At least since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, some scholars and policymakers have called for retrenching the United States’ global military presence. Miranda Priebe and John Schuessler discuss realist, conservative, and progressive visions of restraint. They draw out the underlying beliefs that draw each group to a grand strategy of restraint and highlight the divisions between and within these groups.
Guests: Miranda Priebe is a senior political scientist and director of the Center for Analysis of U.S. Grand Strategy at RAND. John Schuessler is Associate Professor of International Affairs and Co-Director of the Albritton Center for Grand Strategy at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University.
International Security Article: Miranda Priebe, John Schuessler, Bryan Rooney, and Jasen Castillo, “Competing Visions of Restraint,” International Security, Vol. 49, No. 2 (Fall 2024), pp. 135–169.
Originally released on February 19, 2025
[00:00:00] Jeff Friedman: Hello everyone and welcome to the International Security Podcast. We are produced by International Security, a quarterly journal edited at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and published by MIT Press. Each episode of the podcast highlights a piece of research from the journal, drawing out its implications for understanding the theory and practice of international politics.
I'm Jeff Friedman, associate professor of government at Dartmouth College. Today we're speaking with Miranda Priebe and John Schuessler. Miranda is a senior political scientist and director of the Center for Analysis of US Grand Strategy at RAND. John is an associate professor of international affairs and director of the Albritton Center for Grand Strategy at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University.
Their recent International Security article is titled “Competing Visions of Restraint.” It describes that there are at least three distinct camps of scholars and practitioners who endorse retrenching the United States’ global military presence. It also explains how proponents of restraint disagree in important ways, particularly over policy responses to the rise of China.
Miranda, thanks for joining us today.
[00:01:19] Miranda Priebe: Thanks for having us.
[00:01:21] Jeff Friedman: And John, good to see you too.
[00:01:23] John Schuessler: Yes, thank you.
[00:01:23] Jeff Friedman: Okay, John, let's jump into the general frame of your article. Could you start by telling us what is the core meaning of restraint as it applies to US grand strategy, and how does that differ from the alternative you call deep engagement?
[00:01:37] John Schuessler: So we do define restraint in negative terms. So for us, restraint is doing less than deep engagement in at least one core region. Deep engagement says that the United States should be the security provider of first resort in the core regions of Europe, East Asia, and the Persian Gulf or Middle East. So security provider of first resort, essentially act as you could say, a benign hegemon among underwriting stability in those regions.
And a restrainer would be someone who says, “The United States should do less than that in at least one of those core regions.” So it is defined in negative terms.
[00:02:24] Jeff Friedman: And you mentioned that the intellectual and perhaps political foundations of restraint have advanced quite a bit in the last 20 years. Can you say a bit about where that progress came from, what it looks like, what's the general sweep of discourse about restraint and how's that been emerging in the recent past?
[00:02:43] John Schuessler: Sure. As we talk about in the article, for so many of us who are tuned into the grand strategy debate, the famous piece by Barry Posen and Andy Ross, “Competing Visions of Grand Strategy,” which came out in the mid-1990s, laid out four grand strategic alternatives that were live in the debate at that time.
And the first of the four was neo-isolationism. Right off the bat, they describe it as, I think, the least popular or least influential of the four alternatives, and then moved on to the other three, selective engagement, cooperative security, and primacy. And so that gives you a sense for, there was a position in the debate that was a bit akin to what we talk about as restraint today, but it was treated as fairly marginal, and one end, even, of the restraint spectrum, neo-isolationism, very few commitments, if any, abroad.
I think for us, the developments we try to emphasize are kind of the interplay between practice and theories. I'd say the War on Terror and especially the protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were very influential in beginning to get elites of all kinds and the public asking hard questions about, was there something about America's grand strategic posture that led to these suboptimal outcomes? What was it? Would it have been wiser to do less? And so as these questions percolated more through the beltway and beyond, academics were in a position to frame the debate anew between prevailing grand strategy and a more restrained alternative, to take advantage of that opening.
