CIAO DATE: 06/05

America's Strategic Choices

Michael E. Brown

MIT Press

July 2000

 

Abstract

More than a decade has passed since the end of the Cold War, but the United States has yet to reach a consensus on a coherent approach to the international use of American power. The essays in this volume present contending perspectives on the future of US grand strategy. US policy options include primacy, cooperative security, selective engagement, and retrenchment. This revised edition includes additional and more recent analysis and advocacy of these options. The volume includes the Clinton administration's National Security Strategy for a New Century the most recent official statement of American grand strategy so readers can compare proposed strategies with the official US government position.

Michael E. Brown is Director of the Security Studies Program and the Center for Peace and Security Studies, Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University.

 

Table of Contents

The Contributors

Acknowledgments

Preface
Sean M. Lynn-Jones

I A Framework for Analyzing US Strategic Choices

1. Competing Visions for US Grand Strategy (PDF, 49 pgs, 858 KB)
   Barry R. Posen and Andrew L. Ross

II Restraint

2. Come Home, America: The Strategy of Restraint in the Face of Temptation
   Eugene Gholz, Daryl G. Press and Harvey M. Sapolsky

3. From Preponderance to Offshore Balancing: America's Future Grand Strategy
   Christopher Layne

III Selective Engagement

4. Geopolitics Updated: The Strategy of Selective Engagement
   Robert J. Art

IV Cooperative Security

5. Cooperative Security in the United States
   Janne E. Nolan

6. Concerts, Collective Security, and the Future of Europe
   Charles A. Kupchan and Clifford A. Kupchan

7. Concerts, Collective Security, and the Future of Europe: A Retrospective
   Charles A. Kupchan and Clifford A. Kupchan

V Primacy

8. The Stability of a Unipolar World
   William C. Wohlforth

9. Preserving the Unipolar Moment: Realist Theories and US Grand Strategy after the Cold War
   Michael Mastanduno

Documentation: A National Security Strategy for a New Century

Suggestions for Further Reading