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.