I think the final thing I'd say is, as we try to emphasize in the article, there are different pathways to restraint. So that you could have liberal reasons to be restrained, you could have conservative reasons, realist reasons, and the debate widened in that sense, I would say, from where it started, with more people in the debate, articulating more reasons it makes sense to be restrained
[00:04:57] Jeff Friedman: And give us a quick sense about what those main paths to restraint look like. So if I have it right, you just said there's a realist flavor of restraint and a conservative flavor of restraint and a progressive flavor of restraint. What’s the sort of core distinction between those three different ideas?
[00:05:13] John Schuessler: I want to say upfront that we arrived at these three positions, as we say in the article, or this mapping, inductively. Miranda and I and our co-authors Jason Castillo and Brian Rooney all have been consuming a lot of this literature over time.
And we talked long and hard about how to sort the different types of restraint. And these are the three that kind of emerged inductively to us based on kind of the underlying ideas underpinning each position. So the realist take on restraint would say that deep engagement in at least some cases is unnecessary because American vital interests don't depend on being the security provider of first resort in one or more regions, and I guess counterproductive or unsustainable because deep engagement leads to backlash or a reaction from powerful rivals and costs, as allies draw on your resources for ends that don't necessarily serve your interests. And so that's the realist critique, that deep engagement is some combination of unnecessary, counterproductive, and unsustainable over time. So realists are the only of the three camps we emphasize that root their critique in a theory of international politics.
The second camp, then, conservatives, are generally united around the idea that deep engagement saps or contradicts the American way of life as they define it. So I think the longest-standing version of this argument is that an overly active grand strategy leads to an unhealthy expansion of the state to a form of the garrison state that's bad for liberty. That's probably the longest-standing conservative critique. It's been joined more recently by the notion that deep engagement kind of undermines the American community, defined more in nationalist or blood and soil kind of terms.
And then finally, the progressive position is largely that deep engagement prioritizes maybe the wrong threats, so geopolitical threats rather than things like climate change and authoritarianism and inequality, and then prioritizes the wrong tools to address those threats. Too much emphasis on military tools and not enough on other kinds of tools, which is bad for progressive goals like democracy and things like that.
[00:07:55] Jeff Friedman: Okay, well maybe we could just go through each of those three versions of restraint one by one. And maybe Miranda, you can help us unpack the realist version of that. So I guess one of the things John mentioned was that realists think that deep engagement is unnecessary. And I think in the article you all point out that part of that is because realists feel like the United States is fundamentally safer than proponents of other grand strategies do.
Could you just say more about why is that the case? Why do realists think that the United States doesn't need the power projection capabilities that proponents of deep engagement see as essential?
[00:08:33] Miranda Priebe: Yeah, that's a great question. So I think realist restrainers, they don't disagree that the United States needs important power projection capabilities, but they do argue the United States should have a less activist foreign policy and maybe less military presence in other regions.
And they do that be in part because they think the United States is fundamentally secure, as you said, and that security comes partly from geography. The United States is insulated from its rivals by large bodies of water and surrounded by much weaker states that can't really militarily threaten the United States.
And this means both that states aren't likely to be able to have the capabilities to attack us in many ways, and also that we have fewer natural, immediate territorial issues with our neighbors, and also that the United States has nuclear deterrence, though nuclear deterrence means that any large-scale attack on the United States could be met with nuclear use, and that further compounds US security.
And realist restrainers also make a third argument, which is about prosperity, which is that the United States has an incredibly large, diverse, and dynamic economy and a large number of trading partners. And so realist restrainers tend to be less worried about the way that instability abroad might affect US prosperity over the long term as well.
[00:09:54] Jeff Friedman: So I think John mentioned part of the argument that realists make is the United States is fundamentally safe, doesn't need deep engagement. And then you also mentioned the idea that realists think deep engagement is counterproductive. And perhaps, I think in the article you say realists believe deep engagement can be self-defeating.
Could you just unpack the dynamics of that part of their argument?
[00:10:14] Miranda Priebe: So I think there's three pieces to it. The first, as John already mentioned, is that the strategy itself is expensive, right? Deep engagement calls for the United States to have a large military, to use it fairly actively, even in peace time, and to be deployed in many regions of the world.
