The Foreign Service Journal, November 2008

The events recounted in this book will be all too familiar to Foreign Service readers. Those looking for fresh details on U.S. diplomacy in, say, the Middle East or the Balkans, won’t find them here. But they will find a lucid overview of the forces that have shaped our foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. As consummate Washington insid- ers, Chollet and Goldgeier bring par- ticular insight to the confluence of U.S. government decisionmaking and the ideas generated by heavyweights in the think-tanks and policy institutes lying just offshore. In the end, the authors conclude that it’s “folly to try to describe how the United States should approach the world’s complexities with one sin- gle idea.” Maybe so, but one suspects that this won’t deter the next adminis- tration from trying — yet again. James DeHart, a member of the Journal ’s Editorial Board, is currently studying Dari at FSI in preparation for his assignment to Afghanistan. A Foreign Service officer since 1993, he has served in Istanbul, Melbourne, Brussels and Washington, D.C. He is the author of a novel, Savarona (Pub- lishAmerica, 2004). Prudence or Promiscuity? Smart Power: Toward a Prudent Foreign Policy for America Ted Galen Carpenter, The Cato Institute, 2008, $24.95, hardcover, 258 pages. R EVIEWED BY C HARLES S CHMITZ Ted Galen Carpenter, vice presi- dent for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, views U.S. foreign policy as massively imprudent. In his view, our willing- ness to be the world’s policeman and social worker has promoted the asser- tion of imperial powers abroad and at home by the U.S. executive (including all recent incumbents, not just George W. Bush), to the endanger- ment of our constitutional civil liber- ties and the federal system. If our “10 episodes of significant military force in less than two decades [in] places as diverse as Panama, Somalia, Haiti, the Balkans, South- west Asia and the Persian Gulf” do not suggest to you that the U.S. is lacking in “a well-defined (much less sufficiently discriminating) security strategy,” consider Carpenter’s asser- tion that the obligations the U.S. shouldered during the Cold War “reek of obsolescence.” Yet we are unwilling even to consider withdraw- ing our troops from Europe, 17 years after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, or from South Korea, which has “twice the population and an economy 40 times that of its commu- nist North Korean rival.” We make a huge mistake, says Carpenter, in our “casual extension of security commitments” to states not relevant to our own security needs. We seek to invite into the North At- lantic Treaty Organization the Baltic states, Slovenia and possibly even Ukraine and Georgia, despite recent events there. Having invaded both Afghanistan and Iraq (though Car- penter concedes that the initial oper- ation in the first of those two countries made good sense), we now find our- selves in “an increasingly ill-defined, open-ended nationbuilding mission” that may require new security under- takings to protect our investments. Smart Power: Toward a Prudent Foreign Policy for America takes the reader on a brisk and refreshing excursion through our neuralgic poli- cies around the world: the Iraq deba- cle, the so-called “war on terror,” Iran, the Middle East, the Korean Penin- sula, Taiwan and China, Russia and its neighbors, and the disastrous war on drugs. Carpenter wants to rock some boats. Of his many points, consider these three: 1) The Islamic terrorist threat is not the functional equivalent of World War III, and we do not need to fund the military as though it is. 2) The supply-side war on drugs in Latin America and Central Asia has cost us billions, made enemies, spawned wide-scale corruption, and still has not reduced our domestic drug prob- lem. 3) The U.S. Constitution was not designed for an imperial nation per- petually at war or preparing for war. Our domestic liberties are in danger from our hyperactivist security policy. Having argued that the U.S. has not followed a disciplined and thoughtful foreign security policy, Carpenter places the blame directly on “a foreign policy elite” that has not set priorities or established “an analyt- ical framework for assessing strategic choices.” His basic prescription for such a framework is to characterize emergent foreign issues as “vital, sec- 86 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 8 Carpenter takes the reader on a brisk and refreshing excursion through our neuralgic policies around the world. B O O K S