Volume 35, Number 8 · May 12, 1988
Not So Grand Strategy
By Paul Kennedy
Discriminate Deterrence: Report of the Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy
co-chaired by Fred C. Iklé, by Albert Wohlstetter
US Government Printing Office, 69 pp.
For the past fifteen months, a group of this country's leading experts on military and international affairs has been attempting to produce what many critics believe was impossible for the Reagan administration to achieve: an 'integrated' and 'long-term' strategy that would prepare the US to meet the changing 'security environment' for the rest of this century and the early decades of the next. Co-chaired by Fred C. Iklé, who has just retired as the under-secretary for defense, and by the strategic analyst Albert Wohlstetter, the Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy includes inter alios such notables as Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Anne Armstrong, and General Andrew Goodpaster. Since there is no minority report, one presumes that all thirteen members of the commission agree with the analysis and conclusions set forth therein. In that sense, it may fairly be regarded as one of the most important public overviews of what American grand strategy should be, as seen by its intellectual and policy-influencing elite, or at least an important part of it.
Review, 4096 words
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