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I take no joy in writing a negative book review. My experience with reviewers of my own books has been mostly very positive, or at least constructively critical, so I generally try to pay that forward. And frankly, book writing takes so much time and concentrated effort that even a bad book deserves a certain grudging respect.
That said, I was invited to review a book earlier this year that, frankly, I hated, as much for what it said as what it represented. I didn’t know the author, but had actually kind of liked one of his earlier books. So I pre-committed to writing the review, going in with mildly positive expectations that were dashed on literally the first page.
If it had been published in a previous era, the book—Donald Stoker’s Purpose and Power: US Grand Strategy from the Revolutionary Era to the Present—would have been bland, and far too long, but ultimately affirming of the way that national security practitioners think about world politics.
In the light of 2025, however, the book drips with the ideology of what Samuel Huntington called “conservative realism,” which is pervasive in military culture.
In the conservative-realist worldview, there is no conception of society, class relations, or the common good. There is a presumption that whatever elected politicians decide is the “national interest.” American exceptionalism is taken for granted, and therefore American power is confused with being a public good even when there’s evidence to the contrary. And there is no curiosity about why bad things happen in the world; only that the solution to them surely involves military power.
The worst part is that these beliefs are hubristically asserted as truth, making the believer blithely unaware that what they think is not hard-nosed reality but ideology top to bottom.
The unjustified and highly damaging bravado of writing and thinking in this fashion—a fashion I once embraced and that most people in Washington still do—made the initial version of my critical review too hot for publication. If version 1.0 of this draft was NC-17, a couple iterations managed to get it to an R-rating, and then an editor’s hand helped sand the coarser aspects down to what you see below…a PG-13 critique that manages to be scathing all the same.
H-Diplo Review, Purpose and Power: US Grand Strategy from the Revolutionary Era to the Present
Donald Stoker’s Purpose and Power is a voluminous chronicle of American history from the perspective of grand strategy. But in trying to write about the entire history of Washington’s relations with the wider world in a single volume, Stoker has given himself mission impossible.
To be sure, I find myself agreeing with Stoker’s judgments in some places. He is highly critical of Wilsonian adventurism and its damaging foreign policy legacies. He finds the idea of limited wars almost inherently problematic. His scorn for how politicians handled Vietnam echoes in his assessments of Iraq. Stoker finds the fad of policymakers thinking that great powers engage in “gray zone” coercive activities to be a neologism for old practices of trying to secure advantages in geopolitics—and he’s right. He’s also correct in evaluating the Trump administration as having been burdened by coordination problems and failures of execution. And while his assessment of the Biden administration was in-progress as the book went to print, I share his criticism that the Biden presidency should not have made a hollow phrase—“integrated deterrence”—a conceptual lodestar of its foreign policy.
But I also disagreed with many of Stoker’s judgments—and found a lot of it question-begging. If there is a single throughline to my critique, then, it’s that the entire project here is simply too ad hoc. In the spirit of keeping criticisms productive, I will limit myself to delineating two types of concerns: analytical blind spots and thin concepts.
The Pathologies of Power
One of the well-documented limitations of the grand strategy literature has been that those who write about grand strategy implicitly do so for and to ruling-class elites. [1] Grand strategy is an advice-to-princes idiom. That is not inherently a problem. Rulers, after all, need counsel about how to understand the world and what to do with state power.
But every perspective smuggles in pathologies. In the case of court histories, which is what most grand strategy writing tends to be,[2] there are at least two common blind spots. One is American exceptionalism—the belief that the United States is the good guy in any contest with foreign others, and, correspondingly, that when others take actions adverse to US preferences, it is not because of Washington’s expansion or use of state power.
The other blind spot was captured aptly in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s words: “the privilege of a great power is incuriosity about those who lack it.”[3] The failure to see at whose expense power comes is not just a moral failing; it necessarily means we get neither rich accounts of, nor inquiry about, how the world came to be the way that it is. The distribution and form of global insecurity shifts dramatically from one historical conjuncture to another, and those changes don’t just frame and constrain our choices; they largely owe to our choices when we aspire to something as hubristic as global hegemony, primacy, or “leadership of the world.”[4]
Both pathologies—American exceptionalism and state power-centrism—are present in Purpose and Power, though the latter more than the former. Stoker evinces an ambivalent relationship to the first, American exceptionalism. He sees folly in democracy promotion, nation-building, and many ill-advised “limited” wars of choice, all of which suggest he at least rejects some of the ways that American exceptionalism finds expression in foreign policy.
