Rating: 
Summary: Grand Strategy and its Discontents
Review: The surprise attack of September 11 brought about, in the eyes of many learned observers, a radical shift in American national security policy. Since World War II and up until the collapse of the Soviet Union there was a policy of containment and deterrence. During the 1990s, in the wake of the collapse, there was a feeling that democracy and capitalism would eventually triumph everywhere; the Clinton administration reasoned that the US "only needed to engage and the rest of the world would enlarge the process."
In response the 9/11 attack the Bush administration formulated a new strategy, outlined in the national security speech at West Point on June 1, 2002. This speech called for a new strategy which looked like a departure from American tradition. The key elements of this new strategy were preemption, unilateralism, and hegemony. In the beginning, it was little noticed; however, in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, people began to examine this strategy more closely.
Yale professor John Lewis Gaddis, in this short and well-written little book, argues that this was not a new policy, in fact it had deep roots in American history that go back to the earliest days of the republic. Gaddis demonstrates that after the British attack on Washington DC during the War of 1812, the then secretary of state, John Quincy Adams asserted the same three principles. Preemption was the rationale for Andrew Jackson's invasion of Florida, the "failed state" of its day being a haven for marauding Seminoles, runaway slaves and profiteering pirates. With the diminishing authority of the Spanish in Latin America, the US sought to restrict the influence of other European powers in the Western Hemisphere. The Monroe Doctrine was a unilateralist declaration even though the US did not have the means to enforce it without the backing of the British navy. And in the end, the policy of John Quincy Adams was to be the predominant power in the Western Hemisphere, or at least on the North American continent - a hegemon in all but name.
Preemption, unilateralism, and hegemony was indeed a US strategy up until World War II. The US was seeking merely to assure its security by keeping the European powers out of the hemisphere. Most Americans believed it was a mistake to seek an oversees empire as the brief foray into the Phillipines proved in the early part of the 20th century.
After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt was forced the build alliances with the Soviet Union and other great powers in order to defeat Germany and Japan. It was thus necessary to forgo preemption and unilateralism in deference to the alliance. During and after World War II, the US took the lead in building multilateralism institutions - a multilateral system that not only ensured American hegemony, but made it desirable at the same time. Forgoing preemption gave the US the moral high ground, which it maintained until the invasion of Iraq.
The Bush administration's invasion of Iraq had all the elements of a grand strategy: preemption, unilateralsim - when multilateralism failed - and American hegemony. There was also an innovation to this strategy: there would be an active promotion of democracy in the Middle East. This idea swayed many liberals to the cause, including members of the media and the academic community.
The problems with this strategy became apparent after the invasion. They are too numerous to go into and obvious to anyone following the news. The mistakes made during the occupation leaves the Bush Doctine with only a few remaining supporters. The failure to enlist the great powers, not to mention many of the smaller powers, destroyed our status as a benign hegemon and jepardizes our moral high ground.
Gaddis does an excellent job of explaining the grand strategy and showing that it has precedents in history, better than Bush or anyone in his administration. However, he does not show that this strategy is justified, morally or legally, and he does not seem to fully appreciate that many of our friends and allies find this strategy frightening and repugnant. They do not call us arrogant for nothing.
Nevertheless, the jury is still out. Immediately after the invasion, it looked as though one regime after another would fall in the region, along the lines of the dominoes of Eastern Europe. At the present writing, with the Iraqi elections approaching, a decent outcome seems remote and a civil war possible. Yet, there are stirrings of hope and change elsewhere in the Middle East, such as in the Israeli-Palistinian conflict. The upheaval in Iraq is also creating debate that did not exist before in Egypt and the Gulf States. The pendulum may again swing the other way and the grand strategy may be working inspite of itself.
Rating:
Summary: History supports American policy. Will it work?
Review: There has been a tendency in the attention that Americans have paid to global policies of the great powers to ignore how local individuals can have a tremendous effect on what happens all over the world. In SURPRISE, SECURITY, AND THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE, Yale professor John Lewis Gaddis gives credit to John Quincy Adams for setting American grand strategy before we had the military power accomplish much. Franklin Delano Roosevelt gets credit for minimizing the amount of fighting that Americans engaged in during World War II:
"Stalin's dictatorship was at least as autocratic as that of Hitler, and its record of murdering its own citizens was even worse. It clearly did not seek a world safe for democracy, capitalism, or much of anything else apart from its own immediate interests. Yet Roosevelt's strategy required keeping the Soviet Union in the war, because for every American who was dying while fighting it, some 60 Russians were doing so. How then to align American interests with the Red Army's capabilities?" (p. 51).
