[Introduction to] In Uncertain Times: American Foreign Policy after the Berlin Wall and 9/11

In Uncertain Times considers how policymakers react to dramatic developments on the world stage. Few expected the Berlin Wall to come down in November 1989; no one anticipated the devastating attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in September 2001. American foreign policy had to adjust quickly to an international arena that was completely transformed. Melvyn P. Leffler and Jeffrey W. Legro have assembled an illustrious roster of officials from the George H. W. Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush administrations—Robert B. Zoellick, Paul Wolfowitz, Eric S. Edelman, Walter B. Slocombe, and Philip Zelikow. These policymakers describe how they went about making strategy for a world fraught with possibility and peril. They offer provocative reinterpretations of the economic strategy advanced by the George H. W. Bush administration, the bureaucratic clashes over policy toward the breakup of the USSR, the creation of the Defense Policy Guidance of 1992, the expansion of NATO, the writing of the National Security Strategy Statement of 2002, and the invasion of Iraq in 2003. A group of eminent scholars address these same topics. Bruce Cumings, John Mueller, Mary Elise Sarotte, Odd Arne Westad, and William C. Wohlforth probe the unstated assumptions, the cultural values, and the psychological makeup of the policymakers. They examine whether opportunities were seized and whether threats were magnified and distorted. They assess whether academicians and independent experts would have done a better job than the policymakers did. Together, policymakers and scholars impel us to rethink how our world has changed and how policy can be improved in the future.https://scholarship.richmond.edu/bookshelf/1264/thumbnail.jp

Response to Book Review (To Lead the World: American Strategy after the Bush Doctrine

Response to Book Review (To Lead the World: American Strategy after the Bush Doctrine) We want to thank the commentators for their thoughtful and constructive remarks on our book. We think they highlight some of the key attributes of the volume and raise key issues for further reflection. In order for readers of H-Diplo to understand the comments, we want to reiterate here what we stated in the introduction to the book. We tried to bring together some of the nation’s most renowned scholars and public intellectuals from all sides of the political spectrum to focus on what should be done after the Bush administration left office. Although many of the contributors shared a view that recent foreign policy had been either disappointing or a disaster, their task was not to dwell on the past, but to focus on the future. We asked each of them to author a basic national security paper in which they identified key threats, defined overriding goals, assigned priorities to objectives, examined the tradeoffs between “interests” and values, and addressed the challenges of mobilizing domestic support for preferred policies, designing effective tactics, and re-configuring multinational institutions

Conclusion: Strategy in a Murky World

Making national strategy is a byzantine business in the best of times. When dramatic events happen, when the international arena is complex and changing, when threats and opportunities are uncertain, leaders struggle to understand and react effectively. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the attacks of 9/11 opened vistas that were unfamiliar and complicated. How did U.S. leaders manage those transitions

[Introduction to] To Lead the World: American Strategy after the Bush Doctrine

In To Lead the World, Melvyn P. Leffler and Jeffrey W. Legro bring together some of America\u27s most esteemed writers and thinkers to offer concrete, historically grounded suggestions for how America can regain its standing in the world and use its power more wisely than it has during the Bush years. They address such issues as how the US can regain its respect in the world, respond to the biggest threats now facing the country, identify reasonable foreign policy goals, manage a growing debt burden, achieve greater national security, and successfully engage a host of other problems left unsolved and in many cases exacerbated by the Bush Doctrine. Representing a wide range of perspectives, the writers gathered here place our current affairs firmly in the larger context of American and world history and draw upon realistic appraisals of both the strengths and the limits of American power. They argue persuasively that the kind of leadership that made the United States a great--and greatly admired--nation in the past can be revitalized to meet the challenges of the 21st century.https://scholarship.richmond.edu/bookshelf/1266/thumbnail.jp

Introduction

For many Americans, the past decade has been a bewildering era. They have seen their country attacked and their husbands, sons, wives, and daughters sent to war in faraway places. They have read about orange alerts and red alerts. They have waited on long lines at airport security checks. They know that defense expenditures have soared and that Homeland Security has mushroomed. They have seen gruesome daily headlines about the carnage in Iraq, the strife in Afghanistan, and the turmoil in Pakistan. They read about the suicide attacks that were prevented or aborted in Europe, and they know, darkly, that terrorists are at work from North Africa to Southeast Asia, from the United Kingdom to Russia to China. With perils abounding, Americans want a national strategy that makes sense

Dilemmas of Strategy

America’s crystal ball on strategy is murky. Officials in the next administration will face a complex world, will receive conflicting advice, and will need to mobilize domestic support for their policies. They must nonetheless act, most likely without the convenience of a single threat such as the Soviet Union during the cold war or terrorism in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. In this conclusion, our aims are to highlight the decisive issues of consensus and contention that resonate across the chapters. We seek to delineate the trade-offs involved in making choices, and we hope to illuminate the national security dilemmas that any administration must grapple with as the United States helps to shape, and is shaped by, the next stage in world politics

Introduction: Navigating the Unknown

On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall came down. Hardly anyone had foreseen this event. When President Ronald Reagan had challenged Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in June 1987 “to tear down this wall,” he never anticipated that Berliners themselves would have the opportunity and courage to bring about such dramatic change. We now know that the Wall came down as a result of accidental circumstances, a series of mistaken statements and understandings among officials of the German Democratic Republic. No one had planned for this to happen, and no one had plans to deal with a new landscape that might have been dreamed about but had never been imagined as an imminent possibility

Shaper Nations: Stategies for a Changing World

Shaper Nations provides illuminating perspectives on the national strategies of eight emerging and established countries that are shaping global politics at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The volume’s authors offer a unique viewpoint: they live and work primarily in the country about which they write, bringing an insider’s feel for national debates and politics. The conventional wisdom on national strategy suggests that these states have clear central authority, coherently connect means to ends, and focus on their geopolitical environment. These essays suggest a different conclusion. In seven key countries―Brazil, China, Germany, India, Israel, Russia, and Turkey―strategy is dominated by nonstate threats, domestic politics, the distorting effect of history and national identity, economic development concerns, and the sheer difficulty, in the face of many powerful internal and external constraints, of pursuing an effective national strategy. The shapers represent a new trend in the international arena with important consequences. Among them is a more uncertain world in which countries concentrate on their own development rather than on shared problems that might divert precious resources, and attend more to regional than to global order. In responding to these shaper states, the United States must understand the sources of their national strategies in determining its own role on the global stage.https://scholarship.richmond.edu/bookshelf/1274/thumbnail.jp