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Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
Sprache: Englisch
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Even as growing polarization and hyper-partisanship define society and politics at home, American leaders seem to agree on one thing: US military dominance abroad is essential for national security and international stability. This is despite an upswing in popular support for “doing less” overseas.

What explains Washington’s blinkered view of its foreign policy options? Why is the pursuit of military primacy so deeply entrenched in America that alternative approaches have become unthinkable?

The answer, argues Peter Harris, can be found at the level of domestic politics. The modern US state was built during World War II and the Cold War to support a globe-spanning and long-term effort to project military power abroad. This domestic order is hardwired to reject foreign policies of restraint or retrenchment. If the United States is ever to assume a more normal world role, it must first undergo a period of domestic reform, renewal, and realignment. This book explains what these domestic changes might look like – and how a grand strategy of restraint can be implemented from the inside out.

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Leseprobe

Cover

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Introduction

The Problems with Primacy

The Alternatives: Restraint and Retrenchment

Outline of the Book

Notes

1. Waves of Expansion, 1857–Present

Commerce, Coal, and Colonization: 1857–1897

Imperial Apogee: 1898–1917

Age of Ambivalence: 1917–1941

World War II and Its Aftermath: 1941–1949

The Cold War: 1950–1989

The Beached Superpower: 1990–Present

Conclusion

Notes

2. The Restraint Debate

Why America Didn’t Retrench: Primacy as Geopolitical Insurance

Liberal Utopianism: Constructing a New World Order

The Liberal–Primacist Fusion: Today’s Consensus

Why America Should Retrench: Arguments Then and Now

Conclusion: Is There a Coherent Movement for Restraint?

Notes

3. Making the Militarist State

The Changed American State

Path Dependence

The Role of Exogenous Shocks

Temporal Sequencing

Conclusion: The (Militarist) State We’re In

Notes

4. America’s Primacists

The Profits of Primacy

The Ideational Foundations of Primacy

America’s Militarist Identity

Signs of Erosion

Conclusion

Notes

5. Unfit for Peace

Congress and the Imperial Presidency

Elections and Party Politics

America’s Army of National-Security Bureaucrats

“Hail to the Fief”: America’s Global Garrison State

Societal Consent

The Militarist Redoubt

Conclusion

Notes

6. Domestic Renewal

Economic Change, War Weariness, and Flagging Support for Primacy

The Partisanship Problem

The Case for Systemic Reform

Executive–Legislative Relations

Making Retrenchment Salable

Empowering a Restraint Coalition

Conclusion

Notes

7. Internationalism Anew

Pulling Back

Direct Deterrence and National Self-Defense

Offshore Balancing

International Organizations and Arms Control

Overseas Development and Women’s Empowerment

An Open World Economy

Retrenchment without Retreat

Notes

Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Begin Reading

Index

End User License Agreement

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Why America Can’t Retrench

(And How It Might)

PETER HARRIS

polity

The right of Peter Harris to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2024 by Polity Press

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6211-4

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2024932378

The publisher has used its best endeavors to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com

Dedication

For my family

Acknowledgments

I enjoyed writing this book. So much so, in fact, that I might have to write another one. When I do, I’ll take care to share that manuscript with more people than I shared this one with—not least of all because then my acknowledgments section can be longer. This one will be short.

Louise Knight, Inès Boxman, and Olivia Jackson at Polity were tremendous to work with. I’m grateful to Louise for seeing the potential in this project and for her expert advice. I hope to have done her proud. Phil Dines paid enormous attention to detail when copyediting my work, adding immense value in the process, and Evie Deavall did the all-important work of shepherding the manuscript through the production cycle.

Two anonymous reviewers gave feedback on an earlier draft of the manuscript. I thank them for their generosity. As they will see, I’ve incorporated almost all of their suggestions in this final version. Truly, I am indebted to them for their care, attention, diligence, and astonishing depth of knowledge.

I’ve never been one for sharing ideas with close colleagues – much to my detriment, no doubt – but this book benefited from me being around a brilliant group of young scholars at Colorado State University. My thanks to JB Bae, Iasmin Goes, Matt Hitt, Alexis Kennedy, Julia Lee, Kyle Saunders, Dom Stecula, and Daniel Weitzel in particular for making my workplace such a pleasant environment. Bob Duffy is a great chair.

Beyond CSU, I’m grateful to Defense Priorities for making me part of another intellectual community. Even though I don’t identify as a realist, the DEFP team has been nothing but welcoming. I’ve learnt a lot about restraint from watching them go about their work. I respect their unwavering commitment to rigor and wish that every policymaker was exposed to their careful analyses.

