Review: Reluctant Crusaders

Abstract

RELUCTANT CRUSADERS Power, Culture, and Change in American Grand Strategy Colin Dueck Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006, 224pp, $29.97 (ISBN-10 0691124639)The United States responded to the 9/11 terrorist attacks by embarking on an expansive war against terrorism. This has resulted in, among other things, the promulgation of the doctrine to project American power, the renewed willingness to project American primacy to democratize the Middle East, the military invasion and reconstruction of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the infusion of significant financial and material resources into all areas of national security, including the often-neglected domain of homeland security.It is difficult to deny the scope and sheer ambition of this approach to strategic affairs. Potential near-peer rivals are to be dissuaded from even contemplating military competition. An aggressive counterterrorist and counterproliferation campaign will meanwhile contain, mitigate, or eliminate the threat posed by global terrorist organizations, rogue state adversaries, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Commentators have either applauded or decried these unapologetically unilateral policies. But few have thought to question the revolutionary basis of the Bush administration's grand strategy. And fewer still have written accounts that provide an adequate explanation for this particular case of strategic adjustment or to situate it within the larger debate on American grand strategy.In Reluctant Crusader, Colin Dueck has done an admirable job of filling in some of the more noticeable theoretical and empirical gaps in the grand literature. The first quarter of the book provides a basis for understanding grand strategy. The following chapters use a process-tracing method to test this explanatory model against four cases of American strategic adjustment-the periods following World War I, World War II, the Cold War, and the 9/11 attacks. A central theme of the book is that the resultant grand is neither foreordained by strategic culture nor entirely dependent on structural conditions.The first chapter settles on a definition of grand as a calculated relationship of ends and that involves the identification and prioritization of national interests, potential threats, and resources and/or means to meet these threats (10). This definition constitutes a valuable if uncontroversial understanding of grand as a conceptual road map and a set of policy prescriptions (11). Strategic adjustments or instances of fundamental first-order shifts in grand can be empirically measured and verified by changes in strategic capabilities and commitments. Dueck is clearly unsatisfied with the debate between culture- and powerbased explanations for strategic adjustment, and offers a more flexible explanatory model that is open to domestic and ideational factors and is firmly rooted in the more holistic ontology of neoclassical realist theory.Dueck identifies two persistent features of US strategic thinking. Liberalism is associated with the crusading desire to spread democratic ideas and governments. The Iraq War, with its explicit goal of militaryimposed democratization, is only the most recent-and perhaps aggressive-example of this liberal crusade. Limited liability, by contrast, refers to the culturally shaped preference for avoiding costs and commitments in grand strategy (26). The ambition of liberalism is therefore balanced by an equal emphasis on limited means, which the abject American failure to allocate sufficient resources for the postconflict reconstruction of Iraq clearly demonstrated.The following chapters test the neoclassical realist explanatory model against four instances of US strategic adjustment. Structural conditions provide an important starting point for any explanation of grand strategy. Material capabilities clearly delimit and ultimately constrain the state's strategic choices. …