And yet, while he is critical of any US decision-making that renders America “weak” (a term he uses often but vaguely), he takes as a given that the broad orientation of the national security state toward rivalry with other great powers is both correct and a militarized contest in which America must prevail. This is not obviously true; it is a claim that must be defended. Worse, he sees American power as basically good for the world so long as it is well coordinated and serves the aims of America’s political leaders. Why should we believe that? Are the aims of America’s political leaders really good for the nation? Is that something that can seriously be argued in 2025?
Beyond traces of American exceptionalism, Purpose and Power is also heavily burdened by the failure to see beyond the going concerns that preoccupy the US national security state. The people—on whose behalf presidential administrations and the Congress rule—do not meaningfully exist in this book. In one revealing passage, Stoker dismisses both the rise of the American far right and the Black Lives Matter uprisings of 2020 in a single paragraph, noting:
Rioting protestors broke into the Capitol and Congress fled; several people died. The year 2020 was wracked by progressive-left protests and riots producing murders, much looting, and seizure of part of Portland, Oregon. A conservative-right mob now added to the nation’s disorders. Trump did nothing to discourage violence until too late.[5]
Such a hand-wave is not just a manipulative description of what happened; it is stunningly incurious about the greatest political convulsions of our time. As such, the book offers no acknowledgement that the far right was a major Trump constituency, nor that Trump’s ascent to power was a direct consequence of the War on Terror itself.[6] No contemplation of the role that foreign policy might have played in creating an overmilitarized police force directed disproportionately at Black Americans—the very history that incited the BLM uprisings of 2020. And no understanding that non-liberal (whether left or right) political formations—particularly street-level expressions of them—are downstream of worsening conditions of economic security for most Americans, which, in turn, is a product of America’s role in the capitalist world-system.
No attempt, in short, to explain some of the most important shifts in America’s strategic terrain in the past generation. To assume that these events are not worth serious inquiry, or that they’re unrelated to America’s self-appointed role in the world, is an analytical prejudice of national security-thought—a political ideology all its own.
Description Without Explanation
The book argues that the United States has, throughout its history, consistently pursued the triple goals of either security-prosperity-expansion or security-prosperity-democracy promotion. But such a claim is extraordinarily hollow.
Why is that useful to know? Why these particular trifectas of purpose but not others? Would these purposes not apply to most countries? How precisely should we understand presidents toggling between territorial expansion and democracy promotion? And what does it even mean for the state to pursue “security” on behalf of a nation where millions have anything but?
The United States has undertaken some 400 militarized conflicts in its history—many of which, understandably, are not addressed in Purpose and Power.[7] Most, if not all, of these 400 conflicts had “security” as their stated motivation. But that observation in itself is not a meaningful argument. What can we glean that is worth communicating to a policymaker from the constant of the “security” motivation? Even if we hesitate to draw a sweeping conclusion about the forest of war in American life, the individual trees of militarized violence surely had wide-ranging causes and granular motivations.
For Stoker’s core argument to have meaning, then, it would need to address how US leaders sought to realize the security-prosperity-expansion/democracy trifecta, and how they understood the tasks of security and prosperity in particular. For example, what were Washington’s “theories” of security in different moments? Did those theories share attributes that we could use to develop types of “models” for either how they thought about what security/prosperity was or how best to achieve it?
Stoker writes as a historian, which is common enough among those who work in the grand strategy tradition. But the way in which he does so neglects to draw upon the many useful insights about grand strategy that come to us from international relations, security studies, and comparative politics.
He does not even engage with the idea that grand strategy is a “theory of security,” which is perhaps grand strategy’s most common definition.[8] He does not draw upon established classification schemes for conceptualizing grand strategies as plans, principles, patterns of behavior, visions, or variables.[9] He gives no consideration to research indicating grand strategies are narratives about national security that constrain and guide policy choices in all the ways that narratives impact on state behavior.[10] And, most crucially, he omits one of the more vital insights, from Thierry Balzacq, Peter Dombrowski, and Simon Reich, who gave us a cross-national comparative framework through which to understand that a crucial feature of all grand strategies is “national pathologies”: the peculiar features of national experience, geographical position, and the like, which play a major role in the purposes to which statesmen put power.[11] American exceptionalism, after all, is the nation’s chief pathology.
Missing in action throughout is an intellectual apparatus for making sense of power or how the world works. What are the global trends that matter in any particular conjuncture, and why? Are rulers free to do as they choose? Surely not. Then why do they do as they do? And ultimately, when we judge a presidency critically for “weakening” America (a recurring description in the book), what is the precise causal relationship not just between a choice like military withdrawal and supposed American weakness, but also the geopolitical consequences of this “weakness?” These are not just reasonable questions, they are necessary ones.