But the two dimensions that realist restrainers emphasize the most is that it changes the incentives of our rivals, and it changes the incentives of our allies. So when it comes to US rivals the number of US commitments that we have, the large forward military presence, and the frequent use of force leads them to be insecure and leads them to arm themselves to gain more security.
And also when they have revisionist aims, they know the US is going to try and thwart them. So that gives them further reason to arm and to push back against the United States. So our rivals aren't static. They respond to our grand strategy.
And then also the grand strategy changes the incentives of our allies. When the United States does a lot more, it means allies have less incentive to do more for themselves. So they bring less collectively to the table to meet our shared rivals. And they also, as John alluded to at the beginning, are incentivized to take more risks knowing that the United States is going to back them up. This is something that some commentators call reckless driving, that our allies know that we're going to be there for them and therefore maybe are more ambitious or more risk-taking than they would otherwise be.
[00:11:42] Jeff Friedman: One of the themes, I think, that runs throughout the article is the idea that, you know, not all restrainers agree, and not all restrainers agree exactly how their strategy applies to different regions of the world.
And China's the one that comes up most frequently here as an area for disagreement. You mentioned in the article that not all realists agree that restraint is the proper policy response for dealing with China. And I wonder if you could unpack that a bit. What is it about China specifically that strains some of those assumptions that realists make about the United States’ security and the counterproductive nature of deep engagement?
And I guess a following question to that would be, if those assumptions of realism don't hold for dealing with China, which is arguably the most important foreign policy challenge facing the United States, how confident should that make us about those assumptions holding up in general?
[00:12:34] Miranda Priebe: Yeah, that's a great question.
We really highlight in the article that Asia is the region that leads to the most disagreement among restrainers generally and among realist restrainers in particular. There are certainly some restrainers at one end of the spectrum that do call for US restraint in Asia, and including downgrading our alliance commitments, withdrawing some forward forces, changing kind of the ideas of when we might be willing to use force in the region.
But as you note, there's also restrainers on the other end of the spectrum that actually support current US grand strategy under the Biden administration and other similar strategies that were pretty competitive and deeply engaged in Asia under previous administrations. And so there is a wide range of views.
And so those who are skeptical of restraint in Asia tend to think China is a bigger threat. So they worry that China is now or will become so powerful that it can threaten US vital interests. And that argument has two pieces. So either they argue that there's a security logic whereby China, having dominated its own region locally and basically subduing other powers in the region if US doesn't engage enough, will be able to project power globally and even into North America and the western hemisphere. And in that way it can be a troublemaker in our own backyard and actually threaten nearby interests and the US homeland itself.
The other argument is about economics. So this is a concern that China’s security dominance will also give it economic dominance in Asia. And because Asia is such a big economic player and also a dynamic and growing region, that the United States would lose out for its prosperity if there were to be any kind of gain in Chinese influence in the region.
And the second piece, so if that first piece is about what threat China poses the second assessment of these restrainers is about the differences of our allies, and the argument here is that allies in the region, local powers, are not collectively strong enough in the absence of US support to balance China on their own. And that there's all kinds of impediments to collective action, to working together to check China.
So it's both of those pieces that make some restrainers say Asia's different, that the US can't really pull out of that region without big threats to US vital interests. And I should also mention that they highlight that there's also regional animosities, like there's historic troubles between these states that can also further exacerbate the impediments to cooperation.
So I think that part of the argument is pretty clear and it explains why there's other restrainers who see the threat from China as lower or are more optimistic about what allies can do with less, with the US stepping back a little. At the end of the day, I think there's still some ambiguity that you'll see evolving in the debates among restrainers. For example, why aren't restrainers who want to engage in, have deep engagement in Asia, worried about security dilemma dynamics under current US grand strategy? Why are they less worried about the perverse incentives for allies? And I think hopefully a conversation among restrainers will start to to bring that forward in the coming years.
[00:15:53] Jeff Friedman: Thanks. John, let’s go back to you. I'd like to hear you say some more about the conservative view of restraint. And you said at the top of the conversation that there are actually two headings here, two different flavors of conservatism within the restraint community, classical liberalism and nationalism.
