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Force Without Authority explores why the United States' costliest military operations since Vietnam came up short and pushed Republican and Democratic leaders toward withdrawal and retrenchment. Covering the sweep of US armed interventions since the end of the Cold War, Jason Brownlee sets America's post-9/11 invasions in a thirty-five-year foreign-policy arc--from caution to bravado--and back. The al-Qaeda attacks suspended America's traditional aversion to high-risk military missions abroad. For the better part of a decade, presidents from both parties poured US troops into nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq, only to return, in the 2010s, to a less hazardous and less ambitious program of eliminating enemies from a distance without reshaping politics on the ground. This same calculus pushed successive administrations toward diplomacy with America's most formidable foes. Critical and wide-sweeping, the book delivers a bracing audit of America's unipolar moment and a compelling case for statecraft over bluster.
List of contents
- 1. Introduction
- The Argument
- What This Book Is Not
- Imposed Costs and Foreign-Policy Consequences
- Road Map
- 2. Aggression and Resistance (1898-1989)
- Weak Occupiers, Strong Societies
- German and Japanese Exceptionalism
- Echoes of Imperialism
- Domestic Constraints on US Intervention
- Conclusion
- 3. Cautious Goliath (1989-2001)
- Toppling Noriega
- Isolating Saddam
- Somalia Syndrome
- Battling Milosevic
- Engaging Iran
- Caging Iraq
- Dividing Serbia
- Terrorists Beyond Reach
- Conclusion
- 4. Warpath (2001-2004)
- "An Urge for Reprisal"
- Invading Afghanistan
- Targeting Iraq
- Invading Iraq
- Conclusion
- 5. Compelled to Compromise (2004-2011)
- Foreign Provocations
- Compromising with Insurgents
- Nation-Building Redux
- Obama's Surge
- Conclusion
- 6. Force Without Authority (2011-2014)
- America's War, Pakistan's Fight
- Getting Bin Laden
- The Arab Spring and American Ambivalence
- State Collapse in Yemen
- Regime Change and Its Aftermath in Libya
- Condemning, But Not Confronting Syria
- Conclusion
- 7. Victory Without Invasion (2014-2018)
- No More Nation-Building
- Fertile Terrain for "Islamic State"
- Retribution and Risk-Sharing
- Prudence Over Panic
- New President, Same Policy
- Conclusion
- 8. Security in Retreat (2018-2025)
- Indigenous Regime Change in Syria
- Iran Nears the Nuclear Threshold
- Pushing Iran to the Brink
- Postponing Defeat in Afghanistan
- Return of the Emirate
- Conclusion
- 9. Conclusion
- The Reemergence of Risk Aversion
- Persistent Patterns of Regime Change
- Lessons Learned by Rivals
- The Dangers of Asymmetric Force
- References
About the author
Jason Brownlee is a professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin, where he writes and teaches about the comparative politics of the Global South and US foreign policy. His academic research and travels focus on the Muslim-majority countries of South Asia and West Asia (the Middle East).
