/lit/ - Literature

In one sense, his thesis is surely correct. The foreign policies of great powers do sometimes fail, and their power is almost always a cause of the failure in that without this power they would not have embarked on the failed initiatives in the first place. To take two of the cases Gallarotti discusses, ancient Athens would not have tried to conquer Sicily and the United States would not have intervened in Vietnam had the two great powers not had substantial military and economic resources. Whether the systematic relationship between power and failure that Gallarotti posits actually exists is less clear.

He argues that power leads to failure in four distinct ways: by discouraging states from adapting to complexity, by making them vulnerable to overstretch, by leading them to fall victim to moral hazard, and by inducing them to act unilaterally. Not all of the terms he uses are well defined. "Moral hazard," in its original economic context, refers to a situation in which the gains from economic activity are privatized and the losses are socialized -- that is, borne by the government. As Gallarotti uses the term, however, it seems to mean merely overconfidence, which is something different. A firm or an individual operating in circumstances of moral hazard has a strong incentive to engage in behavior known to be risky because the potential economic benefits are large and the losses will be borne by somebody else. An overconfident government, by contrast, carries out policies that it does not consider risky. It believes that it will suffer no losses because the policies cannot fail.

Like Matlock, Gallarotti believes that the Bush administration's foreign policies, to which he devotes an entire chapter, weakened the United States, but the chapter does not always inspire confidence in his grasp of the realities of the world in which Bush and his colleagues formulated these policies.