Peter Trubowitz has been a strong source of encouragement for the past fourteen years. He probably won’t agree with everything in this book, but he’ll surely notice something familiar about the approach and argument. I hope that imitation is still the sincerest form of flattery.

Meriel Hahn provided outstanding research assistance and became a valued coauthor. Though we never actually met because of the COVID-19 pandemic, I appreciated Meriel’s help and professionalism. Her work with me was supported by funds from CSU’s College of Liberal Arts and Department of Political Science.

Two of my mentors sadly passed away during this book’s evolution from proposal stage to finished product. In May 2019, just as I was developing ideas for how to spend my sabbatical year, my undergraduate adviser at the University of Edinburgh died unexpectedly. John Peterson was a terrific adviser. He had a big impact on me. I’m sorry that John didn’t live to see this book come to fruition. I would’ve taken great delight in sending him a copy.

My friend Robert Lawrence died in October 2023, just weeks before I submitted the first draft of the manuscript to Polity. Bob was my predecessor at CSU. We discussed the thesis of this book more than a few times over burgers and coffee. I was always a bit embarrassed that progress was so slow. He endorsed the broad contours of my argument and gave feedback on how to hone the contribution. I miss Bob very much. I wish I could chat with him now.

The Charles Koch Foundation provided financial backing for me to extend my sabbatical into a second semester. I thank Andrew Byers for his support and kindness. Ted Tyler has been great to work with, too. Portions of the book were written while I benefited from another grant, from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. While this second grant funded a separate research project, some of the ideas are connected. My thanks to Karim Kamel, Noelle Pourrat, Hillary Weisner, and the rest of the team in New York.

I hope my family in England, Scotland, California, and Colorado enjoy the book. It is dedicated to them.

Introduction

The United States has pursued a grand strategy of military primacy since the end of the Cold War. Among other things, this has meant readying US forces to fight multiple, simultaneous overseas wars at a moment’s notice; reassuring dozens of treaty allies that Americans will provide for their defense, whether in whole or in part; and trying to dominate rivals such that no challenger can hope to order international affairs in ways that cut against US interests. These are expansive foreign policies meant to serve expansive ends. In the words of historian Daniel Immerwahr, “The [US] federal government doesn’t just run the United States; it seeks to run the world.”1 In this sense, America is truly exceptional. It is the only country that occupies dozens of foreign nations with its soldiers, sailors, and airmen. The US military accounts for around 40 percent of the international community’s total defense spending, despite Americans constituting just 4.25 percent of the world’s population. Simply put, no other government comes close to defining or acting upon its security interests as expansively as Washington. The United States is a sui generis world power.

But there is nothing inevitable about this world role. Indeed, it is doubtful that America’s primacist approach to international affairs would be adopted today if leaders and the voting public were to redesign the nation’s foreign policies from scratch. Over 800 overseas bases, approximately 170,000 active-duty military personnel deployed in more than eighty countries and territories (plus in excess of a million stationed at home),2 a defense budget surpassing $850 billion, and treaty-based alliances with more than one quarter of the world’s states – none of these statistics makes obvious sense in the absence of an existential threat to national security. Nor are they consistent with traditional tenets of US political culture like limited government, fiscal responsibility, and equality among nations. Worse still, there is compelling evidence that a grand strategy of military primacy makes Americans less secure, not more.3

Why is the United States such an outlier? Why are its foreign-policy leaders wedded to the pursuit of global military primacy? In this book, I pin the blame for America’s stubborn attachment to primacism on its domestic political system. The simple version of my argument is that the United States can only adopt such foreign policies as its leaders dare to imagine – but that, for decades, members of the political class have been disincentivized from questioning the country’s massive, indefinite overseas interventions. Indeed, some of the most celebrated US forward deployments in Europe and East Asia have ceased to be “interventions” at all – a word that connotes military missions of a temporary nature rather than the permanent garrisons that, by now, characterize much of America’s forward presence in Eurasia.

