The American Enterprise
March 05, 2025
Just over a century ago, the United Kingdom fundamentally reoriented its defense strategy in just a matter of years. Today, the United States is considering defense reforms that could be just as momentous. In a matter of months, US President Donald Trump has sought to make the most fundamental change in American strategic thinking in at least a century.
Since the end of World War II, the United States has embraced what scholar John Ikenberry termed “strategic restraint.” The logic dictated that by constraining its power in the short term, the United States could establish rules, norms, and institutions that would lock in its power in the long term. In the aftermath of two world wars, Americans were willing to accept this trade-off in pursuit of a more stable order that could avoid another deadly world war.
Today, however, Trump and his top advisers are rethinking this arrangement. Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated in his confirmation hearing, “The postwar global order is not just obsolete. It is now a weapon being used against us.” President Trump and his administration’s officials regularly assert that strategic restraint paid few dividends, allowing other countries to free ride on US security guarantees while taking advantage of the United States economically.
In many ways, this moment feels unprecedented. But the United States is not the first great power to recognize that its power has peaked and consider retrenchment. History is strewn with great powers that have been forced to rethink their strategies when their publics or leaders assessed that the costs of supporting a global presence were no longer worth the benefits.
My new book—Tides of Fortune: The Rise and Decline of Great Militaries—examines how other great powers have responded to power shifts and tracks the rise and decline of Germany, America, Britain, France, Japan, and Russia. Among these, one case is particularly instructive for the United States today: Great Britain in the early 20th century. Many strategists believe that the United Kingdom successfully managed adverse power shifts better than most others, so an examination of British strategy is warranted.
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