisest decision I made. Her example, support, and encouragement got me through all the hard parts of this book: the beginning, the middle, and the end.

Six people read the entire manuscript with great care and provided comments that saved me from many errors in logic and analysis. Thus, on behalf of my readers, as well as for myself, I thank Roger Haydon, Robert Ross, Glenn Snyder, Stephen Walt (who made especially detailed comments), Kenneth Waltz, and Bill Wohlforth.

In addition, others read portions of the manuscript, and their comments greatly improved specific points: Stephen Brooks, Loren Cass, Dan Drezner, Charles Glaser, Bob Keohane, David Kang, Jenny Lind, Charles Lipson, Sean Lynn-Jones, Mike Mastanduno, Rachel McCulloch, John Mearsheimer, Daryl Press, Bruce Russett, Josh Spero, Alan Stam, Jr., and Micah Zenko. On several specific matters, I have consulted at length with Tom Christensen, Gregory Gause, Paul Huth, Steven Miller, Michael O’Hanlon, Barry Posen, Ted Postol, Dick Samuels, and Cindy Williams, and they saved me much angst as a result. If there are others whom I have forgotten to mention, I apologize.

I have been blessed with able research assistants; when I asked, can you find such and such? they invariably did so. I thank Loren Cass, Sean Giovanello, Amy Higer, Bill Ruger, and Micah Zenko. I am especially indebted to Loren because he prepared all the tables in this book dealing with economic and war data, because he lent me his expertise in economic and environmental matters, and because he continued to provide invaluable assistance once he concluded his graduate career at Brandeis.

In addition to The Century Foundation, several other institutions supported my research. The United States Institute of Peace provided a research grant that enabled me to do extensive interviewing in Western Europe in the early 1990s. The U.S. Committee on International Relations Studies with the People’s Republic of China, and its director John Watt, enabled me to teach in Beijing for two weeks in the early 1990s, where I interviewed academics and researchers at the main foreign policy and military institutes, and then to do interviews in Tokyo with Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Defense officials, as well as many academics, politicians, and institute researchers. The Century Foundation made possible a trip to Central Europe in the mid 1990s. The Center for German and European Studies at Brandeis University made possible additional trips to Europe in the late 1990s. The Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University and the Security Studies Program at MIT, both of which have kindly given me affiliations, provided invaluable arenas for creative thinking on national security issues that, time after time, forced me to go back and rethink what I had just written. I thank the Foreign Policy Studies Program at the Brookings Institution, the Program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago, the Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University, the John Sloan Dickey Foundation at Dartmouth, and the Olin Institute at Harvard for inviting me to give talks on portions of my manuscript.

I have learned much from my students, both undergraduates and graduates. To all of you who suffered through Politics 168b, Politics 174b, and Politics 214a over these last years, I thank you for allowing me to try out my ideas, even when they were half-baked, on you. I also thank Linda Boothroyd and Rosanne Colocouris of the Brandeis Politics Department, for their logistical help in preparation of the manuscript.

I owe special thanks to my consulting editor, Teresa Lawson, whose skills at improving a manuscript are unparalleled. She removed needless words, fixed infelicitous phrases, caught my errors in logic, fixed inconsistencies, figured out what I wanted to say when I could not, helped with the book’s organization, and cheered me on in that last final month.

Finally, I thank my children, Robyn and David, for tolerating a dad who said, too often, I have to go work on my book.

ROBERT J. ART      

Introduction

This book deals with America’s role in world politics, and specifically with its foreign policy and military strategy. These two subjects matter because the United States is the world’s preeminent actor, and because it will remain so for at least several more decades. As a consequence, the foreign policy goals that the United States sets for itself, and the ways that it employs its overwhelming military power, will greatly affect how well it fares during its moment in the sun and, to a lesser but still significant degree, how well others fare and what the world will look like after America’s preeminence ends. Getting America’s foreign policy and military strategy right is, therefore, a matter of the highest importance.

