Surprise, Security, and the American Experience

"This is a great book by one of the great Cold War historians of the United States. He has a simple but very compelling argument about when you look at the American experience, which is that you can only understand American grand strategy in diplomatic history by looking at how it reacts to shock and events. His argument is that if you look at the pattern – whether it is Britain burning down the American White House or Imperial Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor or bin Laden’s strike on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon – it has been quite clear. In response to emergency and to shock from these surprise attacks, America has struck back and expanded its security domain. America’s reaction is to fight back and to try to reinvent the world in its own image. It wants to spread its values and its open door market democracy. It has an enduring idea that it can only be safe in a world built around America’s ideals. And I think he is cautiously sympathetic to this view. It is unrealistic in the sense that it is very difficult to remake the world in your image because it presumes a lot of your own power. America had some success in exporting its ‘open door’ – through the Bretton Woods system, the International Monetary Fund, the market capitalist model. But the urge to transform the world to the Atlantic way also leads to overreach, resistance and exhaustion as commitments exceed power, whether in the form of Vietnam, or crippling fiscal deficits, or dangerous confrontations with Iran and China. “In response to emergency and to shock from these surprise attacks, America has struck back and expanded its security domain.” I think that you can create security by living in a world of balance and pluralism rather than uniformity. It is very difficult to be a global power. There are a lot of very serious regional powers, but to actually be a world superpower with commitments on five continents is incredibly taxing even for America! Now that its economic power is eroding, that makes it even more difficult. I think the big question for the 21st century United States in terms of foreign policy is to decide whether they want to live in a world of dominance or balance. What is interesting about these books are that they are all written by Americans talking in the most critical way about themselves."