It was not always so. Before World War II, it was common for leaders in Washington – including sitting presidents and their closest advisers – to articulate and implement “anti-interventionist” foreign policies.4 Periods of expansion and activism were often followed by bouts of retrenchment and restraint. But the experiences of fighting World War II and the Cold War altered America’s domestic politics in profound ways, gradually eroding the salability of noninterventionist ideas such that, eventually, outright primacism became cemented as the political center ground.5

It is difficult to overstate just how much the United States changed during the second half of the twentieth century. Between 1941 and 1991, persistently high government spending – especially on defense – became the norm, whereas before it had largely been shunned except during times of national emergency. The presidency expanded its powers at the expense of Congress, particularly over war and national security policy, with increasing numbers of decisions being taken in secret. Strict limits were set on the boundaries of acceptable political discourse. Antiwar positions – once noble, patriotic, and mainstream – became radical and, in some cases, were deemed “un-American.” Cutting deals with America’s adversaries became suspect, with arguments for retrenchment conflated with isolationism (now a slur), declinism, and dishonor. Militarism became a part of the US national identity. And of course, entire industries, towns, and cities became dependent upon a steady flow of defense dollars – what President Eisenhower unfavorably called the “military-industrial complex.”6

These alterations to the fabrics of US government, politics, economics, and society were controversial at the time, emphasized by critics as evidence of a creeping “garrison state.”7 Even those most responsible for placing the United States on a permanent war footing often did so with a heavy heart. President Truman, for example, agonized about the trade-offs between containing the Soviet Union and preserving civil liberties and personal freedoms at home.8 Eisenhower, too, sought to temper defense spending and used his Farewell Address (in vain) to caution against excessive militarism. By the end of the Cold War, however, such warnings had become fewer and farther between. The militarization of the United States was the new normal. The collapse of the Soviet Union left Washington without a peer competitor on the world stage – but even though external conditions no longer required the United States to pursue primacy abroad and militarization at home, domestic politics strongly encouraged these things while discouraging efforts to return to a pre–World War II posture.

In short, the end of the Cold War revealed that the United States had become hardwired to favor the pursuit of global military primacy and all that went along with it. With the Red Army no longer posing a threat to Western Europe or East Asia, the United States could have adjusted to its new international environment – one defined by abundant security rather than intense rivalry with another superpower – by bringing home the forward deployments that had been sent overseas for the explicit purpose of deterring Soviet aggression. In the event, however, sizable drawdowns only occurred in Europe – and, even there, reductions in force strength were coupled with the expansion of US security commitments in the form of NATO enlargement and participation in the Yugoslav Wars. Everywhere outside of Europe, America’s military footprint either remained static or grew larger. Meanwhile, the US state and its adjunct institutions continued to function just as they had during the Cold War: squarely focused on the question of how to mobilize national resources in service of sweeping international objectives. It went largely unquestioned that the United States ought to be involved in the political and security affairs of other regions; that overwhelming military power was an indispensable part of how the United States should interface with the rest of the world; and that a primacist approach to foreign policy would redound to the benefit of all Americans.

Today, a powerful bias in favor of militarized and interventionist foreign policies still exists across the full expanse of the US political system: in presidential politics, Congress, the news media, academia, think tanks, and beyond.9 The gravitational pull of militarism is so strong that US leaders are almost always unable or unwilling to pare down America’s overseas commitments while in office, regardless of whether they believe military primacy to be truly necessary as a means of securing US national interests. When they do engage in policies of retrenchment, presidents and their allies invariably face strong political headwinds.10 This is true even though the original justifications for America’s vast forward deployments have long since expired, a fact that ought to raise fundamental questions about why the United States has not adjusted its foreign policies accordingly. My argument, then, is that the US political system has become unfit for purpose – unfit for peace – because it disallows the types of discussion that are surely warranted given the gigantic changes that have taken place to the international system and domestic politics in recent decades. In the final analysis, this is why America has not retrenched: because its leaders operate inside a political system that comprehensively disincentivizes them from seriously considering such a course.

Can barriers to retrenchment and restraint be overcome? My answer is yes, it is possible to reform domestic politics to permit a move away from military primacy – and, moreover, that US leaders will be pressured to undertake exactly such a strategic adjustment under conditions of greater multipolarity. Just because Americans have become accustomed to waging a foreign policy of military primacy does not mean they cannot be jolted into accepting new and different imaginations of their country’s proper world role. But such efforts must proceed from a sober reckoning of the domestic landscape as it currently exists. After all, more than eighty years have elapsed since America’s entry into World War II, which means that the United States has been fighting for – or striving to preserve – something like global military primacy for a full third of its lifespan as an independent republic. The vast array of institutions, processes, habits, interests, ideas, and identities that have been inculcated during this time will not be easy to dislodge. Nobody under 30 years of age can recall a time when the United States was not at war in the Middle East. Hardly anyone alive can remember when their country’s armed forces were not massively forward deployed in Europe and East Asia. The challenge for those who would have America relinquish its pretense to global leadership and indispensability, therefore, goes far beyond academic debates over the appropriate ends and means of US grand strategy. To dismantle the primacist superstructures of US foreign policy, critics must focus their attention on the base – that is, government and politics on the home front.