In this book, I use history, theory, and analysis to try to understand what the right grand strategy should be. I prescribe for the United States a set of foreign policy goals to pursue and a military posture to support them that will do the best for the United States, that will do well for others, and that will enhance the chances that, after America’s preeminence passes, the next international era will be congenial to American interests. The goals that I prescribe for the United States are internationalist in nature, and the military posture that I advocate is one of forward defense. Together, the foreign policy goals and the military posture comprise a grand strategy of selective engagement. In this chapter I sketch the outlines of the argument for selective engagement presented in this book and give an overview of its contents.

THE CHALLENGE OF GRAND STRATEGY

Grand strategy is a broad subject: a grand strategy tells a nation’s leaders what goals they should aim for and how best they can use their country’s military power to attain these goals. Grand strategy, like foreign policy, deals with the momentous choices that a nation makes in foreign affairs, but it differs from foreign policy in one fundamental respect. To define a nation’s foreign policy is to lay out the full range of goals that a state should seek in the world and then determine how all of the instruments of statecraft—political power, military power, economic power, ideological power—should be integrated and employed with one another to achieve those goals. Grand strategy, too, deals with the full range of goals that a state should seek, but it concentrates primarily on how the military instrument should be employed to achieve them. It prescribes how a nation should wield its military instrument to realize its foreign policy goals.

Devising a grand strategy means hard thinking about basic interests and the proper role of military power in protecting them. In order to prescribe a grand strategy for the United States, I answer four fundamental questions:

• First, what are America’s interests in the world and what are the threats to these interests?

• Second, what are the possible grand strategies to protect America’s interests from these threats?

• Third, which of these grand strategies best protects America’s national interests?

• Fourth, what specific political policies and military capabilities are required to support the grand strategy chosen?

I answer the first question in Chapters 1 and 2; the second question in Chapters 3, 4, and 5; the third question in Chapter 6; and the last question in Chapter 7. I devote most of the book to the first three questions because providing answers to them is a large and difficult undertaking. So, too, is the task of answering the last question, and it deserves its own book. However, because the fundamental strategy must be fixed before the political-military specifics to support it can be identified, I take up most of the book with getting the fundamental strategy right and only sketch in with a broad brush the specific policies required to support it.

The need for a clear grand strategy for the United States has a new urgency caused by American’s current position in international politics. First, the United States possesses a margin of power over other states, especially military power, that is unparalleled in modern history; indeed, the United States is probably the most powerful global actor the world has ever seen. Consequently, what it chooses to do or not to do inevitably has profound effects not only on its own interests but also on those of most other states in the world. The choices it makes now will affect not only its future position but also the course of world politics for some time to come. Second, this margin of power will not last forever. The country has perhaps a few decades—probably three at the most—before its considerable edge over others begins to wane significantly. America’s ability to shape the world is now at its peak.

Because the costs and risks of wielding its power are not likely to be as cheap or as low as they were in the 1990s, the current moment differs dramatically from the first decade after the Cold War’s end. Despite the challenges of the 1990s, the United States had a fairly easy time of it then. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, America’s position as the world’s only superpower went largely unchallenged, and its power was mostly welcomed abroad for the stability and reassurance that an American presence provided. The United States fought wars that were quick and successful, and that involved little loss of life for its soldiers. The economic boom of the 1990s easily supported a large military force. America’s brand of capitalism looked—to some, at least—as if it could do no wrong. Most importantly, Americans felt secure behind their two oceanic moats. The country faced no state of equal size and power, and experienced no attacks on its homeland by foreign non-state actors. During the 1990s, America’s foreign policy was relatively successful, and the costs and risks of using its military forces, both for peacetime deployments abroad and for waging war, were not excessive.

The future is not likely to be so rosy for the United States. Other states, including America’s allies, are growing restive at America’s predominant position and are likely to challenge it. Thus the costs of its world role are likely to rise. The September 11, 2001, attacks by al Qaeda demonstrated that the country must now plan for the likelihood that non-state actors will engage in grand terror attacks against it—attacks that can kill thousands or millions—both with conventional means and, if they can get them, with weapons of mass destruction. Moreover, some countries that oppose the United States and that harbor aggressive designs on their neighbors’ territory are likely, sooner or later, to acquire weapons of mass destruction and the capability to deliver them against the American homeland. These developments will pose tough issues for the projection of American power. The next few decades do look more ominous.

