The six years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington have seen a proliferation of books on the limits of U.S. primacy, the origins of the Bush doctrine, and the future of U.S. grand strategy. The conventional wisdom is that the George W. Bush administration's grand strategy—chiefly its unilateralism, its hubris, its open embrace of “preemption” (more accurately preventive war) as means to prevent states and terrorists from acquiring weapons of mass destruction, its pursuit of democratization in the Middle East as a cure-all for jihadist terrorism, and its refusal to plan for or devote sufficient resources to the postwar reconstruction of Iraq in 2003–4—represent a radical break with the grand strategies of previous administrations.

In Reluctant Crusaders, Colin Dueck not only challenges conventional wisdom, but also offers a warning: For better or ill, realism and liberalism will likely remain warring imperatives in U.S. foreign policy discourse, and future administrations will likely respond to international threats through the lens of liberal internationalism and limited liability. To paraphrase John Quincy Adams, America will likely continue to go abroad in search of monsters to destroy, but will be loath to buy a large enough sword to finish the task.

Dueck presents in-depth case studies of periods where the United States confronted new international threats and opportunities: the debate over participation in the League of Nations after World War I (1918–21); the aftermath of World War II and the origins of containment (1945–51); the debates over U.S. grand strategy following the Cold War (1990–2001); and the post-9/11 era and the Bush administration's “global war on terrorism.” In each period, the United States enjoyed a clear power advantage over current and potential adversaries. Nevertheless, resulting shifts in grand strategy were not predictable based solely upon the international balance of power or underlying continuities in domestic politics and strategic culture. To explain this variation, Dueck develops a neoclassical realist theory of strategic adjustment. He tests his theory against two alternatives: the offensive realism of John Mearsheimer and cultural-constructivist theories of Thomas Berger, Alastair Iain Johnston, Jeffrey Legro, and Elizabeth Kier.

Neoclassical realism draws upon the rigor and theoretical clarity of the neorealism of Kenneth Waltz, Robert Gilpin, and others without sacrificing practical insights about foreign policy and the complexity of statecraft found in the classical realism of Hans J. Morgenthau, Henry Kissinger, Nicholas Spykman, and Arnold Wolfers. Systemic imperatives, chiefly relative power and anticipated power trends, shape the grand strategies of the great powers. Over the long run, international political outcomes mirror the distribution of power. However, as Gideon Rose observes, unit-level factors—namely leaders' perceptions and calculations about relative power and other states' intentions and domestic political constraints—often impede efficient responses to systemic imperatives. In the short run, the links between systemic forces and states' grand strategies are complex, indirect, and problematic (Gideon Rose, “Neoclassical Realism and Theories of Foreign Policy,” World Politics 51 [October 1998]: 144–77).

Building in part on earlier neoclassical realist works (e.g., see William Wohlforth, The Elusive Balance, 1993; and Aaron Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State, 2000), Dueck posits a crucial intervening role for elite belief systems in strategic adjustment. In the U.S. case, classical liberal assumptions—chiefly a deep-seated and often naive belief in spreading liberal democracy and open markets abroad as means to make the United States more secure—act as filters on potential policy options, “allowing certain strategic alternatives while rendering others unthinkable” (p. 4).

Thus, for example, in 1919–20, the option of a peacetime alliance with Great Britain and France as a hedge against a resurgent Germany was simply unthinkable for President Woodrow Wilson; U.S. participation in the League of Nations was the only viable route to postwar security (pp. 48–50). An amicable divorce of the World War II grand alliance, wherein the United States and the Soviet Union would divide Europe and Asia into spheres of influence, initially had support from some officials in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. However, President Harry Truman and his advisers quickly rejected realpolitik spheres of influence in favor of the more ambitious and risky strategy of containment (pp. 86–88). Finally, after the USSR's demise, neither the George H. W. Bush nor the Clinton administrations considered replacing containment with a grand strategy of offshore balancing as many realists (including Waltz and Mearsheimer) advocated. Instead, they maintained forward troop deployments and established the maintenance of American preponderance beyond challenge as the central aim of their grand strategies (pp. 114–27).

“Limited liability”—a desire to limit costs of international commitments far more than most realist theories would predict—serves as the second filter in U.S. strategic adjustment. These two cultural legacies—liberal internationalism and limited liability—contradict each other and occasionally produce dysfunctional patterns in U.S. grand strategy. For example, in 1947–50, the Truman administration sought to contain the USSR, while simultaneously limiting defense budgets to $45 billion per annum to mollify congressional Republicans. In the 1990s, the Clinton administration repeatedly threatened force to halt ethnic civil wars in Bosnia and Kosovo and to restore the democratically elected Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power. However, after the failed 1993 Somalia intervention, the administration was highly sensitive to military casualties. Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic and the Haitian military junta repeatedly called the United States' bluff. As Dueck writes, “The result was a series of half-hearted interventions, which only served to reinforce the impressions that Americans were unwilling to sustain any significant costs on behalf of their role in the world” (p. 138). Finally, the current Bush administration embarked upon a grandiose project to remake the Middle East in America's image “on the cheap” and now finds itself mired in an Iraqi civil war.

Realists have long lamented the periodic tendency of the United States to embark upon ideological crusades abroad. Dueck's Reluctant Crusaders goes some way in providing a causal explanation for such anomalous, and at times, self-defeating, strategic behavior.