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Paul D. Miller offers a tough minded critique of recent trends in
American grand strategy. He rejects retrenchment but also the
excesses of liberal internationalism. He prescribes a conservative
internationalist grand strategy to preserve the American security
and leadership in the world while avoiding overstretch. Originally
written before the 2016 US presidential election, this first
paperback edition contains a new preface that repositions the
book's argument for the Trump era. Miller explains why President
Trump's nationalist vision for American grand strategy damages US
interests and world order. Miller blends academic rigor with his
experiences as former member of the National Security Council and
intelligence community to offer prescriptions for US grand
strategy. He advocates for narrowing regional priorities and
focusing on five strategic objectives: balancing against the
nuclear autocracies, championing liberalism to maintain a favorable
balance of power, thwarting the transnational jihadist movement,
investing in governance in weak and failed states, and
strengthening homeland security. This book is a must read for
scholars and students of international affairs and for anyone who
is concerned about America's role in the world.
Pessimism abounds in Afghanistan. Violence, NATO casualties,
corruption, drug production, and public disapproval in the United
States are at record levels. Yet the stabilization and
reconstruction effort in Afghanistan has gone better than is widely
believed. Critics of the war effort have drawn misguided lessons
from cartoonish and caricatured versions of Afghan history --
comparing the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) to the
armies of Alexander the Great, William Elphinstone, or Boris Gromov
-- to conclude that the laws of history bar foreign militaries from
accomplishing anything in the land of the Hindu Kush. In fact, the
war in Afghanistan is important, just, and winnable. As the
international community transitions to Afghan leadership in
security operations by 2014, a renewed effort to compel Pakistan to
stop support for militants coupled with greater investment in the
Afghan government's capacity will enable the United States to
achieve its core goals-and Afghanistan will have a genuine chance
of becoming stable for the first time in a generation. Although
serious challenges remain, victory is attainable -- if the troops
and their civilian counterparts are given time to complete their
mission.
Since 1898, the United States and the United Nations have
deployed military force more than three dozen times in attempts to
rebuild failed states. Currently there are more state-building
campaigns in progress than at any time in the past century
including Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, the Democratic Republic of
Congo, Haiti, Sudan, Liberia, Cote d Ivoire, and Lebanon and the
number of candidate nations for such campaigns in the future is
substantial. Even with a broad definition of success, earlier
campaigns failed more than half the time. In this book, Paul D.
Miller brings his decade in the U.S. military, intelligence
community, and policy worlds to bear on the question of what causes
armed, international state-building campaigns by liberal powers to
succeed or fail.
The United States successfully rebuilt the West German and
Japanese states after World War II but failed to build a
functioning state in South Vietnam. After the Cold War the United
Nations oversaw relatively successful campaigns to restore order,
hold elections, and organize post-conflict reconstruction in
Mozambique, Namibia, Nicaragua, and elsewhere, but those successes
were overshadowed by catastrophes in Angola, Liberia, and Somalia.
The recent effort in Iraq and the ongoing one in Afghanistan where
Miller had firsthand military, intelligence, and policymaking
experience are yielding mixed results, despite the high levels of
resources dedicated and the long duration of the missions there.
Miller outlines different types of state failure, analyzes various
levels of intervention that liberal states have tried in the
state-building process, and distinguishes among the various
failures and successes those efforts have provoked."
When is war just? What does justice require? If we lack a
commonly-accepted understanding of justice - and thus of just war -
what answers can we find in the intellectual history of just war?
Miller argues that just war thinking should be understood as
unfolding in three traditions: the Augustinian, the Westphalian,
and the Liberal, each resting on distinct understandings of natural
law, justice, and sovereignty. The central ideas of the Augustinian
tradition (sovereignty as responsibility for the common good) can
and should be recovered and worked into the Liberal tradition, for
which human rights serves the same function. In this reconstructed
Augustinian Liberal vision, the violent disruption of ordered
liberty is the injury in response to which force may be used and
war may be justly waged. Justice requires the vindication and
restoration of ordered liberty in, through, and after warfare.
When is war just? What does justice require? If we lack a
commonly-accepted understanding of justice - and thus of just war -
what answers can we find in the intellectual history of just war?
Miller argues that just war thinking should be understood as
unfolding in three traditions: the Augustinian, the Westphalian,
and the Liberal, each resting on distinct understandings of natural
law, justice, and sovereignty. The central ideas of the Augustinian
tradition (sovereignty as responsibility for the common good) can
and should be recovered and worked into the Liberal tradition, for
which human rights serves the same function. In this reconstructed
Augustinian Liberal vision, the violent disruption of ordered
liberty is the injury in response to which force may be used and
war may be justly waged. Justice requires the vindication and
restoration of ordered liberty in, through, and after warfare.
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