This is the second purpose of the book: to suggest ideas for how domestic-level stumbling blocks to military retrenchment might be overcome. My goal is to complement the raft of scholarship that calls for a US grand strategy of “restraint.”11 Advocates of restraint have provided no shortage of persuasive arguments for why a turn away from military preponderance makes sense – for example, that America’s external environment no longer requires deep overseas engagement on par with what was viewed as necessary during the Cold War; that other countries are more than capable of providing for their own defense and for the collective security of key allies; that recent US-led military interventions seem to create more international turmoil than they resolve; and that a slenderer foreign policy would allow for social, economic, and democratic renewal at home.

All these points have merit. But major strategic adjustments are difficult to bring about, even when the case for change is strong. America’s current world role has put down deep roots in US domestic politics. Once new and extraordinary, the geopolitical reality of the United States being forward deployed across almost the entire planet is now sustained and supported by a powerful assemblage of domestic interests, from local communities that depend upon defense spending as an economic lifeline to national-level politicians who fear criticism for being “soft” on national security. This is why, if they are serious about changing foreign policy over the long haul, proponents of restraint must have a plan to change not just America’s foreign relations but its domestic politics, too.

To restore flexibility and introspection to US foreign policy, I propose a two-pronged strategy of “domestic renewal” and “internationalism anew.” In terms of the former, I suggest a series of political reforms that would level the playing field for those who believe the United States should pursue a more circumscribed world role. These include strengthening the Congress vis-à-vis the presidency, especially in terms of war powers but also over military policy during times of peace; disestablishing America’s two-party duopoly through changes to the electoral system; and introducing new transparency measures so that a more diverse array of political actors can understand the impact of foreign relations on domestic society. If adopted, the domestic reforms introduced in this book would democratize US foreign policy and open the door to a more normal world role. The goal is not to replace America’s primacist cartel with a restraint-oriented counterpart, but to imagine a more pluralistic political environment within which the American people might be exposed to a wider range of ideas about foreign policy. While others have made the case for domestic renewal before, my contribution is to argue that no such agenda will succeed unless it includes a proper diagnosis of militarism as a major feature (and cause) of America’s ossified political system.

I recognize, of course, that no movement to replace the national security state will succeed unless it can recommend an alternative design for how to engage with the rest of the world. Americans cannot be expected to dismantle the domestic foundations of military primacy without a credible plan for what comes next. How will the United States ensure its external security without a massive military presence in Europe, East Asia, the Persian Gulf, and beyond? What would military retrenchment mean for the future of US prosperity? Will retrenchment jeopardize America’s role as the lynchpin of global governance? In short, what are the risks of retrenchment given the uncertainty that inheres in world affairs – and how can these potential hazards be mitigated? My answer to these questions is twofold.

First, the current strategy of military primacy has already become ill-suited to prevailing international conditions. It will become altogether unviable as a grand strategy once the international system completes its evolution toward multipolarity in the coming decades. This means that maintaining the status quo is simply not an option, a reality with which the American people and their leaders must come to terms. Second, it is essential that retrenchment and restraint are not mistaken for retreat or isolationism. Proponents of retrenchment must reclaim the mantle of internationalism from the militarists whose one-dimensional view of international engagement has served the United States so badly. The case must be made that an astute blend of multilateralism, economic engagement, diplomacy, and soft power can advance US interests far better than today’s overreliance on military force. Taken together, domestic renewal and a nonprimacist version of internationalism anew have the potential to strengthen US democracy, uphold national and international security, and provide a blueprint for values-based engagement with the outside world.

The Problems with Primacy

What, exactly, is military primacy? In the pages that follow, I define military primacy as a grand strategy of maintaining and exploiting America’s military advantages over global and regional competitors, with a view to leveraging these structural advantages in service of favorable political and economic outcomes.12 In the first instance, this means investing heavily in the US military such that it remains a force that can fight (and win) multiple, simultaneous wars around the world while also deterring adversaries from attacking the United States or otherwise disturbing the peace. Primacy requires not just parity with adversaries, but a convincing level of military superiority in all relevant regions of the globe. The strategy only works if the US military is so far ahead of its nearest rivals that others are cowed into acquiescence. In short, primacy is a strategy of outpacing all of America’s rivals in the military sphere. By establishing a wide gap between the United States and its competitors, the wager is that Washington can convince foreign governments to accept leadership in those issue areas that are of highest-order concern for the United States.