I am not able to dispute anything in this book, but what it intends to mean is so tied to thoughts about American superiority that it is hardly ironic that there is no entry in the index listing religion as a strategy for obtaining anything through hypocritical humility. Also unlisted: holy war, violent movie sensationalism, Southeast Asian war games (Vietnam), and rock 'n' roll. The index does show some attempts to move beyond the interests that were in the forefront in previous wars: shock and awe, Islamic world: recency of Islamic rage in, and weapons of mass destruction. The attention paid to several centuries of American expansion and waning European hegemony allows skeptics who thought the Cold War was largely a fake cover for increasing military-industrial expenditures to reflect on how often an economic plan for the future is in harmony with such schemes. What this book is missing is an awareness that the surprise of September 11, 2001 came just when the American future was going kaput.
The great depression was not important enough for the meaning of this book to be listed in the index, but an astute reading of pages on the times of American isolationism following the great slaughter of World War I shows a hint that we know so much more now than we did in those days.
"The first clear challenge to security elsewhere came only in 1931 with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, a region that hardly seemed vital to the defense of the United States. And even if it had been, the onset of the great depression would have constrained whatever inclination there might have been to act: the discovery that going to war could restore prosperity would have to wait for another decade." (p. 44).
Those who have an incredible ability to consider whatever income the top one percent of the population are making part of an indication of a restoration of prosperity in our own time might think they see an upswing now, but the enemies of the kind of warfare Americans engage in far from home are not detecting their own improvement. Some Vietnamese were also expecting an economic takeoff after that war, but the 3 million Asians who died in the area-wide conflict and ethnic Chinese slaughtered in Indonesia in 1965 must outnumber those whose opportunities for smuggling paid off. Those who think that smuggling might be a joke in this context should check to see what is listed instead in the index under Afghanistan.
`Economic globalization: Bretton Woods system and' is listed in the index. "The purpose of Bretton Woods was to perpetuate the economic hegemony with which the United States was certain to end the war." (p. 53). Until Nixon was president, it made sense for the United States to support a system that would require cash payments in the event of trade unbalances so countries that produced goods did not get stuck with a large supply of worthless currencies from nations importing. World War II was a historical event in which the number of countries paying the United States for materials was exceptional. Current events are based on contrary expectations, and it is difficult to express how much of the world maintains thinking that runs directly contrary to the American ideals in this book, however ideal they may sound in speeches by the president.
Rating: 
Summary: "Would it be okay now for us to be patriotic?"
Review: This awesome little book sums up the hope that the United States has brought to the rest of the world. "How do we keep hope alive when the costs and risks of doing so have suddenly become much greater? The first thing I'd say is that we have to be ready to fight for it." The book lays out the historic reactions in American foreign policy to previous attacks on our country. And it defines that proper answers to those attacks. It isn't lost on any reader that our nation is formed by the rest of the ethnicities of the world. It gives ME hope for the United States
that this book was published at Harvard, of all places!Buy it. Read it. And read it again!
Rating:
Summary: Preemption or Containment?
Review: This book is a great lesson on how the political minds of American leadership viewed threats to our society, way of life and survival. A perspective on historical achievements and doctrine, Professor Gaddis lays out the specific premise of defense for the post-War of 1812, Pearl Harbor and the 9/11 Attack. How did our leaders wish to confront these acts of aggression and what strategies were used to prevent future threats.
Professor Gaddis demonstrates the philosophies of containment, diplomacy and preemption. Looking backward to John Quincy Adams and other founding fathers, leaders felt America was prepared to commit itself to enlarging rather than contracting it's sphere of responsibility in the world to provide safety within. The Adams Doctrine of unilateralism suggested the U.S. could not rely upon the goodwill of others to secure its safety and should be prepared to act on its own. Adams own philosophy would suggest a deep division in thinking with regard to securing United Nations and requirements of asking the U.N. Security Councils "permission" to act with regard to our own safety and national interest. He wouldn't require such approval or deem it necessary if such an organization existed in his day.
George W. Bush told Americans we must be ready for preemptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and our lives. Gaddis contends previous leadership would have understood his words perfectly well. As the world grew, oceans no longer protected us from the threats of evil and isolationism was not the method to ensure America's safety. Containment is simply not an option in today's world of terror.
