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

This is a provocative, important book that offers a fundamental reinterpretation and sharp criticism of U.S. grand strategy since 1940. In the process it also challenges the numerous assumptions upon which that strategy has been based. Although primarily a work of political science filled with overarching theories from that discipline, it is simultaneously a work of history that illustrates exceptionally comprehensive reading in, and detailed knowledge of, the major works and interpretive controversies in the history of U.S. foreign relations.

An associate professor in the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, Layne makes use of these works as well as his own primary research to posit that U.S. grand strategy has for more than sixty-five years focused on achieving global hegemony (or what he labels in his European focus "extraregional hegemony"), that it has done so as a matter of choice rather than necessity given the nation's relative security, and that the present Bush administration strategy is thus far from a sharp break with the past. He further maintains that this historic strategy has been based upon a liberal ideology and domestic rather international considerations, specifically the "Open Door" approach first enunciated by John Hay in regard to China in 1899–1900 but globally by Woodrow Wilson during World War I. Despite its numerous successes, this ideology, policy, and grand strategy have been highly detrimental to the United States, are doomed to eventual defeat, and should be replaced with more limited ones based upon a Realist policy perspective and a strategy of "offshore balancing" designed to preclude the rise of another hegemonic power on the Eurasian land mass rather than secure American hegemony.

In one sense Layne's approach is nothing new. Focus on the Open Door has been the hallmark of a major revisionist school of thought in U.S. diplomatic history since William Appleman Williams's seminal works of the early 1960s (and before that in the works of Charles Beard), and Lane makes extensive use of these works as well as those of a host of more recent diplomatic historians—most notably Walter LaFeber, Melvyn Lefffler, and Michael Hogan. What is relatively new is the marriage of such an approach to what was long considered its scholarly opposite and opponent: classical, conservative Realism. In this fascinating synthesis, Layne offers a savage indictment of Open Door Wilsonianism and a defense of Realism, and on moral as well as geopolitical and historical grounds. In doing so, he in effect echoes recent calls for a political marriage of Liberals with conservative Realists to counter the ideological excesses and gross overcommitments of the Bush administration. Scholarship as well as politics apparently makes for some strange bedfellows.

This is not an easy read. It is dense, overly theoretical and argumentative (at least from a historian's viewpoint), often repetitious, and filled with an enormous number of long, discursive endnotes that make one beg for a return to footnotes at the bottom of each page (165 endnotes, for example, in a 22-page chapter; and a total of 75 pages of notes for 205 pages of text) . But it is well worth the effort. Indeed, in this reviewer's opinion it should be required reading in the White House and Congress.