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ABSTRACT: This essay examines the history of the Cold War to illuminate insights that can help assess debates about American grand strateg y today. As will be shown, calls for dramatic retrenchment and "offshore balancing" rest on weak historical foundations. Yet Cold War history also reminds us that a dose of restraint-and occasional selective retrenchment-can be useful in ensuring the long-term sustainability of an ambitious grand strategy.
US grand strategy stands at a crossroads.1 Since World War II, the United States has pursued an ambitious and highly engaged grand strategy meant to mold the global order. The precise contours of that grand strategy have changed from year to year, and from presidential administration to presidential administration; however its core, overarching principles have remained essentially consistent. America has sought to preserve and expand an open and prosperous world economy. It has sought to foster a peaceful international environment in which democracy can flourish. It has sought to prevent any hostile power from dominating any of the key overseas regions-Europe, East Asia, the Middle East-crucial to US security and economic wellbeing. And in support of these goals, the United States has undertaken an extraordinary degree of international activism, anchored by American alliance and security commitments to overseas partners, and the forward presence and troop deployments necessary to substantiate those commitments.2
This grand strategy has, on the whole, been profoundly productive for both the United States and the wider world, for it has underpinned an international system that has been-by any meaningful historical comparison-remarkably peaceful, prosperous, and democratic.3 Yet over the past several years, America's long-standing grand strategy has increasingly come under fire.
Amid the long hangover from the Iraq War and a painful financial crisis whose effects are still being felt, leading academic observers have taken up the banner of retrenchment. Prominent voices in the strategic-studies community argue the United States can no longer afford such an ambitious grand strategy; that US alliances and security commitments bring far greater costs than benefits; and that American overseas presence and activism create more problems than they solve. The solution, they contend, is a sharp rollback of US military presence and alliance commitments, and a far more austere foreign policy writ large. Scholars such as Stephen Walt, John Mearsheimer,...