Show Notes
At least since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, some scholars and policymakers have called for retrenching the United States’ global military presence. Miranda Priebe and John Schuessler discuss realist, conservative, and progressive visions of restraint. They draw out the underlying beliefs that draw each group to a grand strategy of restraint and highlight the divisions between and within these groups.
More from The International Security Podcast
What role do ideological differences play in great power relations? Many frame current U.S.-China ideological competition as analogous to the Cold War. But Eun A Jo and Jessica Chen Weiss argue that there was no single Cold War, and that contemporary China differs in important ways from the Soviet Union. They discuss how ideologies vary on two dimensions: universal vs. particularist content, and expansive vs limited scope of promotion.
Right-wing populist leaders love soldiers (especially fallen ones) and the trappings of military life. But their love affair with the military rarely endures. Ron Krebs discusses how romanticizing and mythologizing the military solves a political problem for populists: how to mobilize people power without actually granting power to the people.
How did the rules-based international order come to be, and is it worth preserving? Liberal internationalists, who want to preserve that order, make claims about how the rules-based order emerged and about the role played by key institutions. Marc Trachtenberg argues that historical evidence does not support these claims. He also suggests that there are viable alternatives to the liberal international order—alternatives based on certain traditional ideas about how foreign policy should be conducted.
Nicholas Anderson and Daryl Press argue that the current U.S. approach for operating airpower to defend Taiwan risks catastrophic defeat. They have created a new, unclassified, and transparent model that explores multiple scenarios in a Taiwan conflict. They find that in such a conflict, the United States would likely lose hundreds of aircraft to Chinese strikes on airfields. They also suggest that the U.S. Air Force’s proposed solution to this possibility, the Agile Combat Employment doctrine, would likely fail while raising the risk of escalation. Instead, Anderson and Press’s model indicates that hardened aircraft shelters may offer a way to blunt Chinese attacks.
Will China make a bid for regional hegemony in East Asia, and can it succeed? In the modern era, only the United States has achieved regional hegemony—all other attempts have met catastrophic failure. China should not pursue hegemony, and the United States should adopt a measured approach to China’s rise, facilitating balancing behavior by the United States’ Asian partners while working with China to create a more stable regional order.