The United States is thus at a critical juncture, and the challenge for Americans now is to decide what type of international role they want the nation to play. The eradication of foreign-based terrorist organizations that want to strike the United States cannot be the only possible answer. The prime directive of any grand strategy is, of course, to protect the homeland from attack; any state would ignore that directive at its peril. Vital as homeland security is, however, it does not constitute the last word in either foreign policy or grand strategy: America’s purpose in the world cannot be reduced simply to self-protection. Homeland security is the beginning of grand strategy, but it does not equal grand strategy. The United States is the world’s greatest power, and great powers have never lived for security alone. It is incumbent upon Americans to decide how expansive a role they want their country to play in world affairs over the next several decades, when its power to shape that world is at its peak.

THE UTILITY OF MILITARY POWER

Grand strategy involves military power, and military power is the most expensive and dangerous tool of statecraft, the one that can be the most costly in both treasure and blood. Military power, however, can also promise great benefits. If used properly, it can affect the success with which the other instruments of statecraft are employed. Using military power correctly does not ensure that a state will protect all of its interests, but using it incorrectly would put a great burden on these other instruments and could make it impossible for a state to achieve its goals. Decisions about whether and how to use military power may therefore be the most fateful a state makes. As Adam Smith put it, defense is more important than opulence.

Military power remains important in statecraft because, for the foreseeable future, there will be no world government. This is what anarchy means: the absence of government. Anarchy is not to be confused with chaos, however; in fact international politics exhibits a good deal of order, regularity, and cooperation. Unfortunately, there is also much coercion, unpredictability, and bloodshed. All politics involves coercion as well as legitimacy. In domestic politics, where consensus on norms is high and where government is effective and widely accepted, legitimacy is high, so coercion can be low. In international politics, coercion looms larger, because government is absent and legitimacy is scarcer. The politics that takes place under anarchy thus differs fundamentally from the politics that takes place under government. In international politics, states must fend for themselves because there is no one else to fend for them. In both war and peace, military power helps states fend for themselves, not simply because it provides physical protection to a state but also because its employment produces political effects.

Politics is about influence: about getting others to do what you want them to do, about who has more influence over whom in a given situation, about who alters whose behavior. Military power is one of the instruments by which a state exerts influence. Tanks may threaten or destroy other tanks, artillery may obliterate other artillery, planes may shoot down other planes, and soldiers may kill or threaten other soldiers, but, after the killing is done or a standoff is resolved, the military outcome will also significantly affect the relative bargaining power of the contestants. Even for nations that are at peace with one another, military power remains important in the background; like the force of gravity, it affects the influence that parties exert over one another. In short, military power helps shape political results. Were this not the case, states would disarm.

Military power has three political uses: deterrence, compellence (or coercion), and defense.¹ When a state employs its military power against another state or nonstate actor it wants to prevent that adversary from doing something (deter it), to force that adversary to change its behavior (compel it), or to protect itself against some harmful action that the adversary threatens or has taken (defend itself). Deterrence is the threatened use of force to dissuade an adversary from undertaking something undesirable; it involves a threat to destroy what the adversary values, with the object of dissuading it from starting an undertaking harmful to the deterrer’s interests. Compellence is the use of military power to bring about a change in an adversary’s behavior; it is designed to force an adversary to stop the objectionable actions it has already undertaken. Compellence is usually achieved by employing physical force against the adversary in order to coerce it to alter its behavior, although states can first threaten compellent actions to try to stop the objectionable behavior. If a deterrent threat is effective, the threat will not have to be executed because the adversary will not have taken (or will reverse) the objectionable steps. If a compellent action is successful, the adversary’s actions will change to accord with the behavior being demanded of it. Defense is the deployment of military power in order either to ward off an attack or to minimize damage from an attack. Defensive preparations are directed against an adversary’s military forces.²

Deterrence, compellence, and defense are not tactical uses of force but strategic outcomes, operating among states or among states and nonstate actors. These uses are not strictly military, but rather are political-military in nature: they are intended to change the political behavior of the state or nonstate actor against which force is being directed. This is the case whether military power is being physically wielded—to attack and destroy—or peacefully wielded—to offset, check, threaten, or hold in place.

