Stephen Sestanovich, Maximalist: America in the World from Truman to Obama (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), 416 pp., $28.95.

IN Maximalist, Stephen Sestanovich, a former official in the Reagan and Clinton administrations and now a professor of international relations at Columbia, has written a history of American foreign policy since World War II. Many of the details are not original. Sestanovich relies for the most part on published histories and memoirs rather than on archival sources. But Sestanovich tells the story well and his interpretation of what the history means makes the book worth considering.

Following the lead of Arthur Schlesinger Sr., who divided American political history into cycles of liberalism and conservatism, Sestanovich divides the history of post–World War II foreign policy into periods of what he calls “maximalism” and periods of retrenchment. It’s an old demarcation—first voiced by Walter Lippmann and George Kennan after World War II in a debate over the extent to which the United States should attempt to counter Soviet Communism—but Sestanovich brings it up to date and by the book’s end tips his hand about which course he would prefer.

He doesn’t say in so many words what maximalism and retrenchment are, but his meaning can be gleaned from his examples. Maximalists want to increase the military budget; they want American power to shape the world, with or without allied backing, and are willing to risk war to get their way. Maximalists, Sestanovich writes, “assumed that international problems were highly susceptible to the vigorous use of American power.” Retrenchers, by contrast, believe that America must cut back its global reach either for budgetary reasons or because of opposition from other powers. They preach the limits of power. They think America needs to pay more attention to “nation building” at home than overseas.

Sestanovich arranges the cycles by presidential administrations in the following way:

Maximalists: Harry Truman (after 1946), John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson (after 1965), Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush (after September 11, 2001).

Retrenchers: Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama.

Mixed: George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

Sestanovich is critical of both maximalists and retrenchers, but he attributes the great successes of American foreign policy to maximalism. “The United States achieved a great deal precisely by being uncompromising and confrontational,” he writes. “Had Truman accepted a graceful exit from Berlin, had Kennedy found a way to live with missiles in Cuba, had Reagan backed away from his zero option, the Cold War would have unfolded very differently—and in all likelihood, not nearly so well.”

Sestanovich sees little virtue in retrenchment. “Retrenchment can go from being seen as a strategy for averting decline to being seen as one that accelerates and even embraces it,” he writes. Sestanovich uses a passive, evasive formulation (“being seen” by whom?), but he seems to be suggesting that the United States is always facing new challenges for which retrenchment invariably leaves it unprepared—Sputnik for Eisenhower, Soviet heavy missiles for Nixon and Henry Kissinger, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan for Carter and the Arab Spring for Obama.

SESTANOVICH IS certainly right that maximalism is responsible for notable foreign-policy successes, but he acknowledges that it is also responsible for our greatest failures, which brought forth periods of retrenchment. Truman’s abortive attempt to unify the Korean Peninsula, which precipitated a Chinese invasion, led to Eisenhower’s retrenchment; Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War led to Nixon’s retrenchment; and George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq led to Obama’s retrenchment. The United States is still reeling from Bush’s decision to invade Iraq.

But Sestanovich blames these failures on what amount to correctable errors. The Truman administration screwed up in Korea because of overreach. Having driven the North Koreans out of the South, Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson, discounting the Chinese threat, became determined to unify the peninsula. Sestanovich suggests that if General Douglas MacArthur, the American commander, had pulled his forces back from the Chinese border at the first inkling of China’s intervention, the United States could have held most of North Korea against the Chinese.

Likewise, Sestanovich says that in Vietnam, Johnson should have accepted the advice in 1966 of General Victor Krulak to limit troop involvement in the South while escalating the air war in the North. And in Iraq after the 2003 invasion, he argues, the U.S. strategy became hostage to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s rejection of nation building. “This early mishandling of the occupation,” Sestanovich writes, “had a lasting impact on U.S. policy.”

But in most of these cases, Washington’s strategy was probably irredeemable. The Chinese still could have created a stalemate in Korea. During the Vietnam War, Krulak’s advice to Johnson anticipated what would become Richard Nixon’s strategy of escalation in the North and Vietnamization in the South. At best, following this advice would have let Johnson achieve the kind of agreement that Nixon later signed with the North Vietnamese. But it certainly would not have prevented the fall of South Vietnam. In Iraq, a larger occupation force and a more sophisticated occupation strategy might at best have delayed the onset of the anti-American rebellion and the civil war between Sunni and Shia forces. The lesson I would draw is that maximalism and retrenchment succeed or fail depending upon the circumstances in which they are pursued. The real difference is in the circumstances.

