Rethinking America's Grand Strategy: Insights from the Cold War

Abstract

Abstract: This essay examines the history of the Cold War to illuminate insights that can help assess debates about American grand strategy today. As will be shown, calls for dramatic retrenchment and offshore balancing rest on weak historical foundations. Yet Cold War history also reminds us that a dose of restraint-and occasional selective retrenchment-can be useful in ensuring the long-term sustainability of an ambitious grand strategy. ********** US grand strategy stands at a crossroads. (1) Since World War II, the United States has pursued an ambitious and highly engaged grand strategy meant to mold the global order. The precise contours of that grand strategy have changed from year to year, and from presidential administration to presidential administration; however its core, overarching principles have remained essentially consistent. America has sought to preserve and expand an open and prosperous world economy. It has sought to foster a peaceful international environment in which democracy can flourish. It has sought to prevent any hostile power from dominating any of the key overseas regions---Europe, East Asia, the Middle East--crucial to US security and economic wellbeing. And in support of these goals, the United States has undertaken an extraordinary degree of international activism, anchored by American alliance and security commitments to overseas partners, and the forward presence and troop deployments necessary to substantiate those commitments. (2) This grand strategy has, on the whole, been profoundly productive for both the United States and the wider world, for it has underpinned an international system that has been--by any meaningful historical comparison--remarkably peaceful, prosperous, and democratic. (3) Yet over the past several years, America's long-standing grand strategy has increasingly come under fire. Amid the long hangover from the Iraq War and a painful financial crisis whose effects are still being felt, leading academic observers have taken up the banner of retrenchment. Prominent voices in the strategic-studies community argue the United States can no longer afford such an ambitious grand strategy; that US alliances and security commitments bring far greater costs than benefits; and that American overseas presence and activism create more problems than they solve. The solution, they contend, is a sharp rollback of US military presence and alliance commitments, and a far more austere foreign policy writ large. Scholars such as Stephen Walt, John Mearsheimer, and Barry Posen have been at the forefront of such calls for restraint or offshore balancing within the academy; mainstream commentators like Peter Beinart and Ian Bremmer have offered similar assessments. (4) These calls for retrenchment have recently been amplified by fears of American decline vis-a-vis rising or resurgent rivals such as Russia and China, and by the emergence of a host of strategic challenges around the world. Basic questions of what America should seek to achieve in international affairs, and whether it should break fundamentally with the postwar pattern of US global presence and activism, are more now robustly debated than at any time since the end of the Cold War. (5) The debate between these two rival schools of thought centers on a series of key strategic questions. Can the US economy sustain the burdens of a global defense posture? Are US alliances net benefits or detriments to American security? Is the US overseas presence stabilizing or destabilizing in its effects? Is democracy-promotion a boon or a burden for US strategic interests? How would an American military retrenchment affect geopolitical outcomes and alignments in key regions? Is the United States in inexorable geopolitical decline? How one answers these questions frequently determines which path one believes America should take in the future. Yet grand strategy is not simply about the future; it is also about the past. …