Safeguarding Democratic Capitalism is a masterful work of diplomatic history. Not only will Leffler’s volume be of long-standing interest to historians and international relations scholars, but it is of immense value to strategists and policymakers whose charge it is to ensure American national security.
Conceptualizing Emerging Strategic Challenges in the Cyber Age
Few at CyConUS were optimistic about the future of cyber restraint among states. Rather, it was the assertiveness of nation-states that featured prominently in many of the keynotes and panel discussions. Whether the U.S. and its allies can respond effectively to these challenges, and the many others likely to follow, remains an open question. The cyber era is one of asymmetric conflict. For all of the billions of dollars the U.S. spends on cybersecurity through the departments of Defense and Homeland Security, determined attackers can find success for a minuscule fraction of that cost. Bending that cost-curve in a more favorable direction must be a top priority for the U.S. and its global partners.
#Reviewing The Evolution of Modern Grand Strategic Thought
In an impressive new book, Milevski argues that grand strategy is a conceptual nomad, an idea whose course has been driven solely by immediate historical contingency, with little theoretical grounding or guidance. Over the course of nearly two hundred years, writers on grand strategy have demonstrated a curious case of presentism in their approach to studying and refining the idea. Spurred by the necessity of solving immediate problems, grand strategy has been pushed in one direction after another, whipsawed by the emergence of new contingencies.
#Reviewing War by Other Means
There isn’t much grand about America’s post-Cold War grand strategy. Such is the consensus among the academic scholars, think-tankers, pundits, and many former national security officials who have chastised U.S. foreign policymakers for lacking strategic sophistication, or worse, failing to craft a coherent grand strategy at all...In their well-crafted and important new book, War by Other Means: Geoeconomics and Statecraft, Robert Blackwill and Jennifer Harris join this discussion orthogonally, arguing that the United States has altogether abandoned the economic dimension of grand strategy.
#Reviewing Success and Failure in Limited War
Strategic performance is strongly affected by the state’s information management capabilities. Top policymakers must have the ability to understand the environment in which they are acting (outside information) and how their national security organizations are behaving in that strategic environment (inside information). Strategic risk assessment is based on an understanding of the opponent’s strengths and weaknesses, the challenges and opportunities present in the international environment, and the capability of the state to act in a purposeful way along multiple lines. Without sound outside and inside information, risk assessments will suffer, as will the quality of strategy.
Legitimacy, Strategy, and the Islamic State
The recent wave of international terror attacks committed by the Islamic State (IS) — in Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt, and France — mark a significant departure from the group’s past strategic approach. For much of its existence, most notably under the leadership of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, IS’s overriding priority has been state-building. Localized terrorism in Iraq and Syria, widely used by the organization as it transitioned from an insurgency to a proto-state, has been employed as a method of population control.
Can Cooler Heads Prevail in U.S.-China Military Relations?
All is not right in U.S.-China relations. From Washington’s perspective, Beijing isn’t following the liberal internationalist script. For one thing, China’s “peaceful development” seems to have morphed into a full-throated, and ever expanding, assertion of the PRC’s sovereignty rights in the South China Sea. Moreover, the recent release of the People’s Liberation Army white paper confirms what has long been suspected: American hegemony is little appreciated in Beijing.