Abstract

Response to Book Review (To Lead the World: American Strategy after the Bush Doctrine)

We want to thank the commentators for their thoughtful and constructive remarks on our book. We think they highlight some of the key attributes of the volume and raise key issues for further reflection.

In order for readers of H-Diplo to understand the comments, we want to reiterate here what we stated in the introduction to the book. We tried to bring together some of the nation’s most renowned scholars and public intellectuals from all sides of the political spectrum to focus on what should be done after the Bush administration left office. Although many of the contributors shared a view that recent foreign policy had been either disappointing or a disaster, their task was not to dwell on the past, but to focus on the future. We asked each of them to author a basic national security paper in which they identified key threats, defined overriding goals, assigned priorities to objectives, examined the tradeoffs between “interests” and values, and addressed the challenges of mobilizing domestic support for preferred policies, designing effective tactics, and re-configuring multinational institutions.

Document Type

Response or Comment

Publication Date

3-27-2009

Publisher Statement

Copyright © 2009 H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online. This response first appeared in H-Diplo Roundtable Reviews X: 9 (2009), 22-23.

Please note that downloads of the response are for private/personal use only.

COinS