I took a little trip back in time today and read a statement Dr. Barry Posen prepared for the House Armed Services Committee back in 1993. Dr. Posen’s statement examines the three competing grand strategies of the day: Isolationism, Collective Security and Selective Engagement.

The first and the third perspectives focus on great power war as the most significant danger to the US. Their major difference stems from the assumptions of each. The Isolationist perspective assumes that foreign entanglements represent the greatest danger while Selective Engagement assumes that - given 20th Century history - some situations of regional instability will explode into great power wars which will draw America into them. The Isolationists are left with the problem of explaining how we’ll know where to retailiate for the violence that America will inevitibly encounter, while the Selective Engagers are left with the challenge of creating a guide for when and where intervention is (and is not) needed.

The second perspective, Collective Security, at first seems like the most familiar, given our current understanding of the relationship between globalization and security. After all, it includes the proposition that “peace is effective indivisible, and that the US has a huge national interest in world peace.” Small wars combined with the proliferation of conventional and nuclear weapons make it both a moral and a strategic imperative for the US to work with other powers to address these problems before they cascade through the international system.

Nuclear weapons, however, are the primary mechanism Dr. Posen describes for how these disruptions would jump from the regional to the international realm. Other consequences of instability, such as pandemics, terrorism, and organized crime, are not examined. This shows how great power war (and the ultimate tools of great power war: nukes) ruled the thinking of the time.

Reading through Dr. Posen’s analysis, one finds tantalizing clues that point to the problems we face today. For example, he argues that given the number of interventions that a Selective Enagement policy would demand, its required force structure could reasonably be met through a “two regional war” capability. With the benefit of fourteen years of history, we can see that this statement leaves unresolved the question of whether those two simultaneous missions would involve major combat or whether they would have more of a MOOTW flavor.

After this little jaunt back in time, I tried fitting Dr. Barnett’s grand strategy into the strategic continuum Dr. Posen described, in order to draw out how the insights of each perspective in 1993 came to play itself out over the next decade.

First, the Isolationist focus on the role of nukes in preventing great power war, when combined with Collective Security’s recognition of the interdependant nature of stability in a globalized world, together form the foundation of Dr. Barnett’s assertion that great power war is effectively done (or the probability of great power war is at least at a local minima). This is now generally accepted (whether explicitly or implicitly) in current strategic discussions.

Second, subsequent experiences with transnational terrorists, international crime and global pandemics have shown that strife in the Gap has strategic consequences (not just the moral consequences that Dr. Posen’s of Collective Security focuses upon). Thus, ethnic conflict can still be dangerous to distant powers, even if it doesn’t spark a great power war. This connection (which is essentially Dr. Barnett’s “disconnectedness defines danger” argument) blurs the line between Collective Security and Selective Engagement. The Core seeks collective security, which requires selective engagement in the Gap in order to grow the Core and, thus, grow the sphere of collective security.

Finally, Dr. Barnett’s force structure crosses all three of the 1993 strategic visions. The lack of any explicit discussion of the varying training, manpower and equipment requirements of MOOTW missions, compared to major combat missions, illustrates how the coming demand for COIN and stability operations couldn’t be seen within the Cold War/great power war perspectives.

When thinking about where we ought to go from here, it’s useful to look back on these past debates and examine how unfolding events brought us from that snapshot to this moment.