But primacy implies activism, not just readiness. Military primacy is rooted in a fundamental belief in the necessity and goodness of US overseas interventions.13 Drawing on the lessons of Pearl Harbor, the Cold War, and the 9/11 terror attacks, proponents of military primacy argue that national security and global stability are goals best served when the United States projects power over and onto foreign soil. They caution that the outside world is a dangerous place full of autocrats, aggressors, and human rights abusers. If the United States has the material capacity to impose order beyond it shores, primacists argue, then it would be a derogation of duty to turn inwards.14 To shrug off disorder abroad would be to court disaster, as major instances of global insecurity are bound to affect the United States sooner or later. At its heart, primacy is a strategy of moving preemptively and preventatively to neutralize threats abroad, preferably via deterrence (“peace through strength”) but also via the adroit application of military power if necessary.

Global military primacy is an unusual ambition. Historically, few superpowers have viewed it as a practicable goal. Today, the United States is the only world power for which military primacy is an even semi-realistic grand strategy. Neither China, nor Russia, nor India – America’s nearest peer competitors – can credibly aspire to military primacy in their own regions, let alone globally. The United States is alone in believing that it can assert military dominance across the world. But the uniqueness of America’s aspiration to military primacy is not, by itself, a reason for opposition. Perhaps US exceptionalism is a good thing. Those who urge a move away from primacy must show that the strategy is pernicious or otherwise ill-suited to prevailing conditions.

Critics of primacy point to two main problems in this regard. First, they argue that the maintenance of military primacy will become increasingly fraught with danger in the context of a multipolar world.15 Even if it is accepted that primacy made some sense during the so-called “unipolar moment”16 (when the United States could deploy hard power overseas without placing the security of the homeland in obvious jeopardy), it cannot be argued that the same unilateralist policies are suited to a world that can punch back. Owing to the rise of China and the resurgence of Russia, in particular, the costs and risks of primacist policies are rising exponentially. Simply put, the US military cannot be deployed in or adjacent to flashpoints in Eastern Europe, Northeast Asia, and the Persian Gulf in perpetuity without significant risk of becoming embroiled in a devastating war. In this sense, primacy has already failed: the United States has not managed to cling onto military preponderance; it has not ordered world affairs in ways that guarantee lasting US dominance; it cannot reliably deter adversaries from pursuing bellicose foreign policies; and so, it should reconfigure its foreign relations to make sense of a new international environment.

Failure to adjust could be ruinous for the United States. The problem of hubris is real. President Biden, for example, has declared on multiple occasions that the United States would defend Taiwan against a Chinese invasion – despite the fact that the US military’s own wargame exercises show that Beijing might well triumph in such a conflict, and that the use of nuclear weapons would be a high-probability event in any war over Taiwan.17 President Trump, too, threatened war against both North Korea and Iran, despite the enormous death tolls that each of these regimes could inflict on the United States and its allies (North Korea, of course, is now a nuclear-armed state with the capacity to deliver nuclear warheads far afield).18 After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, some in the US media and politics called for the Biden administration to enforce no-fly zones over portions of Ukraine,19 even if this meant destroying Russian air defenses and shooting down Russian airplanes. While these reckless ideas were not taken up by the White House, they reveal the extent to which some members of the US political class are willing to recommend the use of force even in circumstances that would ensure a confrontation with a nuclear-armed rival. How long before a sitting president acts upon advice that results in a major, uncontrollable conflagration? As Ben Friedman has cautioned in the context of Ukraine, “the longer you continue to roll those dice, even if the odds are low, the more likely you are to hit on a future disaster.”20

Even if US leaders are inclined to stay out of foreign wars, a grand strategy of military primacy ensures that the decision will not always be theirs. Under primacy, the United States has deployed its forces overseas in dozens of foreign countries.21 Including the members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Rio Pact, the United States has fifty-one treaty allies, meaning that Washington is formally committed to the military defense of more than one quarter of the world’s states.22 These commitments date from eras when Washington thought it essential to provide a security umbrella to vulnerable allies, or else saw few risks in doing so. But US relative power has eroded since assuming these security obligations. The country’s underlying interests have changed, too, and domestic politics have become more fractured. Under such conditions, it is plausible that a rival power might doubt the strength of US resolve and feel emboldened to attack an allied nation, engage in “gray zone” or “salami slicing” tactics, or even launch a preemptive assault on one of America’s many overseas garrisons. Viewed from this angle, military primacy is a grand exercise in tempting fate. Thousands of forward-deployed US troops have been made vulnerable to attack from hostile forces, exposing the country to a perpetual risk of being ensnared in a foreign conflict at a time and place of another power’s choosing. This is the exact opposite of promoting national security if defined as freedom from the threat of armed attack.