Can you just briefly say a bit more about the differences between those two camps?
[00:16:16] John Schuessler: I will just own up and say, I guess I was the quote “lead” among the authors on the conservative section. And I've long been familiar with my friends at the Cato Institute and their work. I conflated, I'd say, initially, as did we all, their thinking on grand strategy with conservatism more broadly.
And the Cato Institute is a libertarian think tank. And so they prioritize liberal values, classically defined, small state, free markets, individual liberty. And so if you start from that set of premises, the problem with deep engagement is what it means for the balance between the state and liberty domestically. And the founders of the country worried about this. You find writings by Alexander Hamilton and others about war feeding the state, and then the state overstepping its bounds. It fed the suspicion of entangling alliances early in the republic. You can see it in Dwight Eisenhower's warnings about a military industrial complex much later. And this was what we focused on initially as the kind of conservative critique of deep engagement.
But Miranda, among others, I think over time, as the dialogue continued, rightly pointed out that to the extent restraint was getting some purchase among conservatives these days, it didn't have that classical liberal feel. Indeed, Trump and many of those around him have been described as postliberal. So not animated by classical liberalism or libertarian concerns. And so what would lead them to restraint? Here's where we emphasize kind of nationalism, putting Americans first. Why should we spend money helping Ukraine when that money could better be spent on American jobs or dealing with the threat of fentanyl to American communities and things like that? Or this focus on sovereignty. We're not going to tangle ourselves in alliances or institutions where our freedom to decide to do as we see fit is encumbered by these commitments. Trying to emphasize both strands of conservative thinking among restrainers while emphasizing that it's an uneasy mix.
I think classical liberalism points more cleanly toward restraint. Nationalism, there's a hard line or hard edge to it, in some cases. America first, if you mess with us, you'll get an overwhelming response, that doesn't feel very retrained in cases. So I think the verdict is a bit out there on how cleanly nationalism translates into restraint.
[00:19:15] Jeff Friedman: Let me just ask one follow-up question about each of those variants.
My guess is that a proponent of deep engagement would react to the classical liberal idea by saying that it's not that anyone favors a big state per se, but they just think that that's necessary to promote American security. And for example, there's one line in your article that caught my eye, which was that classical liberals oppose protracted wars of choice. And when I read that, I guess I thought, I'm not sure many proponents of deep engagement support protracted wars of choice and many proponents of deep engagement have renounced the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. So I got the sense from your article that, do classical liberals take that more seriously than others, or how is it that that leads them in a direction that creates a policy disagreement with proponents of deep engagement? As opposed to endorsing values like avoiding unnecessary costs and wars, which I think everybody would endorse in the abstract.
[00:20:16] John Schuessler: First of all, of course you are correct that deep engagers like providing stability in the core part of deep engagement while trying to disassociate it from some of the wars of choice that that occasionally creep up, that that may or may not be extensions of deep engagement.
I think what the classical liberals would emphasize is that the more commitments you take on abroad, the larger the national security state that's required, and they would point to certain developments domestically over time: the enlargement of the presidency at the expense of the legislature and the public in terms of the imperial presidency, or the growth of the, again, the military industrial complex, kind of overweening influence of the military in our decision-making process. It's not that I think deep engagers, per se, want any of this, or certainly don't welcome the deep engagement plus missions that end up going awry. But it's just a matter of if you sign up for underpinning stability in the core, you end up taking on a lot, especially if your credibility's at stake.
Your interests expand naturally, the threats you're dealing with expand, and that requires more and more mobilization that has effects on liberty over time. And we could go on and talk about more in terms of surveillance, so on and so forth, torture, et cetera. But I'll just leave it at that.
