Correspondence: The Establishment and U.S. Grand Strategy

To the Editors (Peter D. Feaver and Hal Brands write):In his article “Why America's Grand Strategy Has Not Changed: Power, Habit, and the U.S. Foreign Policy Establishment,” Patrick Porter argues that the continuity of U.S. grand strategy since World War II has resulted from a group-think mentality fostered by a powerful foreign policy elite—“the Blob”—that stifles debate and prevents needed course corrections.1 Porter's provocative argument is ultimately unpersuasive, because it overstates the degree of conformity and consensus in U.S. strategy while slighting the most obvious explanations for the strategy's endurance. Below we highlight several problems with his argument.First, Porter exaggerates the degree of consensus in U.S. foreign policy since World War II. In fact, despite a bipartisan consensus on the necessity of U.S. global leadership in support of a congenial international order (what Porter calls “primacy”), intense debates about how that strategy should be operationalized have been common in U.S. foreign policy circles. Policymakers, elected officials, and policy commentators argued heatedly over such fundamental issues as whether to pursue a Europe-first or Asia-first strategy in the 1950s, whether and how aggressively to combat Soviet and communist influence in the developing world, whether to make or avoid defense commitments on the Asian mainland, whether to pursue détente or confrontation with the Soviet Union in the 1970s, whether to use force to reverse Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990–91, whether to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organization after the Cold War, and whether to invade Iraq in 2003. These debates reflected genuine intellectual disagreements that pitted members of the Blob against one another. Porter would likely respond that such debates were essentially about tactics, but the fact that the foreign policy community has engaged in knock-down, drag-out debates over issues of such enormous strategic importance shows that it is not as unified, and the marketplace of ideas not as limited, as Porter claims.Second, although Porter argues that dissenting foreign policy views advocating an approach he calls “restraint” tend to be marginalized, departures from a strategy of U.S. leadership have time and again received a hearing at the highest levels of government. In the 1950s and 1960s, Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy repeatedly considered withdrawing U.S. troops from Europe.2 Similar debates occurred in Congress in the late 1960s and early 1970s. When Jimmy Carter took office, he strongly favored withdrawing U.S. troops from South Korea.3 In the early 1990s, the George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations initially delegated management of the crisis in the former Yugoslavia to the European NATO allies. In 2011, Barack Obama withdrew U.S. troops from Iraq as part of a broader move toward an offshore balancing strategy in the Middle East.4 In other words, presidents and other political leaders in the United States have often been willing to consider significant changes in U.S. strategy, and they have sometimes even implemented policies that represented a meaningful shift toward retrenchment and restraint.Third, the reason that many of these departures were not ultimately undertaken—or proved fleeting—is not because policymakers denied them a fair, open hearing. It is because they were judged—or later shown—to be substantively inferior to more assertive policies. Eisenhower never withdrew U.S. troops from Europe, because he understood that doing so would have threatened to destabilize the interlocking series of arrangements that deterred the Soviet Union while pacifying Germany and Western Europe.5 Carter never withdrew U.S. troops from South Korea, for fear that doing so would have risked incentivizing South Korean nuclear proliferation and destabilizing the fragile balance in a critical part of the world.6 The United States ultimately took the lead in addressing the crackup of Yugoslavia when the inability of the Europeans to deal with the crisis had become clear. Obama did draw down U.S. forces in Iraq, but large swaths of that country (and Syria) were subsequently overrun by the Islamic State, compelling a reassertion of U.S. military and diplomatic engagement.7 In these and other cases, an emphasis on U.S. leadership has persisted, because that approach has been deemed—after significant debate or hard experience—superior to the alternatives.Fourth, and related, Porter slights the simplest explanation for why there has been substantial consistency in U.S. strategy: because it works. As scholars have demonstrated, the past seventy years have been among the best in human history in terms of rising global and U.S. prosperity, the spread of democracy and human rights, the avoidance of great power war, and the decline of war in general.8 It has also been a period when the world's leading power consistently pursued a grand strategy geared explicitly toward achieving those goals. To prove that U.S. grand strategy persists for reasons other than utility, Porter would have to show that U.S. leadership has not been necessary to those outcomes or that it is no longer necessary. But he does not do so (or even really try to do so), and his article does not engage the relevant social science scholarship and historical literature establishing a causal connection between U.S. engagements and key aspects of the relatively benign global order.9Finally, critics of primacy consistently argue, as Porter does, that their ideas are censored or excluded from policy debates. Yet, critics of U.S. grand strategy are prominent within the academy, including at prestigious institutions such as the University of Chicago, Harvard, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Their op-eds and essays appear in the New York Times, Foreign Policy, and Foreign Affairs, among other prominent “mainstream” outlets, and their work receives generous funding. Leading critics of primacy are regular participants in U.S. government–sponsored outreach initiatives such as the National Intelligence Council's Intelligence Associates program. Not least, although Porter and many other realists in the academy deplore key aspects of the current president's foreign policy, that president's own core critique of the foreign policy elite echoes those made by academic realists.10 If this is censorship, it is a remarkably ineffective form of censorship. Perhaps the reason primacy endures is not that the marketplace of ideas is broken, but that it is working fairly well.