Smart Power: Toward a Prudent Foreign Policy for America

by Ted Galen Carpenter

Foreign policy expert Ted Galen Carpenter confronts the global challenges America faces, outlining a practical strategy that protects America's security while avoiding unnecessary and unrewarding military adventures. He looks at how U.S. forces remain mired in a nation-building mission in Iraq, while disagreements over Iraq policy and other matters have soured Washington's relations with long-time European allies.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1933995165
• ISBN13: 9781933995168
• Release Date: May 2008
• Publisher: Cato Institute
• Length: 264 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.4" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

A Foreign Policy Must Read

Smart Power: Toward a Prudent Foreign Policy for America belongs on President-elect Barack Obama's desk. Ted Galen Carpenter of the Cato Institute has put together a valuable collection of recent articles which are packed with facts, strongly argued, and easy to read. Carpenter, the author or editor of some 18 books, is one of America's leading non-interventionists. He rightly points out that U.S. foreign policy is a failure. Carpenter writes: "Despite spending as much on the military as the rest of the world combined, Americans do not feel especially secure. And the United States has not enjoyed an era of peace despite the demise of the Soviet empire and the USSR itself." He explains how the U.S. never seems to reconsider any alliance, no matter how antiquated. To the contrary, Washington keeps on handing out more security guarantees to countries even less relevant to American security. Finally, there is a disturbing tendency to intervene militarily in countries of little or no relevance to U.S. interests, leaving Americans stuck nation-building where no real country ever existed. The costs of promiscuous intervention include sacrificing civil liberties here at home. He advocates a more restrained role abroad, lest America lose "the values and principles that make it worth defending." All-in-all, it's a book that every member of the incoming national security team should read. Unfortunately, by choosing retreads from past administrations, President-elect Obama almost guarantees a repeat of America's history of failed foreign interventions.

Knee Jerked v. Brain Jerked Foreign Policy

As David Gordon commented at the Ludwig von Mises Institute's website, Ted Galen Carpenter has given us, on the whole, an excellent and very useful book; but it contains a crucial flaw. The book, which collects essays and columns that Carpenter has written since 2002, offers a devastating criticism of the Bush administration's foreign policy. As Carpenter ably shows, Bush's foreign policy has failed dismally at protecting America's vital interests. Quite the contrary, Bush's meddling in matters that do not properly concern us, the bloody and costly Iraq war foremost among them, has weakened rather than enhanced our security position. Unfortunately, Carpenter does not always follow the principles he expounds. He supports an interventionist scheme of his own: he not only supports Bush's 2001 invasion of Afghanistan but wishes to expand the struggle against al Qaeda to Pakistan. Carpenter distinguishes sharply between vital interests and conditional or secondary interests, on the one hand, and peripheral interests and irrelevant matters on the other. Vital interests are matters that have a direct, immediate, and substantial connection to America's physical survival, political independence, or domestic liberty. Thwarting threats to those interests warrants using whatever level of military force may be necessary if other efforts prove insufficient... Just below the level of vital interests lie conditional or secondary interests. In that category are geostrategic assets that are pertinent but not indispensable to preserving America's territorial integrity, independence, and domestic liberty... The lowest category of security concerns consists of peripheral interests. Such interests consist of geostrategic assets that marginally enhance America's security and well being, but whose loss would constitute more of an annoyance than a serious setback... It is important to emphasize that most developments in the world do not even reach the threshold of peripheral interests. They belong in the fourth category of irrelevant matters. (p. 5, emphasis omitted) The Iraq war perfectly illustrates what happens when peripheral interests are confused with matters of vital importance. Saddam Hussein posed no threat to any major American interest, but this did not prevent the Bush administration from embarking on a costly and futile war. Carpenter quickly disposes of the argument that the danger that Saddam might acquire WMD justified preventive action against him. Bush's claims that Saddam had such weapons proved mistaken, and one strongly suspects, were deliberate falsehoods; but suppose that Saddam did have these weapons. In what way would this pose a threat to America's security interests? Carpenter calls attention to an elementary point that enables us to view this alleged threat in a proper perspective. Any regime that launched a nuclear or biological attack on America would face immediate annihilation. The knowledge that this would transpire suffices to deter

A perfect starting place for discussion

American foreign policy makers struggle with many issues, and face a range of foreign policy problems: to understand them properly, SMART POWER: TOWARD A PRUDENT FOREIGN POLICY FOR AMERICA provides a Cato Institute VP for defense and foreign studies' insights. Chapters consider policy-making, disagreements over foreign issues and consequences, strategies involving economic sanctions and military force, and more, and are a perfect starting place for discussion and debate both at the college level and for general-interest readers.

A principled and effective foreign policy worldview

Those in favor of our interventionist foreign policy have succeeded in virtually eliminating the idea that there might be another way for America to act in the world. Thanks to Ted Galen Carpenter, we now know that there is better way. Mr. Carpenter shows in this series of essays that there WERE people prescient enough to recognize the problems that invading Iraq would cause, yet these views were largely marginalized in the rush to war. He also points out other mistakes we are making that could provide similar disastrous results vis-a-vis Afghanistan, China, Russia, et. al. Adoption of Mr. Carpenter's foreign policy views would lead us to a better national security status, at a substantially reduced cost to taxpayers. Those looking for an alternative to the current bipartisan groupthink that has yielded America-as-World-Policeman, would be wise to read this book.

Smart Power is smart reading

Ted Galen Carpenter has what most of the foreign policy establishment/elite woefully lacks: common sense. At the heart of Smart Power is a simple but powerful proposition: in the post-Cold War era and particularly in the wake of 9/11, U.S. security commitments and military interventions overseas are worse than unnecessary -- they are actually detrimental to U.S. security. Carpenter cogently makes the case that U.S. policy decisions and actions have consequences and all too often those consequences are counterproductive. This is a truth that policymakers and pundits refuse to recognize. So like Einstein's definition of insanity, they keep doing the same thing (Republicans and Democrats alike) and expect different results. Sadly -- even if they bother to read Smart Power -- this is likely to be the case in the next administration regardless of who wins the November presidential election. There is also an irony (whether it was intended I don't know) on the cover of Smart Power, which portrays Uncle Sam playing chess. Yet chess is the old paradigm for U.S. foreign policy, exemplified by the likes of Henry Kissinger and Zbignew Brezinski. The prudent foreign policy that Carpenter prescribes requires discarding chess as a way to think about foreign policy. Indeed, part of the problem with the current state of U.S. foreign policy is that we are still playing chess.