This is an impressive book, offering contributions to both international relations theory and studies of American foreign policy. Economically presented, it is a model of clarity, while simultaneously treating the reader to a rich overview of historical material. Theoretically innovative and policy relevant, the book is also distinguished by a particularly thoughtful selection of cases that look well beyond the “usual suspects” to consider and explain the strategies adopted by presidents not well known for their foreign policy legacies. And although he makes bold and general claims, Peter Trubowitz is refreshingly alert to the limits of his analysis. This is not a book that insists that every case be shoehorned into fitting the model—the world is, after all, a complex place—and any one theory that claimed to explain every case set before it would (properly) be analytically suspect. In Politics and Strategy, the author is content to point to its high batting average and value added over competing approaches.
As an explanation of American foreign policy (and presentation of a model designed to apply more generally), Trubowitz's main contention is that the “international–domestic distinction is counterproductive and unnecessary” (p. 132). Contra the partisans on each side of an enduring debate, it is not possible to understand the grand strategic choices made by states by looking solely at international imperatives presented by anarchy and the balance of power; nor can domestic politics alone do the job. Instead, the author presents an integrated theory that looks at the interaction between an international- and a domestic-level variable: “geopolitical slack” (the immediacy of threats to physical security or a “rapid, averse” shift to a state's international position) and the preferences of the president's core political constituency regarding the trade-off between “guns” and “butter.” Thus, the existence of abundant geopolitical slack is indeterminate, depending on who is president and the preferences of the coalition of interests at whose pleasure he serves that might yield “expansionism” in one case but “under-extension” in another. Similarly, a clear and imminent threat might yield assertive balancing behavior, but it might just as easily result in appeasement: “Geopolitical slack and partisan preference are the twin engines of statecraft” (p. 129); moreover, they are interdependent. Leaders may craft their foreign policies to advance the interest of the nation, but Trubowitz argues that “grand strategy can also be viewed as a means by which national leaders strive to maintain or strengthen their hold on executive power” (p. 9).
Three empirical chapters test and illustrate this argument. The first, featuring Washington, Lincoln, and (Franklin) Roosevelt, offers a sophisticated treatment of when and why leaders resort to strategies of appeasement—and why that is not necessarily a bad choice. The presidencies of Van Buren, Hoover, and Clinton are introduced as examples of “underreach,” and anomalous attributes of the Clinton years (from the perspective of the model) are noted and thoughtfully considered. A chapter on expansionists includes discussions of Monroe, McKinley, and George W. Bush, finding remarkable continuity across three centuries: “[F]oreign ambition cannot be easily divorced from a leader's political self-interest” (p. 77); “in each case, strategic choice turned largely on domestic politics” (p. 78).
The discussions of all of these presidencies (and others as well) are well reasoned and generally confirming, although the George W. Bush case is somewhat less compelling and suggests some additional limits to the model. In Trubowitz's account, 9/11 “made possible geopolitically what domestic opinion would allow the militarist wing of the Republican Party to get away with” (p. 99). But this raises two issues: First, what would the Bush foreign policy have looked like without 9/11, which created a more permissive political environment (but presumably did not change the administration's core constituencies)? Second, the potentially vexing issue of “wings” within the ruling coalition suggests that (pre-9/11) not only was the geopolitical environment extremely permissive but also that with multiple, potentially conflicting wings in the Bush coalition, a priori there must have been a wide range of plausible grand strategic options.
This suggests that there might still be some substantial indeterminacy in play, even beyond that discussed by Trubowitz (the model “does not make good predictions about variation within broad grand strategy types”; p. 138). This lingering indeterminacy raises three additional but related issues that I would consider not so much critiques but reservations about the model, regarding coalitional preferences, historical legacies, and presidential agency.
Does guns versus butter accurately reflect the different preferences between parties or coalitions? It is questionable whether differences between competing political interests can be reduced to this one measure, and, more important, this may not be the ideal conceptualization of the issue. As John Lewis Gaddis argued in Strategies of Containment (1982), the defining difference might be the extent to which administrations believed there was a stark trade-off between the two: Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush thought you could have both; Dwight Eisenhower did not.
Ironically, for a book so admirably well steeped and versed in history, Politics and Strategy also flirts with ahistoricism. Were Richard Nixon's and Barack Obama's (anticipated) retrenchments really motivated by a desire to advance the interests of their domestic political supporters? The implied counterfactual is that if their opponents had won, U.S. grand strategy would have looked quite different (in fact, given that the geopolitical slack metric would be unchanged, the model predicts that had the opposing party won, policies would have been reversed—expansionism rather than retrenchment, for example). But Obama and Nixon each inherited historical legacies: long wars, overtaxed militaries, and notable economic constraints. These legacies, more than the expectation of partisan advantage, were likely decisive, presenting pressures that would have been felt by any president (Nixon, after all, spent the 1960s as one of the nation's most vociferous hawks).
Finally, the treatment of presidents as essentially political automatons with no desires other than to maximize the electoral prospects of themselves and their parties is, I suspect, consequentially restrictive. Certainly Trubowitz's sophisticated framework, which models leaders as extremely alert to the concerns and well-being of core-constituent members of their political coalition, is exactly right. But even politicians believe in things, or at least some of them do. William McKinley desperately wanted to avoid the Spanish American War; Eisenhower's caution was shaped by his military experience; Jimmy Carter really believed in human rights. None of these sentiments was rooted in political calculus—McKinley's foot dragging got him burned in effigy and hissed in theaters. Always, but especially in times of geopolitical slack, leaders' dispositions, not simply their political calculations, must matter, and probably explain some of Herbert Hoover's and Bill Clinton's “anomalous” choices—as would Obama's recent foray into Libya. With a clear preference for butter over guns, and absent the demands of any domestic political constituency, Obama and the other presidents mentioned here are not always and obviously “strategic actors who choose their policies on the basis of political self-interest” (p. 4).
These reservations do not detract from the accomplishments of this thoughtful, ambitious and provocative book; on the contrary, they were elicited by the forceful and engaging nature of its arguments. Transcending intellectual turf battles, Trubowitz takes seriously both international- and domestic-level variables, systematically crafts them into a clear, tractable analytical apparatus, and applies it to an impressive range of history.