[00:21:54] Jeff Friedman: I guess what I hear you saying is that there's just trade-offs in play here and the classical liberals put more weight on the costs of this trade-off than others, and you could see how that would go in a different direction, definitely. Let me just ask you one more follow-up question on the nationalists. You said that some elements of nationalists doesn't seem particularly restrained. In the article you say that nationalists do want to make sure that the United States can maintain strong defenses and punish aggression, and I guess a proponent of deep engagement would likely say, well, that's exactly why the United States needs these projection capabilities and these alliances, so that it can maintain strong defenses and punish aggression. Why is it that nationalism naturally leads in a restrained direction as opposed to even saying we need to put more resources into status quo or conventional foreign policies?
[00:22:45] John Schuessler: To expand a bit, there's a definite unilateral impulse to the nationalist strain and restraints. Fortress America, I think, captures it best. We are not going to come out and look to pick a fight with you, but if you pick a fight with us, expect terrible things. I guess in the ideal, typical version of their world, the United States would have a minimum number of long-term commitments to others, to retain freedom of action, to maintain sovereignty, but enough power that if there were a frontal assault on our prestige or core interests, that there was a way to respond decisively. And as Miranda alluded to earlier, there are some tensions in these views. So how do you project power against a rival if you don't have partners in the neighborhood to help you with that?
My other sense, I do think conservatives generally are willing to make friend and enemy distinctions. It's not that all commitments are to be suspect. If you're a proven friend of the United States like Israel, then maybe there's more willingness to back that friend up. But again, I wouldn't say it's some kind of deep commitment or deep, again, deep engagement.
It's more, are you on our side or not?
[00:24:10] Jeff Friedman: Thanks, John. Miranda, let's, let's explore the third variant of restraint in your article. That's progressivism. One of the things that you describe about progressives is that they don't think the world is as secure as realists do. And perhaps as John mentioned at the top of our conversation, progressives in some ways have an even more expansive definition of the threats that face the United States than proponents of other grand strategies. And so I wonder if you could just clarify that, what is it that progressives see about the world as being insecure and, and if they feel the United States is insecure, why does that lead them to believe the United States should pull back from its obligations as opposed to putting more resources into them?
[00:24:56] Miranda Priebe: Yeah, progressives highlight different kinds of threats, and they see those threats as growing. As you mentioned, progressives tend to define US interests more broadly than the other two groups, so they are worried about justice and human rights globally, about economic equality globally, and about environmental sustainability.
If those are your views of things the United States needs to protect, then it's not surprising that they see the growth in authoritarianism, climate change, and growing economic disparities as as trends to be worried about. And so you're right that this group tends to warn about growing threats where realists and conservatives are much more optimistic about fundamental US security.
Progressives tend to emphasize that although threats are growing, that military tools aren't the right tools to respond to these threats. A large military presence is not going to help you combat climate change. In fact, it has some negative side effects when it comes to the environment. And so I think for progressives, they just disagree about the kind of tools.
Although they might support alliances, they'd like to see the United States have a more equal role within those alliances and a smaller military footprint globally.
[00:26:09] Jeff Friedman: I mean, in particular, it makes sense that military tools aren't the right way to fight problems like climate change. But what about traditional security problems like potential Chinese expansionism? How would progressives contain a potentially aggressive China without the use of the tools of deep engagement, like forward power projection or its current system of alliances?
[00:26:32] Miranda Priebe: Yeah, like the other two groups of restrainers we talk about there's internal divisions among progressive restrainers.
So there are some progressives who do still see alliances and forward military presence as important components. But they would like to de-emphasize those as tools. So they would sustain them, but maybe not in the same form that the United States has today. They would look to have greater alliance burden-sharing, but also greater decision-making equality between the United States and its allies.
While there's other progressives who are more concerned about the negative effects of those things and are more skeptical about alliances and forward presence. And here they join conservatives and realists in being worried that those kind of things tend to provoke US adversaries and tend to lead to these kind of negative spirals that we talked about earlier.
So, but I think you're right Jeff, to point out that there's a tension in the progressive position, especially for those who want to maintain US commitments to allies. How do you do that while still downgrading that military component in US foreign policy? And I think that's a fair question to that group.
[00:27:41] Jeff Friedman: One other question I want to ask about progressivism has to do with the ways the United States should use its global influence to solve collective action problems. So for example, on something like climate change, which is clearly a collective action problem, you mentioned that progressives think we would do better if the United States had a more democratic, more multilateral, more burden-sharing-oriented approach.