Without them, we fall into description without explanation. The earliest chapters, covering the United States from its founding to its decisions to selectively acquire an overseas empire in the latter half of the 19thcentury, were the most narratively informative, though the language of strategy really sanitizes just how blood-soaked America’s frontier history is. But as the book’s focus shifts to the Cold War through today, the chapters become mostly a summary catalog of events. Too abbreviated to be encyclopedic; too demur to make claims about the consequences of most of the events mentioned; too unsympathetic about why statesmen decide as they do.
One example among many are Stoker’s chapters on Trump and Biden respectively. My own writing has spared no criticism of both Trump and Biden, and so it’s no surprise that I agree with some of his judgments. But every judgment needs to be defended. Of both Trump and Biden, he says, “financial profligacy, weakness abroad, susceptibility to flawed strategic concepts, poor assessment of foes, and a lost war are things we see clearly.”[12]
If these presidents rendered bad assessments of foes, what is a good assessment? If these presidents “lost” the war in Afghanistan, why should we think it was winnable by the time they came to power (most experts thought that Afghanistan had been unwinnable for a decade prior to withdrawal[13])? How is financial profligacy not a problem of every US president since the Vietnam War—not just Trump and Biden—considering that US military buildups are debt-financed and no US president in the past 50 years has been willing to raise taxes to pay for military spending? For Stoker’s judgments to be persuasive, they must answer these kinds of questions. Yet he does not even confront them.
If we’re going to say grand strategy can be good or bad, effective or ineffective—judgments he makes in each chapter—we need systematic criteria for our judgments to be reliable. The trouble is that grand strategy, unlike strategy at other levels of statecraft, is as much about purpose as it is about power—the very title of Stoker’s book.
But we cannot say (without diving deep into political theory or philosophy) what purpose is good or bad, effective or ineffective. Power yes, purpose no. Can a grand strategy be good if it’s well coordinated but leads to bad outcomes? If good outcomes result but the process of generating them was contradictory or random, was the grand strategy good? Grand strategy does not lend itself to systematic judgments because it is as much about purpose as it is about power. In judging specific grand strategies, then, we always run the risk of armchair critique. The only guards against that are the concepts we use and the precision of our arguments.
This book can be read as a useful exercise in how the national security state interprets American history. It channels that perspective with authority. But that interpretation, I believe, is far from what policymakers, the national security state, and the history profession need at this conjuncture.
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[1] Thomas Meaney and Stephen Wertheim, “Grand Flattery: The Yale Grand Strategy Seminar,” The Nation (2012), https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/grand-flattery-yale-grand-strategy-seminar/; Van Jackson, Grand Strategies of the Left: The Foreign Policy of Progressive Worldmaking (Cambridge University Press, 2023); Aaron Jakes, “A Yale Program Drew Fire Over Donor Meddling. Its Real Problem Was Promoting War,” Washington Post (October 11, 2021), https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/10/11/yale-grand-strategy-beverly-gage-kissinger/.
[2] For an example of the very recent “grand strategy from below” turn in the literature, see Elizabeth Borgwardt, Christopher McKnight Nichols, and Andrew Preston, eds., Rethinking American Grand Strategy (Oxford University Press, 2021).
[3] Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message (Penguin RandomHouse, 2024), p. 80.
[4] Stoker makes the odd, evidence-less assertion that the United States has never sought primacy or hegemony—that is gallingly incorrect but adjudicating it would consume this entire review.
[5] Stoker, Purpose and Power, p. 664.
[6] See especially Spencer Ackerman, Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump (Penguin Random House, 2021).
[7] Sidita Kushi and Monica Duffy Toft, “Introducing the Military Intervention Project: A New Dataset on U.S. Military Interventions, 1776–2019,” Journal of Conflict Resolution Vol. 67, no. 4 (2023), pp. 752-779.
[8] Barry Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine: France, Britain, and Germany During the World Wars (Cornell University Press, 1984), p. 13.
[9] Nina Silove, “Beyond the Buzzword: The Three Meanings of ‘Grand Strategy,” Security Studies Vol. 27, no. 1 (2018), pp. 27-57; Rebecca Friedman Lissner, “What is Grand Strategy? Sweeping a Conceptual Minefield,” Texas National Security Review Vol. 2, no. 1 (2018), pp. 52-73.
[10] Ronald Krebs, Narrative and the Making of US National Security (Cambridge University Press, 2015); Stacie Goddard, When Right Makes Might: Rising Powers and World Order (Cornell University Press, 2018).
[11] Thierry Balzacq, Peter Dombrowski, and Simon Reich, Comparative Grand Strategy (Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 9-10.
[12] Stoker, Purpose and Power, p. 695.
[13] Christian Tripodi, “Hidden Hands: The Failure of Population-Centric Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan 2008-11,” Journal of Strategic Studies Vol. 47, no. 4 (2023), pp. 545-73.
Release the NC-17 version!