There are other ways to think about how military power can be used. We could enumerate a whole host of reasons why a state would call upon its armed forces, such as reassurance of allies that they will be protected by putting troops on their territory (peacetime presence); a commitment to punish those who commit aggression (collective security); forceful interventions to prevent mass starvation, genocide, or savage ethnic conflict (humanitarian interventions); interposition of forces between two warring parties to keep an agreed-upon peace between them (peacekeeping); intervention in civil conflicts to impose peace among the warring parties (peacemaking or peace enforcement); occupation of a nation to provide the stability necessary to rebuild its political structure (nation-building); quick, decisive intrusion of forces to rescue foreign nationals (rescue operations); short-term actions to exact revenge for harm done by an adversary (punitive actions); and highly directed use of force to prevent supplies and war matériel from reaching a given destination (interdiction).³

We can categorize each of these specific uses of force by whether it produces deterrent, compellent, or defensive political effects. For example, the political goal of a reassurance action is to make allies feel secure. This is done by extending deterrence to protect them in order to dissuade their adversaries from attacking. The political goal of any collective security system is to prevent aggression; this is deterrence of attack, pure and simple. The political goal of humanitarian interventions and peacekeeping operations is to save lives; this is defense of parties from attack. The political goal of peacemaking operations is to impose peace; this is done by compelling the parties to stop fighting. The political goal of nation-building is to construct a viable government; this can be viewed as compelling armed groups to obey a new central government. The political goal of a rescue operation is to snatch away persons being held by an adversary; this can be viewed as defending the parties at risk.

Thus, no matter how varied are the stated reasons for using force, each is ultimately a deterrent, a compellent, or a defensive use of force. There is a simple but important reason why this is the case. When A seeks to influence B, it is attempting to affect B’s behavior. Logically, there are only three basic outcomes that A can produce in B: A stops B from doing something; A forces B to change its behavior; or A takes steps to minimize the damage it will suffer from what B has done or is planning to do. Deterrence, compellence, and defense thus represent the three fundamental outcomes of any attempt at influence, military or otherwise, among states or among states and nonstate actors.⁴

Two final notes about the political uses of military power are in order. First, although I have singled out military power in this book, I do not mean that other instruments of statecraft are irrelevant. No instrument of statecraft can, by itself, produce significant and lasting results on pivotal matters; military power is no exception. Military power must be properly integrated with the other instruments of statecraft—political, economic, diplomatic, and ideological—and they, too, must be integrated with military power for best results. Second, my emphasis on military power does not mean I embrace it enthusiastically. Even though it is necessary, force is a nasty instrument. Military power does affect political relations, but it achieves that result by coercing, maiming, or killing people or by threatening to do so. It is always better, although not always easier, to persuade people with positive inducements than with negative ones. When used in battle, moreover, military power all too often brings unpredictability. Its use sets off a chain of events that engages emotions, hardens positions, escalates goals, and dramatically alters the situation, often for the worse. There are also great risks in threats to use force, in guarantees of protection, or in even a simple military presence in a region. Threats might not be sufficient; guarantees might have to be fulfilled; a simple presence can quickly bring political entanglement. For all of these reasons, decision makers must never treat the military instrument lightly.

A GRAND STRATEGY FOR CONTEMPORARY AMERICA

In the chapters that follow, I go through the essential steps of formulating a grand strategy for the United States. I define America’s national interests in this era and rank them according to their importance; I identify the most likely and dangerous threats to those interests; and then, based on the first two steps, I identify the best way of deploying America’s military power to counter the threats.

