The Iraq war will be rendered all the more tragic if it leads America to pull back from its European and Asian security partnerships and its leadership in maintaining the institutional bases of global order—but this is precisely what Barry Posen proposes. One can applaud his arguments for a less-is-more approach to the Middle East and the problem of Islamic radicalism, which are based on a more plausible theory of terrorism and modern Arab history than the shifting theses offered by the Bush Administration. However, this argument is only loosely related to his broader call for a grand strategy of “restraint”, and this is deeply problematic.
Posen makes four mistakes. First, he conflates all the various types of “activist” grand strategies and sees all of them as equally misguided. In fact, liberal and neoconservative strategies offer profoundly different visions of international order. If neoconservatives want to employ American power to control the international system, liberal internationalists want to use American power to shape it through the provisioning of rules and institutions.
Second, in conflating these alternatives, Posen misses the same point that his neoconservative rivals miss—namely, that America can best pursue its global interests with a functioning governance system that facilitates cooperation in world politics. Posen acknowledges the importance of such governance mechanisms when he talks about the need for a revived Non-Proliferation Treaty and other security regimes. Indeed, the world is thirsting today for a revived system of rules and tools for collective action. Posen notes the troubling way in which the world has pushed back in the face of the unbridled exercise of American power, but it is precisely Washington’s commitment to rules and institutions of governance that reduces the incentives for these soft balancing moves.
Hence Posen’s third mistake is that he narrowly associates “restraint” with the retraction of America’s security commitments in Europe and Asia. The argument he makes is that these alliance partnerships create a moral hazard. Relying on American commitments, other countries shirk their responsibilities, while the United States finds itself intervening everywhere and getting into trouble. But these alliances—as well as America’s commitment to a wider array of multilateral institutions—are actually an essential tool for the establishment of American strategic restraint. These institutions provide mechanisms for other countries to engage Washington, and they establish constraints and obligations that at least partly inhibit American unilateralism. The lesson of the Iraq war is not for America to “come home”, but to tie itself more tightly to its allies. Yes, there are dangers that this extended security system will provide opportunities for strategic blunders and overextension. But the solution is better collective decision-making, not the wholesale scrapping of the postwar system.
Finally, to pull back from a liberal internationalist grand strategy is to lose the opportunity to lay down the institutional foundations for a global order that serves American interests in future years, when it is likely to be relatively less powerful. Think of it as investing in the future. We should be working at this moment to shape the global system so that the institutional legacies of today’s actions put the United States in the best position possible to secure its interests when the wheel of power turns and other countries loom larger. This requires activism, of a certain sort.