Beyond these security considerations, the second fundamental problem with primacy as a grand strategy relates to its patent unsuitability to US domestic politics today. As will be covered in chapter 1, the United States “went abroad” in World War II and the Cold War to ensure that the richest and most populous parts of Eurasia would not fall under the sway of a hostile powers. The goal was to safeguard national security but also to make the world safe for liberal capitalism, with US forces harnessed toward the end of ensuring the survival of an open world economy. This was viewed as a worthwhile undertaking because of the economic advantages that accrued to US firms and consumers across every region of the United States. But today, consensus has evaporated over whether economic openness and a stable international order more generally are goals worth fighting for. Many Americans are skeptical about the value of economic integration, blaming foreign trade and investment for a slew of social and economic problems at home. In this context, it is becoming less plausible for US leaders to defend military primacy as an extension of the US national interest. Especially now that US allies are powerful enough to provide for their own defense, some in the United States are asking pointed questions about why Washington remains the world’s chief security provider.

There is even a strong case to be made that military primacy is actively harming US national interests. More than 7,000 active-duty personnel have been killed during America’s wars since the terrorist attacks on 9/11, 2001. The Costs of War Project at Brown University estimates that a further 30,000 service members and veterans have died by suicide. The same researchers suggest that the federal government has spent or obligated more than $8 trillion toward warfighting over the same period, as well as passing legislation that has eroded civil liberties at home, harmed the natural environment, and adversely shifted the culture of the United States.23 How much more democratic, free, harmonious, and prosperous might Americans be today if their government had not been wedded to military primacy for the past several decades? What social and economic problems might have been fixed if the federal government had been more focused on domestic issues rather than a globe-spanning array of international commitments? It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the United States has suffered not just terrible costs but also staggering opportunity costs as a result of pursuing a grand strategy of military primacy. Whether this approach to international affairs continues to be “worth it” is hardly obvious.

The Alternatives: Restraint and Retrenchment

The opposite to military primacy is a grand strategy of restraint. In short, restraint is a blueprint for how to “do less” abroad in terms of military interventions.24 Whereas primacy is a strategy of maintaining dominance, restraint is oriented toward more modest ends: the preservation of bare national security and an acceptable distribution of power among the United States and its chief rivals. The purpose of restraint is to reduce the likelihood of entering costly overseas conflicts while still maintaining the capacity to neutralize major threats to the homeland as they emerge – a much less ambitious set of objectives than ordering the entire world along lines favorable to US interests. Unsurprisingly, restraint requires far fewer resources than the strategy of military primacy. Restrainers thus call for much smaller portions of the economy and federal budget to be devoted toward national defense, and are far less likely to support military interventions abroad except when absolutely necessary to uphold national security in a strict sense of the term.

To be clear, a grand strategy of restraint would not require the United States to lessen its international engagement in terms of economic policy, diplomacy, contributions to multilateral organizations, or other forms of nonmilitary participation in global society. Restraint is not synonymous with isolationism. Rather, restraint is focused on reducing America’s reliance on military tools of statecraft. In contrast to primacists, restrainers believe that international crises – including instances of severe regional or global instability – can often be addressed without the application of US military force. This might mean the United States using nonmilitary instruments of power to advance its interests, but it might also mean relying upon others to check aggressors, uphold international rules, stop civil conflict, defend human rights, and otherwise ensure the peaceful conduct of world politics. Indeed, restrainers point out that US interventions can often worsen security conditions abroad instead of improving them, outcomes that serve nobody’s interests.25

It is important to distinguish restraint from retrenchment. Restraint is a grand strategy – that is, a coherent plan for connecting ends with means, and a guiding set of principles for how national resources should be harnessed toward achieving political objectives. Retrenchment, on the other hand, is not a grand strategy. It is a policy recommendation. All retrenchment means is the reduction of overseas forces and security obligations. For example, President Biden’s decision to exit Afghanistan in 2021 was an instance of retrenchment because it involved the withdrawal of US forces from that country and a termination of Washington’s commitment to the survival of Ashraf Ghani’s government in Kabul. But Biden’s implementation of this isolated policy of retrenchment said little about his overall grand strategy, which remained one of unabashed military primacy when viewed in the round.

