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Barry Posen of MIT has written a lucid and highly readable defense of a more minimalist grand strategy for the United States, pithily titled Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy. Restraint argues for a conservative foreign policy in the Burkean sense; he repeatedly urges that we be more cautious and—as the title suggests—restrained. The book is important, and we devote two posts to it; today, we outline the general argument; tomorrow, we look at Posen’s read of the rise of China and US strategy toward the Asia-Pacific. He acknowledges that Asia poses some of the most substantial challenges to a policy of restraint. But his suggestions for US foreign policy in the region prove surprisingly radical and probably counterproductive to his own objectives. Nonetheless, as the President gets swept away from his own instinct toward restraint, it is refreshing to hear the argument elaborated in such detail.
A particularly useful feature of the book is Posen’s sociology of knowledge of the American field of international relations over the last two decades (see the Introduction). Posen notes the surprising convergence of liberal institutionalists and conservatives of various stripes—even neoconservatives--around a muscular, even expansionist and revisionist foreign policy that Posen calls “Liberal Hegemony.” Liberal hegemony argues for the advantage of overwhelming military superiority and deep engagement not only through alliances and institutions but through intervention and threats of force to remake adversaries and manage failed states. Posen, by contrast, uses classical realist arguments to argue that such a stance is “unnecessary, counterproductive, costly and wasteful.” (An earlier preview of the debate can be found in the January/February 2013 issue of Foreign Affairs, where Stephen Brooks, G. John Ikenberry and William Wohlforth want to “Lean Forward: In Defense of American Engagement” while Posen wants to “Pull Back.”)
Posen’s indictment of Liberal Hegemony rests on a number of pillars, starting with the extraordinary costs of the post-Cold War interventions, particularly in Iraq (it is still worth considering the hidden costs emphasized by Stiglitz and Bilmes). But Posen also argues that such a foreign policy is almost certain to induce balancing behavior on the part of potential adversaries, most notably China and Russia, that make it self-defeating over the long-run. The absence of balancing was widely remarked in the early post-Cold War period, most notably by Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth’s 2008 World Out of Balance. But the argument seems harder and harder to make over time. As Steven Walt—another realist voice for restraint—also argues in his 2005 Taming American Power, there are a myriad of ways that an overweening presence can generate resentment, nationalist responses, "soft balancing," and what the late Chalmers Johnson called blowback in his late-career critique of American empire.
Another important pillar of the restraint argument that is of particular relevance to East Asia concerns allies. Posen shows a recurrent concern for the moral hazard problems that arise in alliances that are in effect one-sided security guarantees. These alliances—which Ikenberry sees as key institutional pillars of the liberal order—generate “cheap riding” and even “reckless driving” on the part of our allies, behaviors that implicate us in disputes that have little to do with our core security interests.
An important technical extension of this argument concerns the debate over extended deterrence, an ongoing preoccupation in East Asia as well (see our posts on the topic here and here). Most analysts of East Asia see it as the military cornerstone of our commitment to the region; we discussed Brad Robert’s lengthy reflection on the details of the issue here and here. For Posen, however, such commitments are highly risky and continually teetering on the knife-edge of incredibility.
The most purely Burkean component of Posen’s argument comes in the simple observation that we frequently don’t know what we are doing when we intervene, and that the results typically fall far short of the aspirations that drive them. Posen returns repeatedly to the liberal tendency to conflate security objectives with humanitarian interests. In short, pithy discussions of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Iraq he outlines how far the EU and the US fell short of even their most minimal political objectives.
Oddly, Posen’s case for restraint is articulated at less length than his indictment of Liberal Hegemony. This is in part because his case is extraordinarily simple. The United States is not only extraordinarily powerful, but is separated from the world’s strife by two oceans. As a result, we are much more immune from serious security challenge than most politicians, analysts and pundits think. We need to hedge against risks and deal with problems such as terrorism. But the former objective can be achieved at a fraction of what we now spend and the latter is better addressed through homeland defense and highly-selective counter-terrorism operations than by the much more complicated counterinsurgencies we have fought.
It is important to note that these debates are by no means limited to the academy; Hillary Clinton’s attack on Obama’s foreign policy in her interview with Jeff Goldberg at The Atlantic reflects similar divisions among Democrats, with the President much closer to Posen’s approach than he recognizes. As we noted in our analysis of President Obama’s West Point speech, it contained a number of Posen-like elements, including a call for restraint, the importance of engaging allies and a reminder of the incredible costs we bear when we intervene without a game plan.
Next time: how Posen’s minimalist approach would entail major changes in the East Asian security architecture.
