International Relations theorist Charles Glaser has joined a growing chorus calling for the abandonment of Taiwan. His take on why we should abandon the island is tucked into his "nuanced version of realism" argued on the pages of Foreign Affairs. As do most "abandon Taiwan" arguments, he begins with a "realist" argument for why war between the United States and China is unlikely. Why? Because besides Taiwan, Sino-U.S. interests are compatible.

Parting company with other "pessimistic" realists who believe that "power transitions" -- the historic condition of a rising power challenging the existing hegemon -- more often than not lead to war, Glaser believes that this time it is different. The security dilemma (in pursuing our security we take steps which decrease their security which leads them to take steps which decrease our security, a process that can end in conflict) in the Sino-U.S. case. The task for Beijing and Washington (but mostly Washington) is to trust that each country just wants security, not domination. 

For example, the United States should not fear China's nuclear build-up because of Beijing's limited ability to strike the U.S. homeland. According to this logic, the United States should forego temptations to increase its own nuclear arsenal in response to China's own increases. All China is doing is increasing its security with a second strike capability. In turn, China should not fear U.S. conventional capabilities because most are resident across the Pacific.

But ultimately, the argument goes, it is up to the United States and not China, to make adjustments to its security posture and not exaggerate threats that China poses. The United States is safe because China will never have the means to destroy its deterrent.

Glaser concedes that this theory overlooks the fact that U.S. security alliances could seem threatening to China. Here we get to the nub of his argument. The United States must ask itself how important its security alliances are. Unlike "Neo-isolationists," Glaser, an advocate of "selective engagement," believes that the alliances with South Korea and Japan are important. And the United States could defend those alliances without creating a debilitating arms race if it provides just enough conventional deterrence, plus the threat of nuclear retaliation should those countries come under attack.  

To Glaser, Taiwan is different. China's belief that Taiwan is part of it is non-negotiable, and Beijing and Washington have very different views of what constitutes the status quo across the Strait. The Taiwan dispute has no diplomatic solution and the risks of nuclear war are getting too high, particularly with China's advancing second strike capability. His answer is for the United States to make the necessary "adjustments" and abandon Taiwan.

He acknowledges potential critics who may say appeasement usually whets the appetite of the appeased. But, says Glaser, not all adversaries are Hitler, and China has limited territorial goals. Even if China has more expansive territorial claims, the United States can remediate any military imbalance through a greater conventional presence.

In the end, the real danger is a self-fulfilling prophesy, a failure by the United States to realize that its basic goals are compatible with China's. Glaser fears that this is already happening -- the United States is taking a much more competitive military stance because its ability to operate along China's periphery is in danger. According to Glaser, this dilemma has two solutions. The first is for Washington to realize that U.S. interests are changing -- Taiwan is not really vital. And second, the United States should forego the kind of nuclear superiority that could counter China's second strike capability. Problem solved.

This is a fairly conventional international theory argument about the relative stability of Sino-American relations. Glaser is essentially taking a side in an old debate. His innovation is the abandonment of Taiwan, a necessary step to decrease the security dilemma and reveal China's truly limited aims.

Read on

It is not fair to criticize the Obama administration too harshly for its failure to come up with a single, robust policy regarding the spreading street unrest in the Middle East and North Africa. The administration has been playing catch-up and has often been a step or two behind, but I think that is inevitable when one is confronting revolutionary cascades. Moreover, the region is dotted with very different governments, ranging from friendly autocrats who have been liberalizing (albeit too slowly) to thuggish despots who used almost every tool at their disposal to oppress their people and frustrate U.S. interests in the region. The popular movements rising in the region may share some features in common, but the regimes they are threatening are very different. It would be very hard to come up with a one-size-fits-all policy that would endure given these conditions.

