POLITICAL SCIENCECURRENT EVENTS"Since the end of the Cold War, impulse and ideology, generously seasoned with fantasy, have displaced principled strategy as the basis for U.S. policy. In this important and timely volume, Barry R. Posen illuminates the path back toward good sense and sobriety. Restraint is a splendid achievement."---Andrew J. Bacevich, Boston University, author of Breach of Trust"Unnecessary and exhausting military ventures have flowed from the foreign policy elite's excessive ambition, overconfidence in the appeal of U.S. policies, and facile underestimation of the costs in blood and treasure. Barry R. Posen's seasoned strategic wisdom and technical expertise put these tragic mistakes in their place and chart a realistic alternative to American overstretch."---Richard K. Betts, Columbia University Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, author of American Force"Barry R. Posen is one of America's leading thinkers about grand strategy. He has given us some of the best scholarly analysis of how states use military means to meet foreign policy objectives and cogently described the various strategies America has considered over the years. Now he is wading into the policy debate by planting his intellectual flag on behalf of a new U.S. Grand Strategy of Restraint. In a sharply argued and comprehensive book, Posen shows why the Grand Strategy of Primacy, which has guided America's military strategy for the past twenty years, is no longer economically sustainable or militarily necessary. He convincingly argues that Restraint will provide a sounder basis for ensuring U.S. national security in the years to come."---Michael C. Desch, University of Notre Dame, author of Power and Military Effectiveness"In this thought-provoking book, Barry R. Posen ventures alternatives to---as well as insightful critiques of---current U.S. foreign and defense policies. He provides a brilliant introduction to the concept of grand strategy, uses this to analyze contemporary approaches to sustaining U.S. primacy, shows how these approaches are both failing and unsustainable, puts forward a refreshingly unconventional set of proposals for a new U.S. grand strategy, and demonstrates how the military aspects of this grand strategy could be implemented while reducing the U.S. defense burden to no more than 2.5 percent of GDP. Posen has written a book that deserves a wide readership, full of ideas that should feature prominently in an overdue national debate about affordable national security."---Ambassador Chas W. Freeman Jr., former U.S. assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, ambassador to wartime Saudi Arabia, and author of four books on foreign policy, statecraft, and diplomacy.