Of course, it might be argued that a grand strategy of restraint would be easier to adopt if the United States would first implement wide-ranging policies of retrenchment. It might even be argued – as I do in this book – that meaningful retrenchment is a prerequisite for a sustainable grand strategy of restraint. But the two should not be confused or conflated. One is a grand-strategic design for how a state might go about achieving its goals on the world stage. The other is a policy; an injunction to downsize overseas military deployments in a specific case or as a general rule. In this book, I provide an argument for why the United States has not implemented policies of retrenchment in the recent past, and how US government might be altered to become more friendly to such policies in the future.

Outline of the Book

The rest of the book is organized as follows. In the first chapter, I place America’s contemporary overseas deployments in historical context. I trace how the United States has undergone six distinct waves of overseas expansion, from early annexations of island territories in the mid-nineteenth century to the assumption of global military obligations in the late twentieth century. The point of this chapter is to show that the United States has retrenched before, but that instances of retrenchment have become less common and consequential as time has worn on. Part of the explanation is that, in the past, US forward deployments were justified with reference to a range of different logics – commercial, logistical, humanitarian, and so forth. Today, almost all of America’s overseas commitments are justified in terms of national security, a rationale for interventionism (and military primacy) that is much harder to argue against in domestic politics.

Chapter 2 canvasses the various arguments that have been made in favor of military primacy since the end of the Cold War. I point to two stylized sets of arguments in particular: one centered on the idea that the outside world is an uncertain, insecure, and dangerous place, and so the US military is required to be vastly forward deployed as insurance against unpredictable foreign forces; and another that emphasizes more idealistic (even utopian) ideas about US power and purpose, arguing that America has a noble role to play in ushering the world toward something resembling a Kantian perpetual peace. I show that, in the 1990s and 2000s, these two rival camps disagreed mightily on the purpose of military primacy but largely agreed on the premise that US dominance ought to be maintained and extended as far as possible into the future. Today, most members of America’s political class blend insights drawn from both schools of thought. Chapter 2 also discusses contemporary arguments in favor of retrenchment, drawing attention to the many dimensions along which these various camps (I identify five) differ from one another even as they agree on the basic idea that the United States should shrink its overseas military presence.

Chapter 3 introduces some concepts from political science to help explain why America’s grand strategy of military primacy has become so hard to dislodge. These are: stateness, path dependence, exogenous shocks, and temporal sequencing. Of these, the concept of stateness is perhaps the most important. Stateness helps to capture the idea that the US government has, historically, varied in terms of its size, capacity, and legitimacy in the eyes of the people. When the United States had a low degree of stateness, it underextended on the world stage. Now that the United States has a high degree of stateness in the realm of foreign policy and national security, it is much more active and harder to restrain. The concept of stateness is central to the argument of the book: my contention is that the United States government has taken on a particular size, shape, and set of standard operating procedures such that a grand strategy of military primacy has become hardwired into the US state itself.

The concept of path dependence is also of critical importance. It describes in a generic sense how political actors can find themselves trapped by decisions made by people in the past. Even powerful leaders cannot escape the influence of institutional contexts that are passed down from one generation to the next. Over time, ways of doing politics – including on the scale of grand strategy – become routinized and hard to overturn. This is especially true when “business as usual” serves the interests of the powerful within society. In this book, I argue that path dependence helps to explain why the US state is organized in such a way as to reward adherence to military primacy while discouraging (and punishing) actors who articulate alternative paths.

Exogenous shocks are external events that impose some sort of stress upon the US polity; they are instances that test the resilience of prevailing norms and institutions, force political leaders to reveal and articulate their preferences, and provide openings for political entrepreneurs to propose reorganizations of politics and government or else recommit themselves to prevailing orthodoxies. I argue that several exogenous shocks help to explain the ossification of America’s national-security state over the past century, the attack on Pearl Harbor and the 9/11 terror attacks chief among them. However, the concept of temporal sequencing helps to clarify the idea that the political significance of any given event is always contingent upon the historical context within which that event takes place. While this is a basic insight, perhaps, temporal sequencing is essential for understanding not just how but also when and why the United States might be able to break free from the strictures of military primacy in the future.

In chapter 4, I turn to discuss the domestic groups who have a vested interest in the continuation of military primacy as a grand strategy. The purpose of the chapter is to illustrate that path dependence is not automatic. On the contrary, a network of political agents is tightly involved in the perpetuation of primacy as America’s operational code. These actors include lobbyists for certain economic sectors, bureaucrats, policy experts, think tankers, and various advocacy groups who have grown to rely upon US power abroad as a means of promoting their preferred set of values on the world stage. The chapter categorizes domestic support for primacism in terms of those who have a material interest in primacy’s endurance as a grand strategy; those who have ideational reasons to support military primacy; and a more diffuse set of actors for whom primacy has become interwoven with their sense of national identity and ontological security.