So I have some sympathy for the way the Obama administration has handled, for instance, the situation in Bahrain. The regime there has supported key U.S. policies over the years, and securing long-term access to the home port of the 5th Fleet is an important U.S. national interest. The ethnic mix in Bahrain is volatile, and the Sunni rulers have good reason to fear Iranian adventurism -- long a staple in the region. For precisely those reasons, however, the administration is right to use its influence to pressure the regime into avoiding bloodshed and accommodating legitimate political grievances of the protesters. Calibrating the pressure and the message is hard, but the core U.S. interests involved are fairly straightforward.

I have less sympathy for the same equivocation with regard to Libya. The Qaddafi regime is no friend of the United States. While Qaddafi did make a major concession on WMD in 2003 on the heels of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, it is likely that that deal would be honored (or an even better one secured) by any regime installed after its ouster. Moreover, the level of atrocities the regime has inflicted upon the street protesters goes well beyond what the other regional autocrats have done. Full-throated condemnation would seem an easy call for the administration. As former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz notes in a tough column today, the U.S. message has not been all that full-throated, not yet anyway.

The Obama administration needs to do more, but I would not go as far as some who advocate having U.S. forces impose a no-fly zone. I share their outrage at the way Qaddafi had his Air Force strafe defenseless citizens, but involving the U.S. military in this way would constitute a major escalation and it would be hard to walk back if the situation further unraveled. What if Qaddafi shifted to tanks? Would we then be obligated to have our planes destroy the tanks? And without U.N. authorization, the United States would be entirely on its own. Not even our European allies, who otherwise would join in condemning the Qaddafi regime, would approve of U.S. military action without U.N. authorization.

The United States has acted without U.N. authorization before and rightly so, most famously in the Kosovo war of 1999, although there we were joined by all of our NATO allies. (Academics also debate whether the 16 prior UNSC resolutions on Iraq provided adequate legal cover for the 2003 invasion of Iraq or whether the Bush administration needed a 17th.) But in these cases, the action came after considerable diplomatic efforts at the United Nations and elsewhere. Other avenues of pressure were tried and found wanting, and only then was a resort to extraordinary force taken.

As Wolfowitz and others note, there is much the United States can do and pressure other states into doing short of unilateral military actions. The Obama administration should take those steps, and quickly.

Events in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and to a lesser extent Jordan have led both administration officials and the chattering classes to conclude that democracy is on the march in the Middle East. Having once again been caught by surprise by events overseas -- one wonders where our intelligence agencies have been hiding -- the Obama administration is now trying to push itself into the forefront of those seeking democratic change in the region.

Yet it was not democracy that led a young Tunisian to immolate himself and, apart from English-speaking educated intellectuals, it does not appear that democracy is what most people have been demonstrating about. Instead, what they are seeking, first and foremost, is economic opportunity unfettered by corruption and favoritism. Mohammed Bouazizi set himself on fire because he was prevented from earning a modest living. Three Egyptians have burned themselves because of lack of job opportunities. 

Secondly, Tunisians and Egyptian appear to be seeking responsive government, which is quite different from Western notions of democracy. In fact, it is arguable that they and other demonstrators in the Arab world would be quite comfortable living under a Chinese-style system, where there is a high and consistent level of economic growth and standards of living continue to rise. Would Tunisia have overthrown Ben Ali if its economy grew, as it had in the 1990s, and if the President's family curbed their greed? Would Mubarak be in the trouble he is now if he had a far greater percentage of the population benefitting from Egypt's economic growth?

It is noteworthy that for all the talk of upheavals in the Arab world, there has so far been little unrest in the traditional Gulf emirates or in Saudi Arabia. The rulers of the smaller Gulf States have long made it their policy to distribute wealth widely among their citizens. (Non-citizens don't count, of course. And if they made any trouble they would be deported.) Despite predictions of their imminent demise over the past two decades, the Saudis likewise have so far remained quiet. The al-Saud family recognized some ten years ago that it needed to spread more wealth to ensure the support of its increasingly younger population; so far so good.

