In this agile and well-argued book, Zachary Shirkey advocates for what he calls a “dovish” foreign policy for the United States in which the country would continue to be actively engaged in the world while seeking to avoid “the active use of military force.” It would rely instead on “peaceful means” that include deterrence, sanctions, moral authority, economic aid, and the application of international institutions, international law, soft power, and diplomacy while using intelligence gathering and police work to deal with terrorism (pp. 4, 7, 127–28).

Shirkey may have picked an appropriate time for such advocacy because the country seems to be ready for a reassessment after the exhausting and costly military ventures (or adventures) in Iraq and Afghanistan that have so thoroughly failed over two decades to deliver satisfactory results at an acceptable cost. He may also be in tune with a broader American tradition. With one glaring and highly consequential period of aberration stemming from the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the country has pursued a foreign policy for at least the last half-century that was not all that much different from the one Shirkey proposes. And it seems ready now to resume that tradition.

In the wake of the Vietnam War in 1975, the United States fell into something that is frequently called the “Vietnam Syndrome.” Although still pursuing the Cold War with the Soviet Union, it avoided the active use of US military force to do so, relying instead on deterrence, sanctions, diplomacy, soft power, and support to anti-Soviet rebels in Afghanistan.

More broadly, it applied US military force rather sparingly during the entire last quarter of the twentieth century. It did take out offending regimes in tiny Grenada and Panama, and in 1991 it led an international coalition to reverse aggression by Iraq. But the opponents in these cases were scarcely formidable. Although the Iraqi Army may have looked impressive on paper, it lacked strategy, tactics, defenses, leadership, and morale, and it mostly responded by fleeing or surrendering.

Other military ventures were even more limited and were carried out mostly for humanitarian purposes. US troops were sent to Lebanon in 1983 to help police a ceasefire there but were abruptly pulled out when hundreds were killed by a terrorist bomb. Troops helped stabilize a famine induced by a civil war in Somalia in 1992 but were withdrawn later when a couple dozen of them were killed in a chaotic firefight. There were great concerns about civil warfare in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, but the US role was mostly one of handwringing, supplying some military aid and advice, and, toward the end, some focused bombing. Policing troops were sent in only after the fighting was over. And the United States led a bombing campaign against Serbia in 1999 in support of a secessionist movement, but in the process, it did not lose a single combatant or get closer than 10,000 feet to any ground fighting.

Some of these “active uses of force” might be a bit too much for Shirkey’s position. But overall, they do not give evidence of an America looking for a fight or questing after monsters to destroy. And for the most part they are consistent with his observation that “small, short run actions to preserve lives” may sometimes be “appropriate” (p. 6). At any rate, in the 2000 presidential election campaign, there seems to have been little opposition to George W. Bush’s support for a “humble” foreign policy. To a considerable degree, dovishness was ascendant.

That all changed with the big aberration: the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In its wake, Bush abruptly abandoned humility to proclaim, rather preposterously, that the country’s “responsibility to history” was now “to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil”—rather immodestly proposing to outdo God who had tried and failed to rid the world of evil with that flood of His some time ago.

The peculiar consequences of 9/11, it seems to me, could be more fully appreciated by Shirkey, because they account for the overwhelming amount of military action by the United States over the last 50 years, including, of course, the “forever wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq. That is, without 9/11, the comparative dovishness of the last quarter of the twentieth century would likely have continued.

The 9/11 attacks did not prove to be a harbinger—no terrorist attack before or after, in a war zone or out of one, has inflicted even one-tenth as much total destruction. Nonetheless, the reaction has been massive. Impelled by an overwhelming desire to get the bastards who carried out the attacks, military invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were launched to topple regimes there that had nothing to do with 9/11. Initially successful at that task, these wars of aggression soon devolved into extended counterinsurgency (or counteroccupation) operations that have resulted in the deaths of at least 100 times as many people as perished on 9/11.

Shirkey is rightly dismayed at these destructive exercises in hawkishness. But it seems to me that the massive failures of military force in the Middle East have generated a gradual shift back to Bush’s 2000 dovishness. Shirkey may now be preaching to the choir.

For example, Shirkey argues that counterinsurgency is “exceedingly difficult” because “foreign military forces are usually resented” and because “insurgents usually have the superior will” (p. 111). The US military now seems to be on much the same page. In its defense priority statement of January 2012, the Defense Department firmly emphasized (that is, rendered in italics) an insistence that “U.S. forces will no longer be sized to conduct largescale, prolonged stability operations.”

The public has gotten the message as well. In 2013, there was bipartisan support in Congress for the punitive bombing of Syria after a gas attack in the civil war there. But out of concern that it would lead to further involvement in the conflict, the public was strongly opposed to that action as members of Congress of both parties discovered when they went home. Shirkey worries about the seduction of force, but it certainly was not operative in this episode. The United States seems, then, to have embraced an Iraq Syndrome in which the central slogan is “let’s not do that anymore.”

Given the “failure of force” noted in Shirkey’s subtitle, it is amazing that the military is still held in such high esteem and continues to command such a high budget. Shirkey joins the adulation, calling “the US military one of the most, if not the most, revered institutions in American society today” (p. 73), and he writes that servicemen and women “have repeatedly done all that is asked of them and have done it well” (p. 6). In that mood, he blames the monumental failures of the 9/11–induced uses of military force on just about everybody but the military, specifically citing “US-elected officials and, ultimately, the Americans who choose those officials” (p. 6). That is, anyone who voted for Bush, Obama, or Trump.

However, the military itself is more critical of its failings. This is implicit in its italicized refusal of 2012 to ever again engage in large stability operations, suggesting that the military and its leaders have come to the conclusion that they simply do not know how to conduct them. If they had come to that recognition a decade earlier, hundreds of thousands of lives would not have been wasted as a result of their efforts. The military surely deserves some blame for the failure of force in these costly wars: it has not “done it well.”

Shirkey stresses that the world is “full of dangers” and “a dangerous place” (pp. 2, 5). However, he supplies little detailed assessment of what those dangers are, and he points out that the United States is in a “highly favorable strategic position” and lacks “immediate security threats” (pp. 33). Indeed, the reaction to the rise of China, which many do see as the primary danger out there, suggests that Shirkey has a great deal of support because policies advocated even by alarmists to deal with the problem presented by China pretty much fit his “dovish” perspective. The most forceful of these is to rearrange the military in a (potentially quixotic) effort to deter the Chinese by “balancing” against it. Other proposals are even more congruent with his general position. They advocate, for example, working with allies and with other countries in Asia, strengthening the capacity to understand China, applying diplomatic pressure, bargaining carefully, compromising, avoiding effectively collaborating with China’s repressive policies, countering China’s efforts potentially to control communication networks, encouraging transparency, maximizing positive interactions with the Chinese people and with the Chinese diaspora, maintaining competitiveness and our values, abandoning domestic discord, and cooperating on common interests such as pollution, climate change, and North Korea.

Shirkey begins the book by expressing “the need for a more peaceful foreign policy” (p. 1). After the 9/11 aberration, it looks like he is going to get it. Maybe he should be taking a victory lap.