A Grand Strategy for America.

By Robert J. Art. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. 352p. $29.95.

The Challenge of Hegemony: Grand Strategy, Trade, and Domestic Politics.

By Steven E. Lobell. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. 256p. $55.00.

Writing books about American grand strategy became a cottage industry after the Cold War ended. Nevertheless, the two books reviewed here contribute new insights. Both address American grand strategy from a realist perspective. Material and domestic interests drive American foreign policy more than institutions (e.g., G. John Ikenberry, After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Constraint, and the Rebuilding of Order After Major Wars, 2001) or ideas (Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, 1996). Bob Art examines military aspects of American grand strategy and unflinchingly reaffirms the relevance of the use of force and American alliances in the new world of grand terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. Steven Lobell focuses on economic aspects and demonstrates the importance of liberal commercial policies for transitioning from American hegemony to a more pluralistic world.

Art, a senior and seasoned scholar, deploys his craft masterfully. In A Grand Strategy for America he presents a clearheaded, classical, national-interest analysis that starts with a ranking of America's basic interests. The only vital interest, he argues, is homeland security, to prevent an attack on American territory. Two other interests qualify as highly important; to prevent great power competition and wars in Eurasia (Europe or Asia) that, as history shows, America cannot escape; and to preserve access to reasonably priced and secure oil supplies from the Middle East. And three further interests rank as important: to preserve an open international economic system, foster the spread of democracy and human rights and avoid genocide, and protect the global environment. Threats to these interests include grand terror attacks, the spread of weapons of mass destruction to hard-to-deter state leaders and terrorist fanatics, looming prospects of global warming, and the eventual emergence of peer competitor states in Eurasia that might disrupt global peace and markets.

Art then dissects eight grand strategies to promote American interests against these threats. They include American dominion, universal collective security, regional collective security, cooperative security, containment, selective engagement, offshore balancing, and isolationism. The first four strategies he finds wanting because they exceed either the resources (U.S. dominion) or the degree of consensus (universal and regional collective security, as well as cooperative security) necessary to implement them. Containment works only against specific great-power threats, of which there are none at the moment.

Of the remaining three, Art finds that selective engagement does the best job of safeguarding American interests. It takes advantage of the sunk costs of America's alliances and avoids the need to rebuild these alliances once new threats emerge (offshore balancing) or the illusion that America can hide from such threats altogether (isolationism). Currently, as the author points out, America defends some 37 countries through formal or informal agreements. These countries are located primarily in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. He calls for maintaining forward bases in these areas at roughly present levels (212,000 troops on land, 43,000 afloat, numbers now expanded by U.S. operations in Iraq). He acknowledges that such a strategy may not be selective enough for some critics but argues persuasively that it is much cheaper over the long run than more selective strategies. Certainly, this judgment has been vindicated by U.S. military activities in Iraq, where even though allies such as Germany disapproved America's action, they permitted the United States to use forward bases at considerable savings to the American taxpayer.

Art's analysis is a sober reminder to European and American multilateralists that the use of force remains essential for managing world peace beyond the Atlantic region. Europe still has no credible fighting (as opposed to peacekeeping) force to deploy outside Europe, although it is assembling a small rapid-reaction force. For major threats, it relies on the United States, in part, as Art correctly observes, because Europeans continue to trust American military and especially nuclear leadership more than they do the leadership of one another. He advocates the use of force, however, only to protect vital or highly important interests. In rare cases when the use of force is cheap, quick, and effective, it might also be used to protect democracy (Philippines 1989), prevent mass murder (Rwanda 1994), or preempt threats to more important interests (such as the threat to NATO in Bosnia). And although Art allows for the possibility that America may have to act unilaterally on occasion, he gives no example and completes the book too late to make a judgment on U.S. intervention in Iraq.

Art assumes, correctly I believe, that a large degree of consensus continues to exist between the United States and its principal allies. But if the allies reject the use of force in all but the most extreme situations, the United States may be forced to adopt a strategy somewhat less than selective engagement but more than offshore balancing. Such an alternative is a strategy that operates from the perimeter of world trouble spots but counters threats aggressively, rather than waiting for them to emerge. This strategy would abandon fixed forward bases in favor of greater air and naval power in order to project lightly armed forces into troubled situations around the periphery of Eurasia and the Middle East for specific missions and periods of time. This “offshore plus” strategy, which some Pentagon planners seem to favor, would reduce dependence on allies to fight conflicts but still depend on allied and international cooperation to keep the peace in unstable countries after the fighting ends.

