The Peace of Illusions: American Grand Strategy from 1940 to the Present (review)

If George W. Bush had been an aberration, the problem would have been minor, but he was not an aberration. This is roughly the message conveyed by Christopher Layne’s insightful study of U.S. grand strategy from the 1940s to the present. The book deserves a wide readership because—breaking the mold of the academic mainstream—it conveys a simple, forceful message: namely, that the United States, for the sake of its own future, must break away from its Cold War–era foreign and security policies. A mere improvement of the old ways is not an option for Layne; rather, he calls for totally new policies based on self-restraint and enlightened power sharing.

At first glance, these arguments sound like William Appleman Williams and the 1950s Wisconsin School revisited. Indeed, Layne offers a brilliant summary of this once prominent approach to the study of American history. Three notions stand out in his analysis: First, U.S. strategy is fueled not by the outside world but by America’s self-image. Since the late nineteenth century, leading political and business elites have believed that prosperity and security at home depend on open access to the world’s key regions. In their view, the American way of life and democratic form of government can be safe only in an international system penetrated by U.S. trade, investment, ideals, and values. Second, this fixation on “open doors” around the globe is the bedrock of U.S. hegemony, spurring demands for other countries to be run by governments that pursue policies compatible with U.S. interests. Third, the U.S. commitment to transforming the world is ill-founded and self-defeating. Layne argues that the history of powerful empires shows that in the end they all fall into the trap of overextension, unnecessary military entanglements, and excessive interventionism. An anti-hegemonic backlash and counterbalancing strategies are bound to ensue.

Over the last thirty years, scholars such as Daniel Yergin, Michael Hogan, and Melvyn Leffler developed offshoots of this interpretation. From an empirical standpoint, Layne has nothing to add to their nuanced balance sheet of America’s preponderance of power since 1945. He does, however, add an additional theoretical dimension—an extension of ideas closely associated with Richard Hofstadter’s famous Harper’s Magazine essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” For Hofstadter, paranoia and a pervasive sense of vulnerability are byproducts of American “exceptionalism”: American society, he claims, is susceptible to the sense of being alone and perpetually beleaguered because it deems its values and institutions superior to everyone else’s. Layne convincingly spells out the long-lasting implications of this ambiguous tradition—that total threats must be countered by total defense and absolute security. Secretary of State Dean Rusk expressed this view in arguing that the United States would be safe “only to the extent that its total environment is safe.”

This is the sound of a de-territorialized definition of “national security,” of a policy that divorces the concept of security from the territorial defense of the U.S. homeland. Instead of tangible factors such as geography and the distribution of power, security is all about unlimited and open-ended concerns. Threatened potentially by turbulent frontiers anywhere, the United States continuously broadens its defense perimeters, without gaining an inch. In Layne’s words, “Each new defensive perimeter is menaced by turmoil on the other side of the line.” Unable or unwilling to fix a point beyond which U.S. security interests are not implicated, policymakers yield to threat-inflation and threat-exaggeration, fostering a crusader mentality and political recipes for disaster, the experience of Vietnam notwithstanding.

One might argue that Layne makes too little of this approach. In addition to offering controversial judgments about the Cold War years and a sometimes naive perception of Soviet policy, he offers only a sketchy account to back up his claim that the United States pays a high domestic price for its traditional security...