I'd like to thank the Book Club for hosting this discussion of The American Way of Strategy: U.S. Foreign Policy and the American Way of Life, which is now out in paperback just in time for the change in administrations. I should mention that Parameters, the U.S. Army War College Quarterly, in its latest issue has published my exploration of the implications of the book's thesis for U.S. military strategy in "A Concert-Balance Strategy for a Multipolar World," for those who are interested.

I wrote The American Way of Strategy for two reasons. The first was to describe and rehabilitate an important but almost forgotten way of thinking about U.S. foreign policy. The second reason was to defend an older tradition of liberal internationalism which seeks to promote nonintervention as the chief norm in world politics and holds that a concert of status quo great powers can preserve international peace at the lowest cost to a free society in the United States and similar democracies.

In the last quarter century or so, the debate over American foreign policy has been defined by realists in the European tradition, who think in terms of securing concrete national interests, and "idealists" who think in terms of universalizing liberal and democratic values. Earlier generations of Americans, however, spoke the language of the American way of life, which I summarize in the sentence: "The purpose of the American way of strategy is to defend the American way of life by means that do not endanger the American way of life." Other scholars independently have sought to uncover this largely forgotten tradition, including Daniel Deudney, whose brilliant study of what he calls "republican security theory," Bounding Power, was published and came to my notice after The American Way of Strategy went to press.

Both the proponents and the critics of U.S. participation in the two world wars and the cold war argued that their preferred foreign policies would protect the American way of life -- an individualistic society with a civilian government of limited powers and a largely-private economy with widespread individual property ownership. The American nightmare was what the political scientist Harold Lasswell called the "garrison state," a militarized society with an economy that is regimented and mobilized for purposes of national security. (In the book I discuss two alternate dystopias, which I call the castle society and the tributary state).

Libertarian isolationists argued that U.S. intervention in the world wars and the Cold War would turn the U.S. into a garrison state. Liberal internationalists replied that to the contrary, U.S. abstention from Old World power struggles would likely force the U.S reluctantly to turn itself into a Fortress America in a world dominated by a hostile hegemon or alliance. The goal of liberal internationalism was not a world of democracies. It was a world that was safe for democracy, to use Woodrow Wilson's term -- a world in which, thanks to the collaboration of the U.S. with other status quo powers, external security costs would be so low that the U.S. and similar democracies, even if they were a minority of the world's governments, could be secure without militarizing and regimenting their societies.

Traditional liberal internationalists favored democracy in principle but believed that a peaceful world order should be based on the rights to sovereignty and security of all non-aggressive states -- including states ruled by Muslim monarchies and theocracies, military juntas and civilian dictatorships. When it came to the provision of international security, traditional liberal internationalists took it for granted that the U.S. could not aspire to solitary global hegemony without sacrificing the American way of life to excessive militarization. They also rejected the idea of a perpetual Orwellian balance of power among rival blocs, fearing that this, too, would turn the U.S. into a militarized garrison state. Holding that continental isolationism was impractical in the age of industrial warfare, they argued that a lasting peace that would permit the survival of America's liberal way of life required a modus vivendi or concert among all nonaggressive great powers, whether they were democracies or not. Franklin Roosevelt hoped that following World War II, international peace could be secured by a concert of the Big Four: the United States and Britain, both democracies, along with the Soviet Union and Nationalist China, both dictatorships. Roosevelt's plan failed because the postwar Soviet Union acted as a revisionist, would-be hegemonic power in its foreign policy, not because the Soviet Union was a communist dictatorship.

Both of the elements of traditional liberal internationalism -- the norm of nonintervention and the idea of a concert of all great powers, democratic or otherwise have been rejected by many self-described liberal internationalists since the end of the Cold War. Many liberals along with neoconservatives (whose intellectual origins lie in liberalism) argue that sovereignty is less important than promoting democracy or maximizing human rights. In the name of a "responsibility to protect," some argue that states should lose their sovereignty and become legitimate objects of foreign bombing or foreign invasion, not only if they commit genocide (an exception to sovereignty recognized by post-1945 liberal internationalism) but also if they commit a variety of crimes against their inhabitants short of genocide. And instead of FDR's idea of a concert of great powers preserving the territorial status quo against disruption by aggression, some who call themselves liberal internationalists, along with John McCain and like-minded neoconservatives, have argued for a "concert of democracies," a military alliance which would exclude nondemocratic great powers like China and semi-democratic great powers like Russia.

Although I respect people who hold these views, I believe that both of these currently fashionable revisions of traditional liberal internationalism -- the responsibility to protect and the concert of democracies -- are unwise and unnecessary. International norms can and should authorize other nations to act to forestall crimes by states against entire peoples, like genocide and ethnic cleansing. But international norms cannot authorize interventions by a foreign country to defend the rights of individuals in other countries, without destabilizing a system founded on the sovereign territorial state and giving a license to imperialism disguised as humanitarianism.

Nor is the idea of a concert of democracies an improvement over the idea of a concert of all great powers. We must promote peace among the great powers that we have, including China, a nondemocratic power which is also a status quo power, and Russia, a semi-democratic power whose policies in its near abroad, like its war in defense of the South Ossetians against the Georgians, are no different in kind from the interventions of the U.S. in its North American sphere of influence.

What does all of this mean in practice? By the standards of traditional Rooseveltian liberal internationalism, I would argue that the Gulf War, a classic exercise of collective security against cross-border aggression, was justified, while the war to topple al-Qaeda's allies and protectors, the Taleban, following 9/11 was clearly legitimate as well. NATO intervention in the Balkans was more dubious, but mitigating the effects of state break-ups is a legitimate activity of great powers. The unprovoked U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, by contrast, cannot be justified by traditional liberal internationalism, nor could the U.S. invasions of Grenada (Reagan), Panama (the first Bush), and Haiti (Clinton), all of which violated FDR's "Good Neighbor policy" in the western hemisphere.

Maintaining and expanding NATO and the US-Japan alliance while ostracizing Russia and China is a recipe for another cold war. I believe that Russia, instead of being encircled by U.S. allies, should already have been admitted to NATO, which after the Cold War should have become a Eurasian collective security system to which the US belongs. In the absence of a similar pan-Asian security system, the U.S. should have a bilateral treaty of security with China, along with its similar treaties with Japan, South Korea and other states in the region. Why not promise to defend China against Japan, as well as Japan against China? Philip Bobbitt, who does not share my skepticism about a concert of democracies, has suggested a G-8 for security, and as long as it included China and Russia as well as India, something like that could be the nucleus of an informal global great-power concert, assuming that the roster of permanent members of the anachronistic UN Security Council cannot be reformed.

We can talk about other subjects, including claims that weapons of mass destruction and stateless terrorism render traditional liberal internationalism obsolete, but I'd be interested to learn what others think of my distinction between the old and the new liberal internationalism, and my argument that traditional American liberal internationalism ought to be tried for a change.