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Peter Trubowitz

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"Politics and Strategy is the best book on U.S. grand strategy to emerge in years. Trubowitz provides a simple and elegant model that accounts for U.S. strategic choices over centuries. Going beyond the tired isolationist-internationalist dichotomy, this book establishes a far more interesting and complex pattern of variation of U.S. grand strategies, exposing unexpected commonalities between the strategic aims of such unlikely bedfellows as Washington and Franklin Roosevelt, McKinley and G. W. Bush, or Hoover and Clinton. This is a signal contribution to scholarship with major implications for policy debates."--William Wohlforth, Dartmouth College

"Politics and Strategy is vintage Trubowitz. Large in intellectual ambition and empirical scope, elegantly sparse in theoretical formulation, and compelling in the evidence it presents, this book offers a deeply illuminating causal narrative of American foreign policy. The book's grasp of international relations theory is lucid, its in-depth engagement of American domestic politics is exemplary, and its practical policy implications are important. This book shines a brilliantly clear light on a subject too often shrouded in the depressing fog dispensed by pundits and blogs."--Peter Katzenstein, Cornell University

"Trubowitz places grand strategy at the critical intersection of political economy and security, where it belongs. His book is both a major addition to the positive theory of grand strategy and a novel reinterpretation of the history of American foreign policy."--Miles Kahler, University of California, San Diego

"Politics and Strategy is a great book. It offers a big-think synthesis of the two leading categories of theories assessing foreign policy: realism and domestic politics. It then applies that synthesis in a provocative, interesting, and plausible fashion to the history of U.S. foreign policy. Trubowitz does a superb job conceptualizing and defining grand strategies and his argument is compelling, elegant, and novel."--Jeffrey W. Legro, University of Virginia

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Politics and Strategy

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

List of Tables and Figures...........................................................xiPreface and Acknowledgments..........................................................xiiiChapter One Introduction Statesmen, Partisans, and Geopolitics.....................1Chapter Two Grand Strategy's Microfoundations.......................................9Chapter Three Why States Appease Their Foes.........................................44Chapter Four When States Expand.....................................................77Chapter Five Why States Underreach..................................................106Chapter Six Conclusion Statecraft's Twin Engines...................................129References...........................................................................151Index................................................................................177

Chapter One

STATESMEN, PARTISANS, AND GEOPOLITICS

In the spring of 1795, President George Washington faced an agonizing political choice. His special envoy to England, Chief Justice John Jay, had returned from London with a draft of a treaty that strongly favored the British. Revolutionary France's bid for empire in Europe had fanned tensions in Anglo-American relations, and Washington hoped to avert war. He sent Jay to London hoping to reassure London about American intentions and to head off the possibility of a conflict with Britain. But Jay came back with a treaty that was so pro-British that the president was viciously attacked by his partisan foes for a near treasonous deal with the former colonial power. Having delayed action on the treaty for some months, as long as diplomacy would allow, the president now had to decide whether to send it to the Senate for ratification. George Washington faced a strategic dilemma. If he threw his support behind Jay's treaty, the president risked destroying his fragile government from within, through paroxysms of partisan rage. If Washington shelved the treaty to quiet his political detractors, however, there would likely be war with England, which had the potential to destroy the nation from the outside. Geopolitics and domestic politics were two faces of the same coin: the president could not respond to one threat without weighing its impact on the other.

Washington's dilemma was especially acute, but his strategic conundrum was as old as statecraft itself. Political leaders have always had to deal with cross-pressures and trade-offs between geopolitics and domestic politics. This is because leaders face conflicting institutional incentives. One set of incentives is generated by the executive's role as statesman in world politics. The other is generated by the leader's role as chief of a ruling coalition or party on the home front. The tension inherent in this dual role is present in regimes of all types but is especially intense in democracies such as the United States. In democracies, where a leader's hold on power depends on popular support, leaders must respond to shifting geopolitical pressures while simultaneously competing to secure the political backing of not only partisans but also a decisive slice of the national electorate.

This book is about how leaders manage these conflicting institutional incentives at the broadest level of foreign policy—the level known as grand strategy. International relations scholars use the term "grand strategy" to refer to the purposeful and planned use of military, economic, and diplomatic means by states to achieve desired foreign policy ends, whether in peacetime or during wartime. Politics and Strategy focuses on the determinants or sources of grand strategy: How do leaders select or choose their grand strategies? Why do some leaders pursue ambitious, costly grand strategies, whereas other leaders adopt narrower, cheaper ones? When do leaders respond assertively to check foreign threats, and when are they likely to rely on less confrontational means to deal with external challenges? International relations scholars do not yet provide satisfactory answers to these questions.

The Two Faces of Grand Strategy

Two general approaches dominate the study of grand strategy in international relations. The first draws on the tradition known as Realpolitik or realism. It argues that grand strategies are determined by a country's geopolitical circumstances and especially by its position in the international system. Scholars in the realist tradition stress international factors such as a state's relative material power (e.g., military strength, gross national product, population size), whether prevailing military technology favors the offense or defense in fighting wars, and the distribution of power among states in the international system (whether the system is multipolar, bipolar, or unipolar). These and other international constraints, realists argue, shape states' ambitions and possibilities, defining what strategies their leaders might reasonably expect to succeed in a world that is fundamentally anarchical. These considerations determine leaders' foreign policy strategies and choices.

Realist explanations of statecraft differ sharply from a second approach that argues that grand strategy has a domestic face. Scholars in this domestic politics or Innenpolitik tradition point to pressures within states, rather than pushes and pulls from the outside, to explain leaders' choices. The domestic politics approach starts from the premise that societal interests (e.g., industrialists, bankers, merchants, interest groups) have a stake in whether a nation's foreign policy is expensive or cheap, offensive or defensive, or coercive or cooperative. Leaders are thought to respond to these interests in setting grand strategy and choosing national priorities in international affairs. In Innenpolitik accounts of grand strategy, states' foreign policy choices are thus constrained, and perhaps even distorted, by societal interests and pressures. Innenpolitikers argue, for example, that the roots of the classic problem of "strategic overextension," in which a state's reach exceeds its grasp, lie on the domestic side: the combination of powerful economic interests and weak, ineffectual governing institutions allow narrow special interests to push political leaders into overly ambitious foreign policies.

In this book, I argue that this international-domestic distinction misses the essential dynamic that defines how leaders set grand strategy. The fact is that leaders take both geopolitics and domestic politics seriously, and they do so for a simple reason: to do otherwise is to risk their reputation as leaders and their hold on political power. It is clear that leaders who misread or ignore the interests of their domestic coalitions or parties risk losing power and office. But as Niccolò Machiavelli warned, the same is true for "princes" who misjudge their state's geopolitical circumstances and capabilities. They too risk political punishment by their partisan supporters and domestic publics. The unanticipated rise of a foreign challenger, the failure to take an old or new foe seriously enough, or the headlong pursuit of an ill-advised foreign adventure can seriously damage a leader's reputation and credibility, at home as well as abroad. Failure or defeat in international affairs throws...