—Peter D. FeaverDurham, North Carolina—Hal BrandsWashington, D.C.To the Editors (Rebecca Friedman Lissner writes):In “Why America's Grand Strategy Has Not Changed: Power, Habit, and the U.S. Foreign Policy Establishment,” Patrick Porter investigates why the United States has pursued a continuous grand strategy of primacy since the end of the Cold War.1 Although vast endowments of material power enable such a grand strategy, Porter contends that capabilities alone cannot explain this choice. Rather, it is the habitual thinking of the U.S. foreign policy establishment—or “the Blob”—that has ossified an imprudent primacy strategy and precluded serious consideration of alternatives. Porter's study is an important contribution to debates about post–Cold War U.S. foreign policy; nonetheless, two problems hinder its ability to advance the debate on the sources of grand-strategic continuity and change.First, the article does not adequately specify the threshold for grand-strategic change. Porter outlines four constant elements of post–World War II U.S. grand strategy: preponderance, reassurance, integration, and nonproliferation. Left unstated, however, are the criteria for change. Would rejection or relaxation of any one of these principles constitute change? Must all four be rejected? What about major foreign policy pivots within each of these grand-strategic pillars?These questions go entirely unaddressed and undermine attempts at theory testing in the article's empirical sections. For instance, in describing the potential for retrenchment under President Bill Clinton, Porter states: “Clinton could have reallocated resources by lowering defense spending, shifting burdens to allies, or reducing foreign commitments in some combination” (p. 24). The article then goes on to concede that the Clinton administration “oversaw some military retrenchment, making initial cuts of 25 percent” to the defense budget. The administration also reduced the share of gross domestic product devoted to defense expenditures by 1.2 percent (p. 25). Yet, Porter ultimately dismisses these reductions as insufficient to constitute “revision and retrenchment,” without clarifying how much of a diminution in spending—in absolute or relative terms—would have qualified as discontinuity.This analytical shortcoming is not unique to Porter's article. Rather, the lack of clear criteria for measuring change is endemic in the grand strategy literature.2 Because scholars disagree about its meaning,3 they operationalize the concept of grand strategy in widely divergent ways.4 A corollary to this problem is ongoing disagreement regarding the threshold for grand-strategic change: some, like Porter, see post–World War II U.S. grand strategy as basically continuous,5 whereas others identify substantial discontinuities, typically associated with the end of the Cold War or the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.6 Until the literature converges on a common means of conceptualizing, operationalizing, and ultimately measuring grand strategy, ad hoc approaches will prevail and knowledge will not accumulate.7Second, the article's specification of its central concept—the U.S. foreign policy establishment, or Blob—renders the theoretical argument unfalsifiable. In short, Porter's theory defines the independent variable (membership in the Blob) with its dependent variable (primacist views). Although the article describes characteristics and names personifications of the U.S. foreign policy establishment at several points, it does not define criteria for inclusion.8 Instead, it conflates membership with the set of primacist ideas ascribed to it (pp. 14–16): the establishment is defined by its investment in “primacy as the only viable, legitimate grand strategy” (p. 15).This conflation poses several theoretical problems. Most importantly, it renders the theory's independent and dependent variables necessarily invariant. Short of a displacement of the establishment itself, which the article does not theorize, Porter's argument cannot account for grand-strategic change. Moreover, the theory of habit relies on a circular logic: any individual who dissents from primacy—whether a member of the foreign policy commentariat, an international relations scholar, or president of the United States—can be dismissed as outside the foreign policy establishment. It is therefore impossible to falsify the article's claim that habit-driven decisionmaking makes members of the Blob incapable of critically evaluating primacy's core assumptions (p. 46).In an empirical illustration of this problem, the article cites President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's embrace of multipolarity as the sole instance of post–World War II grand-strategic discontinuity. To be consistent with the article's theory, it should follow that Nixon and Kissinger were capable of acting as “determined agents of change” because they were not captured by the primacist habit of thinking characteristic of the foreign policy establishment (p. 17). It is hardly credible, however, to classify Nixon, an avid Cold Warrior and former vice president, and Kissinger, a Harvard professor and prominent Council on Foreign Relations member, as outside the Blob of their day.Ultimately, these theoretical and empirical shortcomings suggest that Porter did not adequately consider the simplest alternative explanation: primacy persisted because it was preferable to the United States’ other grand-strategic options, despite its flaws and excesses. Just as primacy's “excellence … is not self-evident” (p. 46), neither is its inferiority, and continuity may have in fact resulted from the presence, rather than absence, of strategic reflection. This proposition suggests that the puzzle motivating the article is not a puzzle at all.