If you look at the different successes and failures, Sestanovich’s instances of success came from America facing down the Soviet Union, and his failures from America attempting to impose its will on nations that had been the victims of European, American and Japanese colonialism. In the latter situations, the United States ended up replicating the strategy and assumptions of an imperial power, and it encountered a resistance that was based on a century-old nationalism, even if sometimes, as in Latin America or Asia, it came under the banner of Communism. The United States failed in Vietnam as the French had earlier, and it encountered the same resistance in Iraq that the British had faced after World War I. These failures didn’t have to do with specific tactics, but with an unwillingness to accept basic facts about what came to be called the North-South conflict. Two world wars had been fought over the spoils of empire. Woodrow Wilson and Vladimir Lenin had already endorsed self-determination for the colonized, and new anti-imperial movements and leaders had emerged that brooked no compromise.

Take Sestanovich’s portrayal of John Kennedy as the arch maximalist. “John Kennedy and his team were probably the most activist group ever put in charge of American foreign policy,” he writes. Kennedy and his foreign-policy advisers became reluctant to act, however, because they had difficulty making decisions. “They were exceedingly indecisive managers of policy, given to protracted and inconclusive deliberation,” he writes. But where Kennedy most exhibited indecision was in choosing whether, and to what degree, to intervene in Southeast Asia, and that wasn’t just a product of being indecisive, but also of the special circumstances of the region.

Sestanovich depicts Kennedy as eager to intervene in Vietnam, quoting him as saying that the Roman Empire’s “success was dependent on their will and ability to fight successfully at the edges of their empire.” But he recounts how Kennedy was undecided about how to wage the fight. That may have been because Kennedy understood that he was getting into a situation that didn’t call for activism.

In Lessons in Disaster, an excellent study of the Kennedy era based on the papers of McGeorge Bundy, the president’s national-security adviser, Gordon M. Goldstein attributes Kennedy’s reluctance to escalate American participation in the Vietnam War to his understanding of colonialism and nationalism:

Kennedy had visited Vietnam as a congressman in 1951 when 250,000 French troops, aided by 200,000 pro-French Vietnamese, were fighting the Vietnamese Communist forces. From the French defeat, he drew the lesson that if the United States were to send troops, and not merely attempt to advise and train the South Vietnamese regime, it would turn what had been a civil war against a Communist insurgency into a struggle between the U.S. and a colonized people struggling for independence. The U.S., like France, would be bound to lose this kind of war. It wouldn’t be fighting communism, but nationalism.

Goldstein also writes that Kennedy told his aides that if he were reelected in 1964, he would withdraw from Vietnam. In this respect, as in his accepting a neutral Laos, Kennedy may not have been such a maximalist after all.

The jury is still out on what Kennedy would have done, and whether he really understood the perils of a neoimperial strategy in Southeast Asia, but there is no question that Lyndon Johnson did not. Johnson and his advisers saw nationalism and anticolonialism through the prism of the Cold War struggle against Soviet Communism. Other presidents also failed to distinguish East-West from North-South conflicts. Truman and Acheson were under enormous political pressure from Republicans charging that they had “lost” China, but still they seem to have accepted the false premise of this charge—that the loss of the former victim of European and Japanese colonialism was tantamount to a defeat in a worldwide struggle against Soviet Communism. In 1950, they dismissed a British suggestion that they distinguish Chinese from Soviet Communism. Johnson, Nixon and Reagan didn’t understand anti-imperialism in Latin America or the Middle East, and George W. Bush and his neoconservative and liberal boosters certainly didn’t understand Iraq. Those failures, more than any commitment to maximalism or retrenchment, doomed the foreign policy of these presidents.

SOME PRESIDENTS did make the appropriate distinctions in relation to some countries. Nixon and Kissinger realized—after almost fifteen years of open Sino-Soviet conflict—that China was not a dependable part of the Soviet empire, and George H. W. Bush understood that America’s motives in the Gulf War had to be limited to ousting Iraq from Kuwait. These American presidents understood that if the United States didn’t want to incur a nationalist backlash, it would have to make clear that its aims were limited.

One way to do this—going back to Wilson’s attempt to dismantle imperialism in 1919—has been for great powers to act through international organizations when intervening in other countries. George H. W. Bush understood the need for collective action in the Gulf War. Five years before his son invaded Iraq, Bush wrote:

I firmly believed that we should not march into Baghdad. . . . To occupy Iraq would instantly shatter our coalition, turning the whole Arab world against us, and make a broken tyrant into a latter-day Arab hero . . . assigning young soldiers . . . to fight in what would be an unwinnable urban guerrilla war.

