Today on The Atlantic, Iraq war veteran Scott Beauchamp discusses US military intervention with MIT professor Barry Posen, whose new book, Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy, argues the US should drastically rethink its current strategy. Beauchamp sums up Posen's thoughts on the US's current intervention philosophy here:
A number of writers and thinkers have been wrestling with similar questions, and Barry Posen, a political-science professor at MIT, is one of them. His latest book, Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy, gives a name to the general consensus among the American foreign-policy establishment that I sensed as a soldier, calling it “liberal hegemony.” The term encompasses two philosophies that arose after the fall of the Soviet Union. The first is the neoconservative philosophy of “primacy”— overwhelming military force projected around the world to enforce America’s will. The second is “cooperative security,” embraced mainly by Democrats, which only differs from primacy in that it seeks approval from international organizations like the United Nations and NATO when exerting military force. In both cases, the question is how to use force, not if it should be used in the first place.
Posen’s response is the philosophy of “restraint”—a scaling down of the expectations and demands that decades of liberal hegemonic thought has placed on the United States.
Posen aims to shake out a consistent but not concrete idea of how and then the US should respond to "potential national security threats," which could also be called, "bad things happening in the rest of the world." Here's Posen's definition of a true threat to national security:
It’s reasonable for the United States to pay attention to a small number of threats. We don’t have to transform the world, spread democracy, expand NATO, or any of these other things. But there are a few things that we need to pay attention to. We need what I would call moderate, pragmatic strategies to work on those problems.
One problem is the potential rise of China. In the fullness of time, China may become such a tough competitor that we need to contain it the way we contained the Soviet Union. Is that time upon us? I don’t really think so. China is asserting its interests in its own area, mostly its coastal areas, a little bit on its land periphery. It’s a country that’s going through rapid change. It’s got a lot of internal problems of its own. It’s got a lot of security problems. Its military isn’t gigantic.
The whole interview is great, and while I don't agree with every idea Posen offers, he skews closer to my own ideology than the current all-intervention, all-the-time model.
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