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  • Author's Response:This Time It Will Also Take More Than Providence
  • Michael J. Green (bio)

I am deeply grateful to the reviewers of By More Than Providence for their serious treatment of the volume and their intriguing and useful insights. I was gratified that all the reviewers not only accepted the boldest argument in the book—that a democracy like the United States is capable of grand strategy—but that several participants also expanded on that theme. Kurt Campbell and Rush Doshi note, for example, that by acknowledging vacillation and inefficiencies over time, the book helps illuminate the enduring structural reasons for the United States' balance-of-power competition in Asia. James Holmes cites the work of Beatrice Heuser and Michael Handel to emphasize that states adopted grand strategies well before Clausewitz theorized on the subject, and they did so based on "common sense and logic," something even preindustrial Americans possessed in droves. All the reviewers stressed the importance of using history as a guide for a strategic rebalance to Asia as China challenges the current U.S.-led order in the region.

Not surprisingly, several of the reviewers questioned whether such a grand strategy is possible in the era of Donald Trump. I will confess to feeling relieved that I tied together the themes of the book with a closing examination of Barack Obama's "pivot" to Asia and then went to print just before the 2016 election. The Obama administration was strategic enough to reinforce the book's leitmotif of U.S. balancing but also dysfunctional enough to allow a return to the thematic glue of the five tensions that have vexed U.S. statecraft toward Asia for two centuries. In contrast, writing a concluding retrospective chapter around the disruptive and unpredictable Trump administration would have been a real challenge. And yet the history of U.S. statecraft toward Asia does provide a useful and relatively dispassionate framework for considering how much change and continuity the administration really represents.

Does President Trump have a "grand strategy"? His critics argue that he has repudiated seven decades of deep engagement in the Asia-Pacific and has squandered, if not actively dismantled, instruments of U.S. power [End Page 149] ranging from diplomacy to trade to support for democracy. His supporters argue that disruption and unpredictability are the ways and means he employs to achieve a better deal for the United States, measured in terms of bilateral trade deficits and allied defense spending. Thus far, however, the critics have the stronger case. If one focuses primarily on agency, this president represents a seismic shift.

However, structure also matters. Trump's surprise election did not represent a popular mandate for protectionism or isolationism vis-a-vis Asia. In polls taken by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, the Pew Research Center, and others, Americans' support for global engagement, trade, alliances with Asian states, and immigration actually increased in 2016 and 2017.1 Moreover, Trump's national security team (the National Security Council, State Department, and Defense Department) arguably has the most cohesive view of the China challenge of any core grouping of national security strategists in decades (although Trump's trade team may have the least cohesive vision since Herbert Hoover's administration). The current National Security Strategy accurately characterizes the structure of international relations in Asia by emphasizing the emergence of great-power competition with China. Arguably, another Republican president's or Hillary Clinton's National Security Strategy would have had the same premise. The administration's "free and open Indo-Pacific strategy" lacks for details, but it is a durable framework anchored in a coalition of like-minded maritime democracies and a great improvement from earlier flirtations with a U.S.-China condominium based on Xi Jinping's "new model of great-power relations." As Ashley Tellis warns, "the United States has invested heavily in seeking a relationship with China that advances its larger strategic interests, but these efforts have repeatedly fallen short." One could argue that for all its faults, the free and open Indo-Pacific strategy is evidence that we may have learned that lesson.

Of course, Donald Trump himself rarely refers to either the National Security...

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