Even Bahrain, which might have been expected to be the scene of riots, given the secondary status of the majority Sh'ia population, has not witnessed any major demonstrations. Again, most of the Bahraini Sh'ia appear to recognize that a stable Bahrain means more wealth for them too -- even if they do not achieve economic parity with the dominant Sunnis. They also know that Saudi tanks are not far from the causeway that links their state to its much larger and more powerful neighbor, and that those tanks would be quick to cross into the island kingdom if the ruling family came under siege.

Read on

Although Britain and France have closely aligned interests, they have long found it difficult to cooperate. As Shakespeare once described the relationship: "France and England, whose very shores look pale with envy of each other's happiness." While NATO allies France vetoed Britain's application for the European Economic Community -- not just once but twice. But yesterday, British Prime Minister David Cameron and French President Nicolas Sarkozy signed a treaty that will bind their defense establishments tightly together for the coming fifty years.

The treaty commits the countries to cooperation in nuclear stockpile stewardship, development of a 10,000 troop expeditionary force, and sharing of aircraft carriers. The agreement will see Britain's second carrier capable of landing French (as well as American) fighters, and swapping crews. They will jointly purchase transport aircraft and develop UAVs and future attack submarines.

Cameron was at pains to emphasize the agreement's strengths in terms of Britain's ability to fight unilaterally, saying it will "increase not just our joint capacity, but crucially we increase our own individual sovereign capacity." Sarkozy reassured that France would not balk at participating in Britain's wars -- a crucial argument after the Falklands and Iraq wars.

France and Britain have fought mostly on the same side in their wars of the past century, they've been committed to the others defense through NATO since 1949, as well as have Europe's only nuclear arsenals and its most powerful conventional militaries. They also have political cultures in which the use of military force is still generally accepted as a central element of statecraft.

It has long made sense for Britain and France to cooperate more closely on defense issues.  The Blair government took a major step forward with the St Malo agreements in the late 1990s; but France remaining outside the NATO integrated military command since 1967 created both practical difficulties and suspicion in the United States about European cooperation.

France has been warming to NATO for nearly a decade, acknowledging advances other militaries were making as the result of close cooperation with U.S. military transformation.  France returned to NATO military staffs last year, removing major obstacles to the kind of relationship Britain has been seeking. 

Both countries showed unexpected compromise. Britain has accepted in defense the "two speed Europe" it fought so stridently against in EU councils. France was ambitious for an EU defense in ways that have not materialized; the agreement with Britain can be seen as both countries conceding the EU is incapable of providing the basis for closer practical cooperation. The United States should understand it also as a vote of no confidence that NATO can provide that basis (although the Cameron government would surely deny that, given how much rhetoric about NATO the defense review contains).

The Cameron government managed this all very shrewdly, rolling out their national security strategy, then their defense review, then their budget, and only then signing the U.K.-France treaty. Different sequencing would have increased the outcry in Britain that the budget cuts were damaging to Britain's security. Setting the context as they did, the optics are good European politics (a novelty for a Tory government), good transatlantic politics, and innovative ways to keep costs down. 

When Great Britain and France were melding their militaries together to fight The Great War (as World War I was called before there was World War II), the Allied Supreme Commander, French Marshal Foch, worriedly asked his British counterpart, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, how many casualties it would take before Britain were fully committed to winning the war. Haig imperiously answered "it would take but the death of a single British soldier," to which Foch irritatedly replied, "then assign him to my staff and I'll shoot him myself the first day of the war." With the new Cameron-Sarkozy agreements, the French may finally have their casualty.

The presidential candidate campaigned on a variety of themes: change, a persona that rose above partisan politics, and a commitment to restore a country exhausted by crises at home and abroad. Even though the predecessor was not on the ballot, he was so unpopular by the time of the election that his shadow seemed to dominate the campaign. The winner won in part because he was seen as his predecessor's antithesis.

In foreign policy, the contrast was sharp. The country was mired in a bloody stalemate, the result, apparently, of initial intelligence errors compounded by gross mismanagement and toxic civil-military discord. Of greater concern, this war seemed a side-show from the larger conflict, which the challenger also claimed had been mismanaged so severely that the United States was now generally thought to be falling further behind, far less secure even than when the conflict began. The winning candidate promised to end the stalemate in the "side-show" quickly, and refocus on the larger conflict, putting the United States back on the offensive and rolling back the gains of the enemy with a bold new strategy that would restore American credibility throughout the world.