But I guess proponents of deep engagement would likely say that US leadership has a lot of value for solving collective action problems, for one reason, in helping to coordinate a group of nations that are often quite difficult to coordinate if they were left to themselves. And then also there's the argument that because the United States provides security goods to other countries, that that gives it leverage to steer the direction in which they take their foreign policies on important issues.
So can you just say a bit about how would progressives respond to that and why would they think that US influence is harmful rather than helpful for helping to coordinate the provision of global public goods?
[00:28:44] Miranda Priebe: I suspect that progressives would answer your question by pointing to other ways that the United States can lead.
So deep engagers think of US leverage and US influence as coming from its security leadership and the security that it provides. And I suspect progressives would emphasize that the United States is an incredibly powerful economic actor, and that it has influence and leverage that comes from that source of power.
And you do see some progressives, in fact, arguing in favor of using tools like sanctions more than military tools, for example. And then I think the other piece that progressives would probably emphasize is the US acting and gaining legitimacy through its own actions. So being consistent, not being hypocritical by leading, by cutting its own emissions and being a model.
So I suspect that progressives agree with you that the United States does need to play a leadership role. We see that in their writing, but at the same time they're more skeptical about the military and security relationships being the only way to gain that.
[00:29:48] Jeff Friedman: Let me now just zoom out and ask a few questions in closing about how restraint fits into the current events and other policy debates.
John, let me start with you. I wonder if you could say a bit about how restraint in your view relates to an alternative grand strategy, sometimes called prioritization, particularly associated with Elbridge Colby, who's on track to be President-Elect Trump's under secretary of defense. As I understand it, prioritization involves essentially de-emphasizing the US presence in Europe and the Middle East in order to provide additional resources to containing China. My sense is that that could be potentially consistent with several variants of restraint you talk about in your article. So would you consider prioritization for these purposes to be restraint, or something else?
[00:30:33] John Schuessler: I think it could be, and it would depend on the motivations and what it means in practice.
But my reading of Colby in his book, A Strategy of Denial, is it's very akin to a realist form of restraint where if China actually is a potential hegemon and there are good balance-of-power reasons to prevent it from becoming one, we need to prioritize that threat over others. Again, there, as Miranda already said, realists are going to disagree about how to actually assess the threat and what should be done in response, but that sounds consistent with the realist form of restraint to me. There are some who agree with Colby on the conservative side for more nationalist reasons—basically, we care more about this issue than about the fate of Europeans and hence we're going to prioritize it. But anyway, I would say that there's no inconsistency between—the extent Colby's kind of promoting a realist form of prioritization, I don't see any necessary inconsistency between that and restraint.
[00:31:45] Miranda Priebe: I'll just add that we deliberately decided to adopt a broad definition of restraint in this article. So we define restrainers as those who want to reduce US military engagement in one or more key regions.
And so in this article, we include people that might actually use the term prioritizer to describe themselves. They might not actually prefer the term restraint. We did that because we wanted to get a better sense of this big tent that, the diverse mix of people that are making up calls for greater restraint in US foreign policy.
I think certainly we could have adopted a narrower definition of restraint that focused on only groups that have a narrow definition of US interests or groups that want restraint in all three regions. Those are alternatives, and I think when you think about it in that way, if you had a narrower group of restrainers who really believe in restraint in all three regions, then their differences with prioritizers are really not just about where to adopt restraint, but why?
So prioritizers are worried much more than other deep engagers about limited resources. They see Russia and Iran as having a much lower threat to the United States than other deep engagers do. And they're just more willing to make hard choices. They don't necessarily think that deep engagement is a flawed strategy. I think they just are more worried about the resources available for that strategy across multiple regions.
[00:33:12] Jeff Friedman: One of the things that you write in your article is that Russia's recent invasion of Ukraine makes NATO seem more worthwhile or may have taken the steam out of some of restrainers’ push to de-emphasize NATO in the US foreign policy portfolio.
