Max Americana.

• Author: Judis, John B.
• Position: 'Maximalist: America in the World from Truman to Obama' - Book review

Stephen Sestanovich, Maximalist: America in the World from Truman to Obama (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), 416 pp., $28.95.

In Maximalist, Stephen Sestanovich, a former official in the Reagan and Clinton administrations and now a professor of international relations at Columbia, has written a history of American foreign policy since World War II. Many of the details are not original. Sestanovich relies for the most part on published histories and memoirs rather than on archival sources. But Sestanovich tells the story well and his interpretation of what the history means makes the book worth considering.

Following the lead of Arthur Schlesinger Sr., who divided American political history into cycles of liberalism and conservatism, Sestanovich divides the history of post-World War II foreign policy into periods of what he calls "maximalism" and periods of retrenchment. It's an old demarcation--first voiced by Walter Lippmann and George Kennan after World War II in a debate over the extent to which the United States should attempt to counter Soviet

Communism--but Sestanovich brings it up to date and by the book's end tips his hand about which course he would prefer.

He doesn't say in so many words what maximalism and retrenchment are, but his meaning can be gleaned from his examples. Maximalists want to increase the military budget; they want American power to shape the world, with or without allied backing, and are willing to risk war to get their way. Maximalists, Sestanovich writes, "assumed that international problems were highly susceptible to the vigorous use of American power." Retrenchers, by contrast, believe that America must cut back its global reach either for budgetary reasons or because of opposition from other powers. They preach the limits of power. They think America needs to pay more attention to "nation building" at home than overseas.

Sestanovich arranges the cycles by presidential administrations in the following way:

Maximalists: Harry Truman (after 1946), John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson (after 1965), Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush (after September 11, 2001).

Retrenchers: Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama.

Mixed: George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

Sestanovich is critical of both maximalists and retrenchers, but he attributes the great successes of American foreign policy to maximalism. "The United States achieved a great deal precisely by being uncompromising and confrontational," he writes. "Had Truman accepted a graceful exit from Berlin, had Kennedy found a way to live with missiles in Cuba, had Reagan backed away from his zero option, the Cold War would have unfolded very differently--and in all likelihood, not nearly so well."

Sestanovich sees little virtue in retrenchment. "Retrenchment can go from being seen as a strategy for averting decline to being seen as one that accelerates and even embraces it," he writes. Sestanovich uses a passive, evasive formulation ("being seen" by whom?), but he seems to be suggesting that the United States is always facing new challenges for which retrenchment invariably leaves it unprepared--Sputnik for Eisenhower, Soviet heavy missiles for Nixon and Henry Kissinger, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan for Carter and the Arab Spring for Obama.

Sestanovich is certainly right that maximalism is responsible for notable foreign-policy successes, but he acknowledges that it is also responsible for our greatest failures, which brought forth periods of retrenchment. Truman's abortive attempt to unify the Korean Peninsula, which precipitated a Chinese invasion, led to Eisenhower's retrenchment; Johnson's escalation of the Vietnam War led to Nixon's retrenchment; and George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq led to Obama's retrenchment. The United States is still reeling from Bush's decision to invade...