Once elected, the new president went about his business methodically. He commissioned a major review and devoted an extraordinary amount of his time and his senior staff's time to considering a range of apparently sharply drawn options. Prominent in the review was the budgetary concern: the United States simply could not afford to continue to spend money on national security at the rate it had been without piling up a crushing debt. However, as the review unfolded, the various clear-cut alternatives got blurred, and in the end the president chose a compromise option even though his staff argued, not unpersuasively, that the president was blending mutually exclusive alternatives in an incoherent strategy. There was also an embarrassing inconvenient truth: while there were enough new features to be able to spin it as a new look, in fact the new strategy resembled more the strategy of the predecessor than anything touted during the campaign.

Read on

Subtle shifts in the balance of power are difficult to detect yet of foremost importance to peace and stability. And even if detected in a timely fashion, policymakers can be slow to react. But maintaining a balance of power favorable to one's interests is one of a president's key tasks. On that score, our leaders have been negligent for over a decade.

Occasionally, presidents detect shifts in the military balance when it is too late and then compound the problem by responding with questionable policy choices. For example, President Eisenhower's policy of massive retaliation was, in part, a response to what seemed to be a loss of the U.S nuclear monopoly and Soviet conventional supremacy in continental Europe. (Eisenhower also wanted to maintain U.S superiority on the cheap -- by cutting Truman's conventional defense build-up).

A policy of responding with a nuclear attack to Soviet aggression anywhere did not seem very prudent to many at the time, but at least the president took the perceived shift in the balance of power seriously. Some of President Nixon and Carter's questionable arms control ideas were a response to a shift in the strategic balance in favor of the Soviets. Unfortunately, most of the time, policymakers do not react to an adversary's growing capabilities until met with disaster (e.g. Pearl Harbor, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, 9/11).

Today the balance of power in Asia is shifting. Since the end of World War II, Washington has kept the peace in Asia through its forward presence of military forces and its uncontested ability to project force into the region. Take an example from just 14 years ago. Realizing how destabilizing were China's missile tests conducted in the waters around Taiwan, President Clinton sent carrier battle groups near the Taiwan Strait. The missile tests stopped, Taiwan held its elections, and conflict was avoided.

Today, any president would think twice about doing the same. Why? China has arguably gained conventional supremacy around its periphery. Without remediation this could become a hard fact. China's growing short-range missile arsenal (maybe up to 1,500) and fleet of modern aircraft could not only be used to destroy much of Taiwan, but could also be used to strike devastating blows against U.S. forces in Japan. Together with its fast-growing submarine fleet, the Chinese missile force will, within the next decade, be able to cause serious harm to U.S. carriers steaming into the region.

Beijing has been focused like a laser beam on how to coerce and intimidate Taiwan while deterring U.S. and Japanese intervention. Washington has not given the same attention to defense. Our shipbuilding program has atrophied, our ability to protect the bases from which our aircraft fly is non-existent, and there is nothing in the current navy or air force programs of record that demonstrate our attentiveness to this problem.

As a country, we have become so accustomed to projecting air and sea power with impunity anywhere in the world that the idea that our aircraft could be shot down or surface ships sunk seems like science fiction. But China has been studying how to undermine the way we do battle for decades, and its efforts are bearing fruit.

A president choosing to respond to a Chinese attack on Taiwan would now face a host of bad options, most of which are dangerously escalatory. If U.S. forces or those of an ally were attacked, Washington could eventually bring its superior power to bear from other theaters of conflict, but it would take time, and, as shown both in the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment's AirSea Battle and in RAND's A Question of Balance, would probably require hitting military targets in China itself. Considering China's growing conventional superiority, a president's response to a devastating blow by the Chinese against U.S., Japanese, and Taiwanese assets may, by necessity, be highly escalatory.

