/lit/ - Literature

The recommendations for U.S. foreign policy in Christopher Preble's The Power Problem, by contrast, go well beyond prudence. Preble is the director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, a Washington think tank with a libertarian political outlook that generally favors a far more modest foreign policy than recent administrations have chosen. On the evidence of this volume, Preble considers the defense of the borders of the United States to be the only legitimate use of U.S. military power.

He, his colleague Ted Galen Carpenter, and other foreign policy analysts affiliated with Cato can be counted on to make a cogent case against whatever international initiative the U.S. government happens to be contemplating or actually carrying out. Since the think tanks in the nation's capital that are more closely aligned with one of the two main political parties usually support the government's foreign policy initiatives (at least when their favored party is in power), and since the international projects the U.S. government launches sometimes turn out badly, this is a valuable service.

Preble denies that he is an isolationist, and he and his colleagues do strongly favor free trade. Cato's approach to foreign policy in fact corresponds to what the scholar Walter Russell Mead has called the Jeffersonian approach, one that the nation's third president embraced and sought to practice. Its main belief is that the liberty on behalf of which the American colonists revolted against their British overlords is not only precious but also fragile: military adventures abroad can compromise it at home.