Abstract
This chapter will offer an example of the sort of outcome-based risk assessment highlighted in the previous section by examining the emerging US grand strategic approach, which could be called “selective engagement.” It first describes this strategic posture, and then informs its analysis with two previous case studies of similar strategies: the gradual British recognition of a need to wind down their empire, and the Nixon Doctrine. The discussion then undertakes a brief risk assessment of the emerging US approach along the lines suggested in the previous chapter.
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Notes
One of the best such treatments is Barry R. Posen and Andrew S. Ross, “Competing Visions for U.S. Grand Strategy,” International Security, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Winter 1996–1997), 5–53.
See Thomas Wright, “The Rise and Fall of the Unipolar Concert,” The Washington Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 4 (Winter 2015), 7–24.
See, for example, Robert Art, “Geopolitics Updated: The Strategy of Selective Engagement,” International Security, Vol. 23, No. 3 (Winter 1998–1999), 5–42.
Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Vintage Books, 1987), 151, 228.
David Lake, “British and American Hegemony Compared: Lessons for the Current Era of Decline,” in Michael Fry, ed., History, the White House and the Kremlin: Statesmen as Historians (London: Pinter Publishers, 1991), 108, 111.
Aaron Friedberg, The Weary Titan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 103.
Andrew Gamble, “Hegemony and Decline: Britain and the United States,” in Patrick Karl O’Brien and Armand Clesse, eds., Two Hegemonies: Britain 1846–1914 and the United States 1941–2001 (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2002), 127–140.
Jean-Marie Guehenno, The End of the Nation-State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985).
Henry A. Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 707.
Richard Nixon, U.S. Foreign Policy for the 1970’s, a New Strategy for Peace (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, February 18, 1970).
Kissinger, Diplomacy, 708–709; and Henry A. Kissinger, White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), 224.
For a number of recent treatments of the credibility problem, see Christopher Fettweis, “Credibility and the War on Terror,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 122, No. 4 (Winter 2007), 607–633; Stephen M. Walt, “The Credibility Addiction,” Foreign Policy, January 6, 2015, available at http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/01/06/the-credibility-addiction-us-iraq-afghanistan-unwinnable-war/;
Jonathan Mercer, Reputation and International Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010); and
Daryl Press, Calculating Credibility: How Leaders Assess Military Threats (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007).
See the discussion in Mark Gunzginger, Shaping America’s Future Military: Toward a New Force Planning Construct (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2013).
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Mazarr, M.J. (2016). Outcome Assessment of the Emerging US National Security Strategy. In: Rethinking Risk in National Security. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-91843-0_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-91843-0_12
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