The Foreign Service Journal, November 2009

N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 9 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 63 as well as John Gunther Dean. He is currently president of Science Ambas- sadors, Inc., a nonprofit association in Potomac, Md., dedicated to sharing sci- entific wealth between nations. Less Is More The Power Problem: How American Military Dominance Makes Us Less Safe, Less Prosperous and Less Free Christopher A. Preble, Cornell University Press, 2009, $25, hardcover, 212 pages. R EVIEWED BY D AVID H OFFMAN That’s the message of this important new study by Christopher A. Preble, foreign policy studies director at the Cato Institute inWashington, D.C. As he notes, “The problems that our troops are encountering in Iraq, Af- ghanistan and elsewhere are not new. They are connected to a deeper power problem: our insufficient attention to the need to prioritize when and whether we should intervene militar- ily. …Our military power has become a problem, and this problem is the basis for this book’s controversial ar- gument: We should reduce our mili- tary power in order to be more secure.” Preble recalls that nearly 200 years ago, John Quincy Adams proclaimed that America would not “go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” Such restraint is in sharp contrast to the bravado of a later president, GeorgeW. Bush, who memorably told the Sunni and Shia forces resisting the U.S. mili- tary occupation of Iraq to “go ahead, make my day.” For Preble, who works at a libertar- B O O K S