The good news is that it is not too late to restore some stability to the equation. The United States is a far richer and more stable nation than China. With marginal adjustments in how we spend our finite tax-payer dollars, we can restore a favorable conventional balance in the Pacific that would lessen Chinese temptations to use force and provide us with more strategically stable defensive options should Beijing succumb to those temptations. We seek a cooperative relationship with China, which makes it difficult to think about the unthinkable -- a conflict with China. But a conflict with the United States is just about all the PLA thinks about, and for the sake of peace we must take them seriously.

I have a lot of time for my FP blogging colleague, Tom Ricks, even when we disagree.  But I keep reflecting on two of his General McChrystal related observations and I can't square them with what I know (or think I know) about history and civil-military relations. So, at the risk of starting a petty intramural squabble, here are some counterpoints.

In his otherwise sensible New York Times Op-Ed, Ricks made the following claim:

If President Obama had not fired General McChrystal, it would have been like President Truman keeping on Douglas MacArthur after his insubordination during the Korean War."

Now I supported McChrystal resigning -- calling it "clearly a firing offense" -- and I wholeheartedly agree that the disrespectful command climate that the Rolling Stone interview revealed was corrosive of healthy civil-military relations. But it was meaningfully less corrosive than the MacArthur incident on several dimensions and it is both unfair and unwise to equate the two. MacArthur vigorously opposed Truman's Korea policies of restraint, sought to lift them, and was colluding with friendly reporters and political allies back in Washington to thwart them. And he made no bones about this disagreement, as his post-firing Congressional lobbying makes clear.  McChrystal and President Obama both claimed that there was no policy dispute at issue, neither in the Rolling Stone interview nor in the larger civil-military dustup. McChrystal's disrespectful comments were directed at members of Obama's team who, in McChrystal's views, were not doing enough to implement Obama's policies. This is a distinction that may not matter in terms of McChrystal keeping his job, but should influence what we learn from the incident (and may justify giving McChrystal a dispensation to retire at 4-star pay.

My second quibble may be a tick more substantial.  In a recent blog post, Ricks argues that Republican Senators who pressed the issue during General Petraeus' confirmation hearing were right that Obama's military timeline made no military sense but wrong to try to pin Petraeus down on whether the military had ever recommended it. As Ricks argues (absolutely correctly): "just because the military is strongly against an approach doesn't mean the approach is wrong." Moreover, Ricks argues the timeline might even make sense in a larger context.  In Ricks' words:

So, while the Afghan deadline makes no sense militarily, it might make sense politically, both for domestic political reasons and in prodding the Afghan government. If you believe, as I do, that the Afghan government is our biggest problem in the war (followed closely by the Pakistani government), then what happens to the Taliban is a secondary issue, and the primary question has to be: How do we get a government in Afghanistan that is not counterproductive and can field reasonably good security forces?"

I think Ricks may be right in theory but is himself missing three important aspects of the larger context that indicate he may be wrong in this case:

• Establishing the provenance of the timeline is useful not merely for the historical record but also as an antidote to a potentially dangerous gambit that some of Obama's political advisors may have been attempting. According to Jonathan Alter's account of the Fall 2009 Afghan Strategy Review, the White House sought to pin the military down on the timeline so as to give the White House political cover to abandon the Afghanistan surge; they wanted to be able to pin the blame for any failure on the military and the timeline played a key role to this end.  This kind of gamesmanship is bad strategy and makes for bad civil-military relations. Identifying who proposed what and why is helpful.
• The timeline indeed is foolish in a narrow military sense, as Ricks himself recognizes. But it is also counter-productive for the larger strategic aim to which Ricks in his post seeks to direct the critics' focus: getting helpful governments in Kabul (and Islamabad). The arbitrary timeline and the strategic confusion it has generated has created the exact opposite incentives. Instead of creating a sense of urgency, it has created a sense of despair and incentivized our local partners to hedge and seek separate deals.
• The timeline is an exceedingly expensive and unnecessary way of buying acquiescence (it has not bought support) from Obama's left flank.  Public support for the war in Afghanistan is wobbly, but nowhere near as weak as was support for the war in Iraq when President Bush pushed for a similar surge. President Obama's influence over his Afghanistan policy opponents was and is much greater than Bush's influence was over either supporters or opponents at the time of the surge. Bush had come close to exhausting his reservoir of political capital in mobilizing support for the war. Obama has barely started to tap his reservoir in the war's cause. And so on.