I postulate six overarching national interests for the United States. The first is vital; the second and the third are highly important; and the last three are important:

• First, prevent an attack on the American homeland;

• Second, prevent great-power Eurasian wars and, if possible, the intense security competitions that make them more likely;

• Third, preserve access to a reasonably priced and secure supply of oil;

• Fourth, preserve an open international economic order;

• Fifth, foster the spread of democracy and respect for human rights abroad, and prevent genocide or mass murder in civil wars;

• Sixth, protect the global environment, especially from the adverse affects of global warming and severe climate change.

The first interest—preventing an attack on the homeland—is the one truly vital interest of the United States: the physical safety and political sovereignty of its citizenry is the prime directive of any state. The second interest—preventing great-power wars in Eurasia—is highly important because these wars could drag the United States in, and because such wars would almost inevitably threaten American trade, promote the spread of weapons of mass destruction, and bring on political changes that could severely diminish American influence. The third interest—oil—is also highly important because the United States and the rest of the world are heavily dependent on oil for energy and transportation; they cannot do without it, at least in the short and medium term. The fourth interest is important because an open international economic order helps promote the growth of wealth, and that is beneficial, in turn, because it facilitates the protection and promotion of the fifth and sixth interests. Richer states, after all, are more likely to become and remain stable democracies, as I explain later in the book, and such states, in turn, are more likely to protect human rights and to have the resources to protect their environments. The fifth interest is important because of the intrinsic value that the United States puts on democracy and the protection of human rights, but also because democratic states help to promote peace. The sixth interest is important because climate change will produce adverse effects (although the United States is better placed than most other nations to deal with those effects).

The first goal ranks above all the others because it is vital for the other five. Taken together, the first three interests rank above the other three. If the first three interests are not protected, then the security of the United States and basic health of the American economy would be put at grave risk. In contrast, if the last three were not realized, the nation would suffer to some degree, but not as severely. Those interests can add significantly to America’s security and prosperity, but only if the first three interests are realized. In their claim on American resources and leadership, the vital and highly important must take priority over the important.

These six goals encompass both realpolitik and liberal internationalist goals. The first three are classic realpolitik interests because they involve the security, safety, and basic economic health of the nation. The fourth represents a mixture of realist and liberal goals because it involves both America’s prosperity and the projection of its values abroad. The fifth is a classic liberal internationalist goal because it involves the projection of American values abroad. The last is the hardest to characterize. It might fall into either category, depending on one’s views about the severity of climate effects that will be induced by global warming, even though in the medium term, global warming looks to be at worst an inconvenience, rather than a disaster, for the United States. All six, however they are characterized, are consistent with the traditional American style and practice of foreign policy, which has always fused the realist and liberal strands of statecraft.

The gravest threat to the American homeland today comes from hostile states or terrorists armed with nuclear, biological, or chemical (NBC) weapons. The greatest threat to Eurasian great-power peace comes from any aggressor state that seeks to dominate either eastern or western Eurasia or both, or from intense great-power security competitions that could escalate to war. The severest threat to American and global prosperity lies in the disruption of oil supplies from the Persian Gulf. The most serious threats to international openness come from economic nationalism, fears that economic openness could be militarily disadvantageous, or from a Eurasian great-power war. The greatest threats to the spread of democracy and to human rights come from ruthless dictators, thug leaders, or civil wars where one or both parties resort to mass murder of non-combatants. The worst threat to the global environment comes from the unbridled use of fossil fuels that continue to pump carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

I argue that to protect America’s one vital and two highly important interests from these threats, the United States should keep a peacetime military presence in the Persian Gulf, Europe, and East Asia; maintain its key alliances and forward-based forces in those regions; and preserve a healthy military capability to reinforce forces abroad when necessary. American alliances and forces deployed abroad help stabilize these three key regions by reassuring allies and deterring potential and extant adversaries. Forward-based forces also provide more effective positions from which to go after terrorist groups that threaten the United States (as demonstrated in the war against the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan) and are also valuable should the United States decide to launch preventive wars against hostile states that acquire, or are soon to acquire, NBC weapons. Thus forward-based forces, allies, and bases abroad contribute directly to protecting the three most crucial American interests.