Chapter 5 demonstrates how the national-security state and its votaries work to block any moves toward retrenchment. This is an important chapter, serving to illustrate my argument that domestic politics truly is to blame for America’s weddedness to military primacy. What evidence is there for the US political system getting in the way of policies of retrenchment? Are there plausible counterfactual scenarios in which the United States could have retrenched under some different set of domestic conditions? Drawing upon vignettes of US foreign policy over the past thirty years, I argue that there is compelling evidence that leaders in Washington would now be overseeing a very different set of foreign policies if the US political system had been calibrated differently at critical junctures. As will become clear, there is not just one process via which domestic politics tends to upend even small movements toward restraint; there are several such mechanisms, with veto points existing across the major organs of government and wider society. But there is nevertheless a recognizable and coherent political ecosystem at play – one that is heavily biased against policies of retrenchment, and which must be reformed if the goal is to bring about substantial changes to US foreign relations.

In chapter 6, I begin to explain how and why leaders in Washington might yet come to recognize advantages in ending military primacy as the default grand strategy of the United States. I argue that there is a disconnect between what a proper grand strategy should do for ordinary Americans and what the grand strategy of military primacy can provide. I agree with others that the United States needs a period of domestic renewal, reform, and realignment, but argue that this can only happen in conjunction with a major strategic adjustment abroad. In this chapter, I offer prescriptions for how US politics could be restructured to make alternative grand strategies more feasible. The point is not to argue for whatever set of domestic reforms would make restraint more likely to obtain, but rather to insist upon a democratized political system in which all options for engagement with the outside world are given a fair hearing and chance of success. Some of my suggested reforms are difficult to imagine today – my call for a radical overhaul of the electoral system, for example – but others are more modest in nature.

Finally, chapter 7 concludes with a discussion of what form of grand strategy should replace the ailing edifice of military primacy. My main goal is to articulate a set of foreign policies that are suitable for the coming multipolar world, and which have the potential to deliver tangible benefits to the American people. My secondary goal, however, is to advance a proposal for US foreign policy that stands a chance of withstanding domestic scrutiny. One premise of the chapter is that the US political system will not endorse a move away from military primacy unless there are alternatives in place to guarantee national security and promote economic prosperity while remaining faithful to core US values. What I propose meets these standards: military retrenchment but with caveats that Washington should continue to invest in a strong national defense, especially in terms of nuclear forces, intelligence capabilities, and cybersecurity; “offshore balancing” as a means of securing critical overseas regions from hostile powers, coupled with vigorous participation in multilateral organizations; and a greatly expanded focus on humanitarian and economic aid, along with robust support for free trade and an open world economy. This version of restraint is a far cry from isolationism – but it is much preferable to the wrongheaded and increasingly unsustainable policies of military primacy.

The book has been written for policy audiences as well as informed general readers. But it is also a work of political science. Throughout, I will draw insights from International Relations theory and the literature on American political development. My scholarly interest is to clarify the two-way relationship between international affairs and the evolution of US domestic politics, including the shape, size, and purpose of the US state.26 The intuition here is that, while Robert Kagan is surely right that America “made” the modern international system,27 the reverse is also true – that the world beyond America’s shores has played an enormous role in molding the modern United States. What I hope to show is that at least some of these “outside-in” changes to US domestic politics have outlasted their usefulness and should now be viewed as instances of institutional maladaptation. In the past, it might have made sense for the US state to be ordered toward the end of permanent warfighting. During World War II and the Cold War the United States faced bona fide threats to national security, forcing America’s leaders to construct a political system at home that would allow for the defeat of tyranny abroad. Today, however, the US government has become so accustomed to fighting wars and preparing for future conflicts that its leading officials cannot imagine doing their jobs in the absence of war; the state and its permanent warfighting activities have become conjoined and codependent, with “specialists in violence” dominating the US government’s foreign-policy bureaucracies even during eras when peace has been within grasp.28 This is a phenomenon that must be studied, explained, and understood if it is to be undone.

I will make these arguments in social-scientific terms, but the normative implications are enormous and run like a leitmotif through the entire book: Americans will never enjoy the sort of “peace dividend” they so richly deserve until domestic reforms can proceed in tandem with changes to defense policy. Indeed, my analysis suggests that only radical reforms to US government and politics will be enough to allow antimilitarist, anti-interventionist, and antiprimacist ideas to receive an equal hearing in the organs of state – something they have not enjoyed since the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.29 Retrenchment, restraint, and national renewal will have to come from the inside out.