In short, the timeline made no military sense, no strategic sense, and little political sense -- except in partisan terms of enabling Obama to shift any blame from a potential failure from himself to the military. Clarifying who insisted on the timeline and who is merely accepting it is a useful function in an otherwise less-than-dramatic congressional hearing.

By Peter Feaver

Lawrence Korb has an odd op-ed in today's Washington Post that warrants a quick response.  

Korb's thesis has two parts. Part I is that senior military officers should give their civilian bosses their candid professional opinion, even if it is not what civilians want to hear. I heartily agree. Part II is that the Chairman of the JCS, Admiral Mullen, has violated this precept and deserves public censure.

Part II is the "interesting" part of the argument and it is so interesting it borders on explosive: Korb is charging the chairman of the JCS with a dereliction of duty.  I don't think Korb makes this case and if I were Mullen I would demand a retraction.

Korb claims that Mullen misled the Congress in late 2007 when he was pressed about the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan and the priority then given to Iraq: "In Afghanistan, we do what we can. In Iraq, we do what we must," Mullen said. "There is a limit to what we can apply to Afghanistan."

Mullen's response clearly indicated that in his view, Afghanistan would require additional resources but that given the constraints Iraq had to take priority for now. This is precisely the sort of cross-theater risk analysis that the chairman is supposed to give; there is nothing wrong or surprising if it differs from the view of subordinate battlefield or theater commanders, nor if it happens to conform to the view of civilian superiors. On the face of it, then, the response was not derelict.

It might have been derelict, however, if it was dishonest and did not reflect Mullen's true view -- if, as Korb alleges, it was dictated by a desire to curry favor with President Bush rather than a commitment to provide his own professional opinion. Is there any evidence to support this allegation? Since Korb presents none, I assume there is none. Instead, Korb presents evidence that the Iraq-before-Afghanistan view was not what the Afghan commander General McNeill was telling Mullen, nor what the CENTCOM commander Admiral Fallon was telling Mullen. But he presents no evidence one way or the other that Mullen secretly agreed with them and was bullied into saying otherwise.  

Korb's allegation in the absence of evidence is all the more interesting because we actually have a case in the past year of a senior official apparently instructing a military subordinate to shade his military advice based on what the president wanted to hear. This is not quite a smoking gun for the Korb argument, but it is close enough to count as a whisky, tango, foxtrot moment. Even if it were just a poor choice of words on the part of the senior official, it comes far closer to violating the civil-military principle Korb claims to be interested in upholding than does the incident Korb cites.

Why does Korb ignore a civil-military problem in one case in order to manufacture a civil-military problem in another case?  

By Will Inboden

Inspired by the recent spate of top 10 reading lists offered by some of my fellow Foreign Policy colleagues, and Peter Feaver's discourse below on the meaning of "Grand Strategy" (not to mention Peter's exposure of me as a "lurking" alum of the Yale Grand Strategy program's inaugural class), I thought I would offer my own list of ten books that are essential reading for anyone interested in grand strategy.

An important disclaimer: there are a few books that are so canonical that they should automatically appear, almost template-like, on any grand strategy syllabus. Such are Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, Sun Tzu's The Art of War, Machiavelli's The Prince, and Carl von Clausewitz's On War. Read those before you read any of the others I mention below. And for those of you who are either graduate students or who otherwise have almost limitless time on your hands, an exhaustive reading list can be found here.     

For the rest of us who have less time but still an interest in the subject, my ten recommended grand strategy books follow, in no particular order.

Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy. Along with George Kennan, Kissinger is the twentieth century's leading American scholar-practitioner of diplomacy. Any of his books are worth reading; this one is his best. A magisterial overview of the global order from Westphalia to the end of the Cold War, Diplomacy also distils Kissinger's own lifetime of learning from his doctoral dissertation to his years as a globetrotting statesman.

Edward Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire. "The Romans won their victories slowly, but they were very hard to defeat," observes Luttwak. This is because "the superiority of the empire...derived from the whole complex of ideas and traditions that informed the organization of Roman military force and harnessed the armed power of the empire to political purpose."

Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History. The beginning of wisdom in approaching grand strategy is to appreciate the limits of power and human insight. Almost six decades since its writing, Niebuhr still speaks with prescience today:

Modern man's confidence in his power over historical destiny prompted the rejection of every older conception of an overruling providence in history. Modern man's confidence in his virtue caused an equally unequivocal rejection of the Christian idea of the ambiguity of human virtue... We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization. We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect disinterestedness in its exercise, nor become complacent about particular degrees of interest and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimatized."

Perhaps nothing better illustrates Niebuhr's complexity than the fact that (in an irony he would no doubt appreciate) he is today both embraced and argued over by leading voices on the political left, right, and center. 

George Kennan, American Diplomacy, 1900-1950. While seemingly modest in size and scope, this book best embodies the wisdom and worldview of one of America's foremost strategic thinkers. Though not always correct, Kennan is unfailingly insightful and eloquent.

Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500-2000. A bestseller and instant-classic when it was first published in 1987, by a decade later Kennedy's concluding warning of imminent American decline because of "imperial overstretch" seemed dated and unduly alarmist. But now today, just over two decades since publication, the book's lessons from history appear as relevant as ever. 

Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation. President Truman's Secretary of State conceived the challenge facing American strategists at the outset of the Cold War thus: "The enormity of the task...began to appear as just a bit less formidable than that described in the first chapter of Genesis. That was to create a world out of chaos; ours, to create half a world, a free half, out of the same material without blowing the whole thing to pieces in the process." That Acheson and his comrades succeeded is an inheritance we all enjoy; that he left such an elegantly-crafted memoir is an inheritance only his fortunate readers will enjoy.

John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress. Not only a classic of English literature, it also has all of the elements of grand strategy in narrative form. A clear vision and an ambitious goal, but an uncertain connection between means and ends. The navigation of uncharted and hostile territory, with imperfect information, limited resources, endless diversions, insidious enemies, and inconstant allies. Fortunately, in perhaps the ultimate test of any grand strategy, it has a happy ending.

Geoffrey Parker, The Grand Strategy of Philip II. Not all grand strategies succeed, but some of the best lessons come from those that fail. In the sixteenth century Philip II of Spain ruled "the first empire in history upon which the sun never set." Yet as Parker authoritatively describes, despite "uniquely favourable international circumstances Philip failed both to preserve what he had inherited and to achieve the dynastic and confessional goals that he had set." 

Walter Russell Mead, God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World. If Philip II's grand strategy foundered most spectacularly with England's defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, Mead's book explores the success of the grand strategy which emerged eventually among the victors. The empire and international system created by England and eventually inherited by the United States (the "Anglo-American maritime order") has, in Mead's telling, displayed remarkable resilience not only in maintaining American power, but in shaping many of the norms of the modern world. Not without considerable handicaps and hubris, of course -- Mead scores the countless follies of the English-speaking peoples as much as he celebrates their success.

Allen Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President. Lincoln's challenge was not just to win a war but to preserve the very existence of a nation. Grand strategy involves all elements of national power, and Lincoln had to draw on manifest military, economic, diplomatic, intellectual, rhetorical, and even spiritual resources in the campaign to defeat the Confederacy without extinguishing the very possibility of America. Of the countless biographies of Lincoln, Guelzo's is one of the very few studies of how the ideas and worldview of our greatest president shaped his policies. It is a book worthy of the man.