—Rebecca Friedman LissnerNewport, Rhode IslandPatrick Porter Replies:I am grateful to Peter Feaver and Hal Brands, and Rebecca Lissner, for their replies to my article “Why America's Grand Strategy Has Not Changed.”1 In the article, I argued that the habitual ideas of the American foreign policy establishment (“the Blob”) make U.S. grand strategy in its fundamentals hard to change, largely limiting debate within government to a question of how, not whether, to pursue unrivaled dominance abroad. Below, I address several of my critics’ complaints.Overall, the two letters fail to rebut the empirical evidence I offer about the process of presidential decisionmaking, evidence that demonstrates a habit-driven continuity in U.S. grand strategy. My critics do not address the evidence I provide about two presidents who promised change—Bill Clinton and Donald Trump—only to be constrained by the foreign policy establishment into preserving the United States’ prevailing grand strategy. Under Clinton, there is no evidence of a grand-strategic reassessment within the executive branch. That lack of evidence is telling, given the volume of reportage about various White House intrigues. Officials rebuked a colleague who publicly speculated about alternatives (pp. 30–31). Debate about whether the United States should maintain overwhelming military preponderance quickly settled on how, not whether, to retain it (p. 31). The persistence of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was assumed to be a good thing, with little wrangling over enlarging its membership. In Trump's case, persistent pressure from government officials, Congress, allies, and the commentariat drove a reluctant president to reinforce alliances with money and troops (p. 41). It nudged a president who denounced failed wars and alliances to increase U.S. military commitments in the Middle East—including the small garrison in Syria, despite an earlier announcement of U.S. withdrawal2—and to pursue nuclear counterproliferation at the risk of war, despite having once suggested that proliferation was tolerable (p. 42). The Trump administration has not rigorously debated alternative grand strategies. In an anonymous op-ed essay published in the New York Times in September 2018, a White House insider declared that “senior officials,” including the author of the op-ed, were “working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda,” because the “national security team knew better” than the president.3 So much for the “open” marketplace of strategic reflection. Finally, veteran members of the U.S. foreign policy establishment agree that decisionmaking is constrained, noting a conformist pressure that imposes restrictive parameters on debate (p. 17).Turning to Lissner's critique, she suggests that the concept of grand strategy lacks utility because it has no agreed meaning. She then deploys that very concept, suggesting that primacy may be the best among the United States’ grand-strategic options. Lissner suggests that my independent variable (the Blob) collapses into the dependent variable, which she identifies as “primacist views.” To the contrary, the dependent variable is the selection of grand strategy, including by reluctant presidents. Moreover, Lissner suggests that I offer no theory of change, but I do, with historical demonstrations (pp. 17–18). She claims that the case of greatest variation—Nixon and Kissinger's attempt to reorganize U.S. statecraft around accepting multipolarity—contradicts my thesis, because both Nixon and Kissinger were insiders, yet held dissenting views. Members of the club, like them, can indeed lapse; but when they do, they meet resistance. The weight of orthodoxy makes it difficult to deviate from the bipartisan consensus that the United States should lead the world, even in periods such as the 1970s, when adverse external circumstances prompted more division than usual.Lissner claims that I fail to explain why Clinton's defense budget cuts did not revise the U.S. commitment to military preponderance. But, again, I do. Clinton deliberately confined reductions to a level that still outmatched the combined spending of all the major powers at the time, with the orthodox rationale that preponderance was necessary to maintain a favorable balance of power and prevent spirals of alarm (p. 25). Those who proposed alternative force structures and budgets, such as the Center of Defense Information, were largely ignored. Congressional hearings focused on how best to maintain the U.S. role as global security provider (p. 31). Even proposals for modest modifications to the “two-war standard” were swiftly outflanked by primacists who enjoyed privileged media access (p. 30).In their criticism, Feaver and Brands deny the existence of conformist pressures, mischaracterizing my argument as a general claim of censorship. I do not argue that society at-large censors alternative opinions. To the contrary, there is a vibrant debate in universities, civil society, and in specialist foreign policy journals. Mainstream media does not suppress criticism, though it exhibits biases. Rather, the question is why public discussion hardly penetrates internal decisions on fundamental and Brands that debates took over important issues such as détente with the Soviet Union or It does not however, that fundamental core commitments were also open to debates over fundamental commitments with debates over how to For instance, they Barack from Iraq as a shift to offshore That is Under the United States a in the as a more than a level the Iraq invasion The United States an of two and engaged in against If can so be represented as offshore no change is and Brands are that President John Kennedy considered withdrawing U.S. troops from would have been a retrenchment of grand-strategic as is a core of In my article, I the of primacy as a grand strategy to the early 1960s, which is the United States a commitment to and case is with to President Jimmy who his attempt to U.S. troops from South Carter was not with a debate were but with which took the form of of military and political pressure from allies, and Carter was only because he his having been and Brands, and Lissner, that the U.S. strategy of primacy endures because it works. American statecraft can indeed but consider also that strategy has U.S. at a than the U.S. to the Congressional The to reinforce the commitment to primacy after the terrorist attacks of September 11, and the Middle to the and on including the United States’ war since Feaver and Brands these as The attempt to North with a on the on two The United States is on a course with in Europe, the and wars of primacy also to the of demonstrates that wars in the Middle Trump in and despite evidence to the contrary, in the endures that only can the As was of of the of his policy could his in its United

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