Lobell has more limited aims in his conceptually rigorous and tightly reasoned study. He explores how declining hegemons reconcile their international commitments with domestic resources, while not undermining their economic power or national security. Both commitments and resources are ultimately a function of the degree of openness of the international commercial system and the impact that this system has on the domestic power struggle between liberal free traders and economic nationalists. An international system populated by challengers who practice free trade will “ratchet up” the relative power of free traders within the hegemon. These groups favor grand strategies that minimize defense costs through arms limitations and more efficient open markets, and thus prolong the transition to a more pluralistic world. By contrast, an international system populated by contenders pursuing imperial commercial policies empowers economic nationalists in the hegemon. Economic nationalists favor strategies of punishment that impose higher defense costs and retaliatory tariffs. These strategies expand the hegemon's commitments and exhaust its resources, precipitating a more rapid and violent decline of the hegemon.

Lobell tests this argument against three historical periods: 1) Great Britain from 1882 to 1914; 2) Great Britain from 1932 to 1939; and 3) Spain from 1621 to 1640. In the first period, Britain confronted a mix of liberal contenders in the United States, Japan, and France after 1904 and imperial contenders in Germany, Russia, and France before 1904. In this situation, liberal free traders in Great Britain, including the Labour and Liberal Parties, financial service institutions, export firms, the Treasury and Foreign Office, and Gladstonian-minded civil servants, dominated British grand strategy. Minimizing defense outlays, they devolved power to Japan in the Far East (Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902), the United States in the Western Hemisphere (Hay-Paunceforte Treaty of 1901), and France in the eastern Mediterranean (Entente Cordiale in 1904). Great Britain also concluded the Anglo-Russian agreement in 1907 and even sought arms limitation agreements with imperial Germany. Germany's naval buildup in 1912–13 eventually undermined the influence of free traders in London. From that point on, economic nationalists gained power, and British grand strategy shifted progressively from cooperative to punitive strategies toward contenders.

In the period from 1932 to 1939, Britain faced a world of mostly imperial contenders—Japan, the Soviet Union, Germany, and Italy. The exception was the United States. In this situation, Britain pursued policies of “restrained punishment.” Economic nationalists, including inefficient iron, steel, coal, and auto industries, state planners, the military services, defense ministries, and empire organizations, pushed through increased military expenditures, imperial preferences, abandonment of the gold standard, state intervention in the economy, quotas on Japanese exports, loan and credit embargoes against Germany, and trade sanctions against Italy. By the mid-1930s, free traders at the Bank of England, Treasury, and elsewhere began to compromise with nationalists to “restrain” the policy of punishment. The result was that Britain armed too late to deter Germany but embraced imperial trade policies that clashed with U.S. free-trade objectives after the war.

From 1621 to 1640, Spain faced a world of entirely imperial challengers. Accordingly, economic nationalists determined its grand strategy. Including King Philip IV, his aide the Count-Duke of Olivares, and various empire organizations invested in Portugal, the Indies, and Flanders, the nationalists progressively taxed and squeezed the liberal factions centered in the Cortes (parliament) of Castille; the shipping, textile, and manufacturing industries; and the Genoese bankers. Spain waged a war of punishment against the United Provinces in northeastern Europe, the French and Turks in Italy, the Protestant states in Bohemia, and the Dutch and English in the Americas. By midcentury, Spain had exhausted its resources and gradually faded from great power status.

From this analysis and in contrast to Art, Lobell concludes that the United States should reject grand strategies of selective engagement as well as primacy and devolve power more quickly to liberal challengers in the European Union and Japan. In this manner, the United States takes advantage of a world of predominantly liberal challengers and conserves American resources, while encouraging remaining imperial countries (China and Russia) to follow suit.

Lobell reminds us that power is never value neutral but organizes commercial systems in liberal or imperial terms. Even more importantly, power organizes political societies in liberal (democratic) or imperial (authoritarian) terms. U.S. national interests depend on this political identity of nations as much as on their relative power. When identities change, the rank ordering of national interests may change. If a hegemon emerges in Europe that is democratic, namely, the European Union, is it still a highly important interest of the United States to prevent such a hegemon? And if democratic hegemons do not threaten America's basic interests, does not the spread of liberal democratic regimes become a highly important or even vital interest of the United States, rather than just an important one? After all, the United States does not seek merely to defend its homeland from attack. It seeks to preserve a liberal democratic society. A liberal international commercial system advances this objective, as Lobell suggests. But no liberal commercial system exists without an underlying military order that preserves a liberal peace, sometimes, as Art argues, by using force against despotic threats. What governs the use of force in these situations, however, are not just territorial or economic objectives. Political objectives matter more. We could defeat terrorism materially but, in the process, lose our civil liberties. No one would consider that homeland security. Realists are slowly beginning to recognize that political values, which motivate power, are also facts and that it is only “realistic” to take them into account.