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American Grand Strategy in the Age of Trump, by Hal Brands. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2018. 256 pages. $25.99 (paperback).
Republic in Peril: American Empire and the Liberal Tradition, by David Hendrickson. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2017. 304 pages. $34.95.
These two books reach dramatically different conclusions, but both authors start from similar premises. David Hendrickson is deeply rooted in what one might call the Old Testament in American foreign policy: as the American founders established it, with a heavy emphasis on neutrality and nonintervention in foreign conflicts-that is, restraint. Hal Brands is no less rooted in what one might call the New Testament in American grand strategy: as practiced from the Cold War to the present, and focused on preserving the post-World War II, American-led liberal international order, which he sees as dependent on continued American primacy.
Each man is troubled by heresy, so to speak, with Hendrickson fearful that the American people have come to worship the "golden calf of empire" and Brands worried that in the age of President Trump they will throw away all they built from the rubble of the Second World War. This quasi-religious terminology seems appropriate, Naval War College Review, Winter 2019, Vol. 72, No. 1 because both Hendrickson and Brands understand that-whatever partisan differences Americans may have-American grand strategy depends on a consensus akin to what Abraham Lincoln called a "political religion" about what the strategy is for. Both authors agree on something fundamental, made famous at the dawn of the Cold War by the journalist Walter Lippmann: that the grand strategic dimension of foreign policy entails "bringing into balance, with a comfortable surplus of power in reserve, the nation's commitments and the nation's power" (Brands, p. 128; Hendrickson, pp. 172-75).
As Brands discusses the issue, there are three generic solutions to this problem: (1) "decrease commitments, thereby restoring equilibrium with diminished resources"; (2) "live with greater risk," either by gambling that adversaries will not test vulnerable commitments or by employing riskier approaches, such as nuclear escalation or cyber warfare, to "sustain commitments on the cheap"; or (3) "expand capabilities and thereby restore strategic solvency" (Brands, p. 128). Moreover, both writers express some admiration for Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger for attempting a grand strategic reassessment...