Alliances and forward-based forces also contribute to realizing America’s three important interests, but in a more diffuse fashion. Spreading democracy and protecting human rights by direct military intervention could be a bottomless pit for the United States; the demand far exceeds the supply of American forces and the willingness of the American people to commit them to such tasks. Similarly, waging war to preserve economic openness, other than protecting Persian Gulf oil, would generally be counterproductive. Global warming is not a problem against which use of military force is practical. However, the projection of American military power abroad can contribute indirectly to the realization of these three important interests. To the extent that an American military presence abroad promotes peace and political stability in Eurasia—and it does—then it contributes to global economic openness, wealth generation, the building and consolidation of democracy, respect for human rights, and the freeing up of resources for environmental protection. Eurasia is home to most of the world’s people, most of its proven oil reserves, and most of its major military powers, as well as a large share of its economic growth. If Eurasia remains stable and experiences economic growth, then the rest of the world, Americans included, will ultimately benefit. If, however, Eurasia experiences great-power wars and severe, prolonged economic dislocation, then the rest of the world would suffer, as modern history has shown.

In sum, all six of its interests can best be pursued if the United States remains militarily strong, militarily engaged, forward-based, and allied with key nations. None of these interests would be well served if the United States were to sheathe its sword, cut loose from its alliances, and bring its military forces home.

I favor selective engagement as the grand strategy that would best protect America’s six national interests. Selective engagement is a strategy that aims to preserve America’s key alliances and its forward-based forces. It keeps the United States militarily strong. With some important changes, it continues the internationalist path that the United States chose in 1945. It establishes priorities: it assures protection of America’s vital and highly important interests, while also holding out hope of furthering each of the three important interests to some degree. It steers a middle course between not doing enough and attempting too much; it takes neither an isolationist, unilateralist path at one extreme nor a world-policeman role at the other. Selective engagement requires that the United States remain militarily involved abroad for its own interests. A forward defense strategy is a prudent policy: it seeks to forestall dangers, not simply react to them, and to head off adverse events, not simply cope with their ill effects once they have occurred. Central to selective engagement are certain tasks that the United States must do well if its security, prosperity, and values are to be protected. Small in number, these tasks are large in scope and importance, and neither easy nor cheap to attain. If properly conceived and executed, however, selective engagement is politically feasible and affordable.

In this book, I evaluate seven other grand strategies that the United States might choose: dominion, global collective security, regional collective security, cooperative security, containment, isolationism, and offshore balancing. Of these seven, containment is politically feasible, but today it needs to be done only regionally, not globally, and for that reason can be easily subsumed under a more comprehensive strategy of selective engagement. The other six strategies are infeasible, politically unattainable, problematic, or undesirable, as I demonstrate; consequently, they cannot protect America’s interests as well as selective engagement. Dominion—a strategy to rule the world—is infeasible because it is beyond the resources of the United States. Global collective security and cooperative security are politically unattainable; the former requires a degree of global consensus that does not exist, while the latter is a great-power condominium against the smaller powers that the latter would not accept. Regional collective security is not politically feasible in most regions of the world and remains problematic even for the region ripest for it, Europe. Isolationism and offshore balancing are politically feasible, but for reasons I spell out, they are not desirable.

To make the case for a grand strategy of selective engagement, I proceed as follows. In Chapter 1, I define the five key features of the current international environment that bear most directly on America’s foreign policy interests, show how most grew out of America’s prior policies, and then derive America’s contemporary interests from those features. In Chapter 2, I justify the choice of these six fundamental national interests in more detail, analyze more fully the potential threats to them, and provide the rationale for the priority I assign to each. In Chapter 3, I give a brief overview of the eight grand strategies potentially available to the United States, and then show why four of them—dominion, global and regional collective security, and cooperative security—can be easily dismissed as either infeasible or politically unattainable, and why the fifth, containment, can be folded into selective engagement. In