By Antonia Colibasanu and Ryan Bridges 

Exercise of Power: American Failures, Successes, and a New Path Forward in the Post-Cold War World
By Robert M. Gates

For my first review of 2021, I chose a book about the United States, and for good reason. In addition to being the year of COVID-19, 2020 was a key year for American power, as the U.S. was confronted with serious socio-economic challenges and held a presidential election that saw the highest voter turnout in more than a century.

When I picked up Robert Gates’ book, I expected to get lots of insight into the “making” of U.S. national security policy. (Gates served under eight presidents from both parties over four decades, including as director of the CIA under President George W. Bush and secretary of defense under President Barack Obama.) I did not expect, however, a study of the notion of power. That was the most important part of the book for me as an analyst.

The first chapter (the longest and densest of the book), titled “The Symphony of Powers,” and the second chapter, titled “Exercising Power,” are the most theoretical and useful for both analysts and policymakers. Gates discusses the instruments that the U.S. (and any nation-state) uses to defend its interests globally and the way they must be implemented to maximize their effectiveness. While Gates criticizes the fact that after the Cold War ended, U.S. presidents relied mostly on military instruments to exercise American power, he also – between the lines – calls for the restructuring of U.S. national security to make it better able to meet the challenges of the 21st century.

He examines the nonmilitary elements of power (diplomacy, intelligence, cyber, strategic communications, science and technology, and culture), and places economics at the center of each. The remainder of the book is dedicated to case studies of how the past six administrations have used power instruments to manage post-Cold War security challenges. And since Gates himself worked in government throughout this period, the book is one of the most accurate (though still personal) presentations of recent American security policy. In addition, Gates is one of the few writers who has pointed out the similarities between administrations on U.S. foreign policy. He writes that Obama and President Donald Trump are “two successive presidents who have signaled an American withdrawal from global leadership.”

Of all the case studies included in the book, U.S. foreign policy performed the worst in Iraq and Afghanistan and the best in Colombia, according to Gates. Plan Colombia, as the U.S. initiative to combat drug cartels and insurgents was called, helped the country recover from being a “failed state” while also helping the U.S. pursue its own interests. In Iraq and Afghanistan, however, the U.S. veered away from its original mission, gradually moving into nation-building, a task for which U.S. forces on the ground were not trained.

Gates criticizes the fact that U.S. presidents have relied mostly on the use of force to drive American strategy. But looking ahead, that approach is becoming less feasible. The American public is growing warier of military deployments, and in order to counter China’s growing influence, the U.S. needs to look toward nonmilitary means of applying pressure. Gates recommends a sort of policy revolution – but its path is still unclear. Ultimately, his book is less about providing prescriptions for the future and more about understanding U.S. national security policy over the past three decades. It also serves as a reminder that any viable U.S. foreign policy must win strong support from the American people in order to succeed.

Antonia Colibasanu, analyst

American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century
By Gary Gerstle

I can’t remember the grade or the teacher, but I remember the classroom and where I was sitting in it when I first heard America compared to a melting pot. Since that moment, my political beliefs have drifted all across the political spectrum, but I’ve almost fervently, maybe naively, clung to the notion that something is special about the American nation. America’s superpower, it has been said, is the ease with which it turns others into Americans. This, along with Americans’ fundamental belief in everyone’s right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, is the essence of the “American Creed.”

In “American Crucible,” Gary Gerstle, a professor of American history at the University of Cambridge, refers to this by the more generic term “civic nationalism.” He also describes another American creed, one they didn’t (directly) teach us in school: racial nationalism, “the belief that America is a land meant for white people, or Europeans, and their descendants.” The balance between these contradictory beliefs – that America is a land where all were welcome and unbounded, or a land only for whites – defined the nation’s history in the 20th century and beyond, Gerstle argues. This contrasts with other scholarship that puts race at the center of American nationalism. Maybe this is my own bias, but I prefer Gerstle’s version.

It would be difficult to summarize “American Crucible” much more than that. This is a book that dedicates more than a few pages to discussing the importance of Joe DiMaggio, Superman comics and Frank Capra. It almost loses the thread at times, and it probably places too much emphasis on Teddy Roosevelt, who as much as anyone embodied both civic and racial nationalism. But I enjoyed it for its comprehensiveness and its balanced depictions of the competing visions of America.