A course for the 21st century that avoids the mistakes of the past.

A Realist’s Guide to Grand Strategy

By WILLIAM RUGER

Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy, Barry R. Posen, Cornell University Press, 256 pages


The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has long been considered one of the finest institutions of scientific learning in the world. But few outside of academia know that MIT’s political science department, and especially its international relations (IR) program, is one of the best around. Neither are many aware that its IR faculty has been ironically old-fashioned—some would wrongly say “unscientific”—in stressing history along with the more technical aspects of defense policy.

Some of the most exciting work in IR has been pursued at MIT over the last few decades. The school has excelled in the study of grand strategy, defined by MIT professor and Restraint author Barry Posen as a state’s “theory about how to produce security for itself.” When the Soviet Union fell, Harvey Sapolsky, longtime director of the university’s security studies program, began to think about what type of grand strategy would be appropriate for the U.S. in the new post-Cold War world. He was joined by two of his graduate students, Eugene Gholz (now a professor at the University of Texas) and Daryl Press (currently a professor at Dartmouth College).

They were not buying the consensus view that the “unipolar moment” meant that the U.S. should double down on its Cold War activist foreign policy. Instead, in their seminal article “Come Home, America,” these three argued that the country needed a grand strategy of “restraint” that harkened back to America’s traditional and Washingtonian approach of noninterventionism.

What the “MIT School” of grand strategy—if you will—lacked was a book-length treatment to do battle with rival approaches. Not until Posen joined the cause with Restraint did the restrainers get a defining treatise.

Posen depicts the current grand strategy debate as pitted between two main rivals: liberal hegemony and restraint. Liberal hegemony is an activist grand strategy that aims to assertively maintain U.S. dominance and the “unipolar moment” in the service of liberalism and national security. Posen explains that it has been the reigning U.S. grand strategy since the end of the Cold War and remains the consensus view of the foreign-policy establishment of both major parties—of liberal internationalists and neoconservatives alike. Yet he believes it is “unnecessary, counterproductive, costly, and wasteful,” and ultimately “self-defeating.” Posen therefore spends the first half of the book explaining in detail what liberal hegemony is and why it so imperils America. In the book’s second, meatier half, he lays out his overarching restraint strategy and describes the specific military approach required to support it.

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