This is perhaps a bit too old, but hey, we’re a new blog. John J. Mearsheimer has an article in the National Interest’s January/February issue on U.S. grand strategy. Without getting into the nitty-gritty of the piece, Mearsheimer does an excellent job showing what went wrong after the end of the Cold War, choosing global dominance, as opposed to isolationism, offshore balancing, or selective engagement.
He eventually comes down on offshore balancing as the preferred grand strategy, but the piece is just as informative in tracking the evolution and failure of a global dominance strategy in the last two decades and how both democrats and republicans pursued similar, yet subtly different, foreign policies.
One of Mearsheimer’s main criticisms with the global dominance strategies (be it unilateral or multilateral) is two-fold: Policy-makers severely exaggerate U.S. ability to build nations while ignoring the adverse consequences of a forward-leaning posture (e.g. U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia) and aggressive foreign policy (e.g. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan).
For the entire article, click here.
