TO MOST AMERICANS, the title of Richard Haass’s sprawling new book will seem to capture how they feel about the world—chaotic, in crisis, and radically changed. Public opinion polls reveal that many, if not most, Americans would add: and not worth the trouble. Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, believes they are wrong. In this thoughtful, detailed, necessarily somewhat frenetic review of the global and regional issues and challenges confronting the world, and specifically the United States, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, Haass makes the case for U.S. leadership in constructing what he calls “World Order 2.0”—a set of principles, norms, and policy priorities around which he believes the world can, and must, come together. His vision of world order is appealing, and his defense of U.S. global leadership seems especially urgent and apropos, given the inclinations of the Oval Office’s current occupant. But Haass’s vision is driven by nostalgia for a world that never existed. And it warrants caution: world-shaping ambitions have proved extremely costly—for the shapers, and especially for the shaped.
The article discusses U.S.'s grand strategy from the mid 1980s through 2015, including U.S.'s strategic planning, the former U.S. presidents George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan's strategies and the U.S.'s national security strategy. An overview of the U.S.'s strategic response to international threats, including in regard to U.S. adversaries' acting deceptively and the U.S.'s aggressive response to perceived threats, is provided. An overview of the U.S. government's response to national security threats is also provided
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Students of comparative military organizations have advanced three hypotheses to explain when armed forces adopt more liberal manpower policies: when a major security threat looms, when the military professionalizes, or when the surrounding society grows more tolerant of difference. This article argues that all three are theoretically and empirically problematic: they potentially have much to contribute, but only in conjunction with a perspective that is more appreciative of the centrality of political processes. Enduring reform of the military's participation policies is more productively viewed through the lens of the struggle over national and communal identity. To illustrate the power of this alternative approach, this article reconsiders cases commonly cited in support of the existing hypotheses: the racial desegregation of the U.S. military, the integration of the Druze into the Israel Defense Forces, and the imperial and independent Indian armies' policies with respect to what the British termed "class."
Theories of international relations have often incorporated time horizons — a metaphor for the value actors’ place on the future relative to the present. However, they have rarely drawn from a growing body of experimental research that studies how human beings actually think about the future and how this affects their decision-making in the present. In this paper, we present relevant findings from psychology and behavioral economics, notably those of “construal level theory” (CLT), and explore these findings’ implications for three classic questions of international relations theory — cooperation, conflict, and compliance; preventive war; and coercion. We argue that experimental evidence regarding how people discount future value and construe future events challenges both neorealist and neoliberal approaches to international cooperation. We further maintain that CLT helps explain a longstanding puzzle about preventive wars — namely, why they are often initiated too late by declining powers but too soon by rising competitors. Finally, we rely on these empirical findings to explain who wins coercive contests and why compellence is often, but not always, harder than deterrence. We advise scholars of international relations and international security to pay closer attention to their assumptions about time horizons, and we suggest that these assumptions be grounded in what we know about actual human decision-making.
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In the winter of 2007, as Americans grew increasingly weary of a protracted and seemingly unwinnable war in Iraq, President George W. Bush bucked the political winds and, rather than bring the troops home, called for dispatching more forces, a “surge.” This would be a last-ditch effort to bring order to Iraq, which had known little peace since US forces had invaded the country and toppled Saddam Hussein's regime four years before. But, while the military struggled to dominate the battlefield in Iraq, Bush faced a rhetorical insurgency at home. This was not a surge, many Democrats warned, but a dangerous “escalation.” Failing to back the surge was tantamount to capitulating to “Jihadist Joe,” one Republican congressman memorably charged. Democratic opponents countered that resisting the surge was the surest way to save “GI Joe.” Where the administration saw controllable “sectarian strife,” many Democrats saw an unmanageable “civil war.” There was a lot at stake in these rhetorical battles. Both sides believed that, with their patience wearing thin, Americans wanted nothing to do with someone else's “civil war.” Sectarian or civil “strife,” though, seemed like a law-and-order problem, just the sort of thing that well-meaning outsiders could help to quash.
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