Abstract
“We are going to do a terrible thing to you—we are going to deprive you of an enemy.”1 This 1988 statement by Georgi Arbatov, a top Soviet foreign policy adviser, showcases the considerable strategic difficulties met by the United States once it was left without a superpower rival to compete against. Deploring the demise of an enemy irreducibly committed to the obliteration of your way of life may impress observers as making little sense. Nonetheless, the presence of an enemy equips a state with a grand strategy connecting means to objectives in its international undertakings.2 Despite its many facets and critics, containment had provided for more than four decades a straightforward purpose in the more predictable, even if more dangerous, world of the Cold War. But once the Soviet Union conceded defeat, soon to be followed by its disintegration, the United States was left without a successor strategy, and, consequently, with no clear road map to follow.
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Notes
US Department of Defense, Soviet Military Power (Washington: Department of Defense, 1990), p. 21.
Grand strategy is “both as a conceptual road map, describing how to match identified resources to the promotion of identified interests, and a set of policy prescriptions.” Colin Dueck, Reluctant Crusaders: Power, Culture, and Change in American Grand Strategy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 9–11; also see
Richard Betts, American Force: Dangers, Delusions, and Dilemmas in National Security (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).
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Derek Chollet and James Goldgeier, America between Wars: From 11/9 to 9/11 (New York: Public Affairs, 2008).
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Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay, America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2003);
Philip Gordon, “End of the Bush Revolution,” Foreign Affairs 85 (July/ August 2006): 75–86;
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Daniel Drezner, “Does Obama Have a Grand Strategy?” Foreign Affairs 90 (July/August 2011): 57–68.
Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 23–4;
Fareed Zakaria, From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America’s World Role (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
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Barry Buzan, United States and the Great Powers: World Politics in the 21st Century (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), pp. 68–71;
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Barry Posen, “Pull Back: The Case for a Less Activist Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs 92 (January/February 2013): 116–28;
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Richard Ned Lebow, A Cultural Theory of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008);
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Richard Ned Lebow, Why Nations Fight: Past and Future Motives for War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 113.
Alexander George and Andrew Bennett, Case Studies and Theory Development in Social Sciences (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005),
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© 2013 Tudor A. Onea
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Onea, T.A. (2013). Introduction. In: US Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War Era. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137359353_1
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