The Peace of Illusions

American Grand Strategy from 1940 to the Present

Bibliographic Data

ID10031183
AuthorsD F Schmitz, David Schmitz (0000-0002-8792-3507, Whitman College, corresponding author)
Year2007
Volume94
Issue1
Pages336-337
Publication date2007-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of American History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314
PublisherOxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/25094917
OpenAlexW2332021288
LanguageEN
Citations received43

The Peace of Illusions is an excellent analysis of U.S. grand strategy since World War II that demonstrates the continuity of President George W. Bush's foreign policy with the past. It provides a critique of the U.S. quest for hegemony over the past sixty years and proposes a policy of offshore balancing to protect American interests. Historians will be interested in Christopher Layne's deft combination of international relations theory with historical analysis and his surprising mix of a realist's criticism of U.S. policy with William Appleman Williams and the Open Door thesis, which Layne also calls America's liberal ideology. Layne accepts the Open Door as the best explanation for why, since World War II, the United States has attempted to “establish its hegemony in the world's three most important regions outside North America itself: Western Europe, East Asia, and the Persian Gulf” (p. 3). A central question drives Layne's analysis: “why did the cold war's end lead to a new wave of U.S. expansion” (p. 2)? Layne's answer is that since the start of World War II the grand strategy of the United States has been one that he calls “extraregional hegemony,” designed to dominate first Europe and later East Asia (p. 8). That strategy was implemented, Layne argues, not because of structural imperatives or dangers to the United States, but due to domestic politics: “the economic and political Open Doors—in other words, America's liberal (Wilsonian) ideology—caused the United States to seek hegemony” (p. 194). “Well before the cold war's onset ... U.S. policymakers realized that their nation's enormous relative power gains created an unparalleled opportunity to mold the postwar international system, leading to an ambitious conception of America's postwar strategic, economic, and ideological interests” (p. 39, emphasis in original). Thus, Layne concludes that the driving force behind American foreign policy since the 1940s “has not been ‘counterhegemony’—blocking the bids of other would-be European hegemons—but the goal of imposing America's own hegemony on the Continent” (p. 106). The end of the Cold War has, according to Layne, “lifted the realpolitik veil from American grand strategy and exposed to clear view its liberal ideological foundation” (p. 118)

Economic history · Foreign policy · Grand strategy · Hegemony · Ideology · International relations · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Global Political and Social Dynamics · History · International Relations and Foreign Policy · Law