A fairly quick read with a very substantive presentation comparing leadership many years apart in chronology but very near in their thinking.
Rating:
Summary: The Most Important Book On Post-9/11 Foreign Policy
Review: This small volume by John Lewis Gaddis is the most important book on foreign policy in the post-9/11 environment published to date. In this volume Gaddis, a Professor of History and Political Science at Yale, analyzes the changes made in foreign policy under George W. Bush and places them in historical perspective.
Gaddis reminds readers who have forgotten their history that as a result of the War of 1812 during which the British burned Washington, DC to the ground, it was (then Secretary of State) John Quincy Adams who instituted a three-pronged strategy to protect the United States from surprise attack. The lynchpins of the strategy were preemption, unilateralism, and hegemony. This strategy served the US well from the War of 1812 until it was fundamentally changed by FDR in 1942 in a multi-lateral response to the Axis powers of World War Two. In the case of the FDR policy shift, the decisive surprise attack was, of course, Pearl Harbor. The Adams doctrine essentially comprise the policies the George W. Bush administration has reverted to, much to the consternation of multilateralists and UN wonks.
Gaddis finds that the FDR doctrine of multilateralism was appropriate during World War Two, although allied relations were mishandled, particularly at Yalta. These errors in dealing with the Soviets would eventually set the Cold War in motion. The policies of international interdependence remained basically unaltered throughout the Cold War because of a phenomenon Gaddis describes as an "asymmetry of legitimacy" in which the world was divided into two spheres of influence. Most countries saw the US as the more desirable ally (excepting the majority of dictatorships in the world), i.e. the Soviet Union (and communism) was generally considered anathema. The influence of the US grew throughout the Cold War, with the consent of the allied countries. The Soviet Union also expanded, without ever having such consent. The decision by the US to abandon preemption and unilateralism during the Cold War helped decide the ultimate fate of the Cold War, and expand democracy around the globe.
Gaddis is highly critical of the Clinton administration's collection of ad hoc decisions on terrorism posing as strategy, and particularly points out differing approaches between Bush and Clinton. The Bush administration has stated their policy on terrorism as "We will defend the peace by fighting terrorists and tyrants. We will preserve the peace by building good relations among the great powers. We will extend the peace by encouraging free and open societies on every continent." Gaddis compares this with policies laid out in Clinton's last national security policy in 1999, which simply listed three priorities: "To enhance America's security. To bolster America's economic prosperity. To promote democracy and human rights abroad." Gaddis correctly analyzes the significant differences between the two and finds that while Clinton speaks in lofty goals, the statements are nonspecific and assume peace as a given, which it obviously is not. Bush clearly sees the need to defend peace and forcefully promote American security. An interesting point is that Bush seems positively multilateral (and of course there are numerous other countries fighting with the US in Afghanistan and Iraq, despite what the Bush detractors try to assert), but makes a point of engaging with the major powers. This clearly makes the point that under Bush, the US need not accord countries like, for instance, Kenya, equal say in alliances. (This is exactly how the UN has deteriorated into a third world debating society.)
Gaddis supports the foreign policy of George W. Bush, making it clear that since the US has extremely open borders and is no longer protected by geographic isolation, a policy of preemption when dealing with fanatics is required (and obviously bigger intelligence budgets will be needed), and a willingness to act unilaterally if necessary and not subjugate security to the UN (which has done a manifestly unsatisfactory job of managing security in even the tiniest of states in the most minor of conflicts) is a necessary corollary. This Bush doctrine takes the US back to the policies of John Quincy Adams, policies that largely kept the US secure for 130 years.
Gaddis closes with a story of a lecture at Yale. He was discussing Lincoln, who called America "the last best hope of earth." Gaddis believes that is still true, and I agree. This is not a universally popular notion in academic circles, particularly in liberal arts in the Ivy League. The ensuing discussion must have been fairly lively, but an amazing thing came out of it. An undergraduate student stood up and said "I love this country. I love this place. I love what we're doing here tonight. I love it so much that I'm prepared to defend our right to do it, which is why I'm joining the Marines. It's people like me who make it possible for people like you to be here doing what you're doing." Never have truer words been spoken. Thank you for your service: you are the reason Americans have the freedoms we enjoy.
Read this book. You won't regret it.
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