And when I read that, it called to mind a term that my colleagues Steve Brooks and Bill Wohlforth use, which is “insurance value.” The idea that part of what deep engagement provides is some confidence that if unexpected problems occur in any region of the world, that the United States will be in some position to handle that.
And I wonder how restrainers think about that idea, that isn't one value of deep engagement that it allows the United States to be prepared for threats we can't currently foresee? Even if restraint seems like it might be a worthwhile grain strategy now, how confident can we be that that might be the case in 5, 10, 20, or even 50 years?
[00:34:08] Miranda Priebe: I think many deep engagers like Bill Wohlforth and Steve Brooks, who you mentioned, come at it from a realist perspective, and so they share with the realists that we're talking about, the realist restrainers, a healthy respect for uncertainty and a healthy respect for the possibility of not being able to predict how the distribution of power is going to change over time or how wars might go, or how attentions might change.
And so I think you're right that both of these groups have an instinct towards caution and towards insurance, as you put it. Restrainers are more concerned about the trade-offs of buying that insurance and so are maybe not willing to buy as much or to go as far. Just to give one example, deep engagers often want to draw the line in Asia, Taiwan, right? They don't want to let Chinese influence grow at all for fear that it'll grow too much. And many restrainers say, “We would love to see Taiwan remain independent, but we're not willing to defend Taiwan and risk nuclear war with China over that in order to contain Chinese power.”
They might not be willing to draw the line there. They're not willing to pay that high a price upfront for fear of worse outcomes. So I think that's it's not that they don't have the same instincts, it's that they weigh these things differently about the cost and risk and trade-offs.
[00:35:31] Jeff Friedman: One of the things you point out at the start of your article is that restraint has really gained a lot of momentum over the last decade or so, and I wonder if you see that as being likely to continue to the future.
Feel free to speculate about the fate of restraint under the new Trump administration, or just generally speaking, do you think that the structural factors that led restraint to grow in popularity and intellectual interest over the last couple of decades are likely to continue or reverse, or is it hard to say?
[00:35:58] Miranda Priebe: Yeah, we really wrestled with this question, and I wish that we could give you a firm prediction, but I think the way that we came down in the article is that it's really hard to say because there's things that are happening now that redound in restraints’ favor. So things like US fiscal challenges and competing domestic priorities.
To come back to what John was mentioning at the beginning, those are things that are going to pressure the United States to consider reducing the costs and risks of its foreign policy. We also see multiple crises abroad and a growing risk of US-China confrontation, and those things could make more people take a second look at restraint, and especially with restraint having so many entry points through progressive, conservative, realist logics.
You could imagine that there's ways in which people, more people, could come into the big tent of restraint over time. Certainly, Trump himself as president in the past has shown some sympathy towards restraint. He talks a lot about alliance burden-sharing and reducing US commitments. But at the same time, there's these countervailing trends and that's why we struggle to kind of say how the net effect is going to end up.
The countervailing trends, as you mentioned, Jeff, are like instability in other regions. When we see more instability, do we get nervous and decide we need to be more involved? And we also see that the Trump administration has shown the kind of hard-line instincts as well that John mentioned earlier. And I think that Barry Posen's article on illiberal hegemony in Foreign Affairs a few years ago really highlighted that Trump's proclivities are mixed. He has some sympathy towards restraint and some tendencies towards deep engagement. And so for readers, it might be unsatisfying that we can't give a final answer, but hopefully highlighting the different trends and the competing pressures will help us have a better sense of where things are heading as things evolve over time.
[00:37:48] Jeff Friedman: Well, thank you, Miranda, and thank you, John. And thanks to everybody for listening to the International Security Podcast, produced by International Security, a quarterly journal at Harvard Kennedy Schools’ Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, published by MIT Press. If you like the conversation, please take a moment to rate and review us or share us on social media as that helps other people find the show.
I'm Jeff Friedman. The executive editor of International Security is Jacqueline L Hazelton. Our producer is Monica Achen. Our associate producer and technical director is Benn Craig. Thanks again to our guests, Miranda Priebe and John Schuessler. See you next time.