Executive Director writes for ISS Roundtable

Professor Inboden and fellow scholars review three books: Eliot A. Cohen’s The Big Stick: The Limits of Soft Power and the Necessity of Military Force, Robert G. Kaufman’s Dangerous Doctrine: How Obama’s Grand Strategy Weakened America, and Robert Lieber’s Retreat and its Consequences: American Foreign Policy and the Problem of World Order. Prof. Inboden writes “insofar as scholars and practitioners of American national security policy can ever agree on anything, there seems to be a near-consensus that the United States faces an imperiled and deteriorating position on the global stage.” He argues that despite similarities- there are stark differences between these three books: “Cohen attempts to recover the military as an instrument of statecraft…Kaufman focuses squarely on the past eight years and makes what might be considered a first draft of history in evaluating the Obama Administration’s national security policy…[and] Lieber sees the diminished American role on the global stage as producing deleterious effects for the international system.” 

Read the full roundtable here.