The Use of Force After the Cold War (review)

With the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, the United States entered a new era of exercising military force. According to the collection of essays in The Use of Force After the Cold War (written before the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks), the end of the Cold War has supplied presidents with new opportunities and constraints on their ability to use force. In his essay "The Role of Force in Diplomacy," for instance, Alexander George argues that this has produced a U.S. foreign policy caught between an insistence on "retaining the option of unilateral action in defense of U.S. interests" and the need for "strong international legitimization of such actions" (89).

Leaving aside the concern that as global sheriff the United States will address only military threats to its security, the volume stresses the importance of America's emerging ambivalence toward multilateralism as a way of defining its existence in the post-Cold War period. Andrew Kohut's essay "Post-Cold War Attitudes towards the Use of Force" elaborates on this thinking by contending, "While on balance the American public continues to be internationalist in outlook, an isolationist minority has grown substantially . . . " (168). Thus, the general theme of the volume is that in the absence of the Communist threat, an ambivalence toward multilateral solutions involving the use of force has resonated with a more insecure post-Cold War America. This ambivalence has, in turn, deprived international institutions of the necessary powers to respond to a host of foreign policy issues, including terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.

The overall strength of H. W. Brands's volume is its appreciation for the power of historical context and the impact of major events on contemporary views of how force should be applied. Each essay speaks to the importance of the post-Vietnam era in U.S. foreign policy. We learn that a result of America's failure in Vietnam was that for the first time since the establishment of the Truman Doctrine in 1947, the policy of containment of Soviet global power was being challenged by competing perspectives and different presidents. James Lindsay's essay informs us that with each administration following Vietnam, there has been some relative modification in national security, although this modification has proven to be very difficult for each president in devising ways of using force and building domestic support. Nixon and Ford each emphasized the importance of counterbalancing the USSR by using or declining to use force in order to encourage global stability. Carter's perception of complex interdependence and global community even went so far as to downplay great power politics, the utility of military force, and preoccupations with conventional security issues. A return to containing Soviet power, fighting proxy wars against Soviet influence, and retreating from multilateralism were the goals of the Reagan administration. In this capacity, the volume provides a valuable service to scholars by highlighting the importance of historical significance.

The volume ends on a high note by supplying the reader with several theories involving the use of military force and violence in enforcing U.S. national interests. Stephen Biddle identifies several conceptual frameworks that are beyond the realm of conventional foreign policy decision-making models. He contends the economic determinist school perceives the military as "the inevitable outgrowth of basic changes in the mode of civil economic production," the contingent innovation school sees policy actions resulting not from "broad economic forces but from the actions of specific innovators who see novel possibilities in new technologies and create new organizations and military doctrines to exploit them," and an alternative theory of essential continuity that "implies that twenty-first-century warfare will be mainly a continuation of a century-long increase in the importance of skill in managing complexity" (220-22). The chapter succeeds in combining an admiration for theoretical implication with a measure of creative thought.

However, the volume lacks a considerable degree of...