Bill Clinton also understood the importance of collective action. That’s why he insisted on acting through NATO in the Balkans. If the United States had acted alone, it could have sparked a war of national liberation that might still be going on. (The British military historian Michael Howard is said to have remarked during the 2003 Iraq War that it was fortunate that the United States had lost the Vietnam War, because if it hadn’t, it might still be there.)

Sestanovich, on the other hand, points with favor to Acheson’s skepticism about the United Nations and Reagan’s dissatisfaction with his European allies. And he misunderstands George H. W. Bush’s commitment to collective security. He writes that Bush “managed to mobilize a global coalition without really limiting American freedom of action.” But in fact, Bush’s collective commitment did limit American action—and greatly to America’s benefit. When America has abandoned this strategy for some version of unilateralism, as Johnson did in Vietnam or George W. Bush did in Iraq (where Washington’s only significant ally was the former imperial power in the region), the United States has provoked a nationalist backlash. Erstwhile villains have been turned into martyrs. And American forces, hopeful to be seen as “liberators,” have become seen instead as imperialists.

Sestanovich is right, of course, in saying that a policy of retrenchment can lead to failure. Carter’s attempts to reach accords with the Soviet Union may have convinced Moscow that it could meddle in Africa without repercussions. In his first two years, Clinton’s attempt to steer clear of international conflict contributed to massacres in Bosnia and Rwanda that probably could have been avoided with a minimal show of American determination.

But the history of retrenchment, like that of maximalism, is studded with successes as well as failures. Eisenhower’s winding down of the Korean War, Nixon’s opening to China and his closing of the gold window, Reagan’s belated decision in his second term to wind down American intervention in Central America and George H. W. Bush’s decision not to invade Iraq have to be counted as successes that were based upon a recognition of the limits of American power.

WHAT I WOULD conclude from this mix of successes and failures is that the difference between maximalism and retrenchment is not the most telling way to divide the history of American foreign policy since World War II. American policy makers have debated what to do along these lines, but the debate has often been muddled. The debate between Kennan and Lippmann over how to respond to the Soviet threat—with Kennan initially prescribing aggressive “counterforce” around the globe, which Lippmann considered entirely unnecessary and dangerous—was really about Soviet intentions. Lippmann and his successors did worry about America turning into a militarized society, but they would not have expressed these concerns if they didn’t disagree with the prevailing “maximalist” view of the kind of threat that the Soviet Union, Communist China, a Communist Vietnam or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq posed.

It is also hard to draw a sharp line between administrations that practiced maximalism and those that practiced retrenchment. Sestanovich concedes that George H. W. Bush’s and Clinton’s administrations represented a mix of the two approaches, but that is also true of many other administrations as well. Kennedy stared down the Russians during the Cuban missile crisis, but afterward signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty; he also agreed to a neutralized Laos. Nixon, the retrencher, tried to secure a graceful exit from Vietnam, but he attempted to do so initially by winning the war—a strategy that Sestanovich himself describes as “maximalist.” Reagan is Sestanovich’s archetypical maximalist, but his courting of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his advocacy of nuclear abolitionism can be construed as retrenchment as well as maximalism. His withdrawal of support for the contras in Nicaragua—which the conservative advocates of maximalism loudly denounced—could also certainly be interpreted as an act of retrenchment.

What Sestanovich seems to have done is to project the difference he sees in America’s approaches to the Soviet Union, typified by the difference between Carter before 1979 and Reagan, onto the entire history of foreign policy since World War II. He also seems to have endorsed the neoconservative excuse (it’s all Rumsfeld’s fault) for the failure of the George W. Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq, as well as the neoconservative critique of George H. W. Bush for not going to Baghdad and provoking a decade-long guerrilla war. That leads Sestanovich—without saying so in so many words—to mount a one-sided defense of “muscular” and sometimes unilateral foreign-policy initiatives and to reject policies that suggest the limits of American power. That’s not helpful, particularly in guiding foreign policy now.

Sestanovich sees Barack Obama as an advocate of retrenchment. That’s certainly true in some respects. Obama has had to dig America out of the hole in the Middle East that George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq created. He has had to govern on behalf of an American public skeptical about the use of American force overseas except in obvious cases of self-defense. And he has had to face Republican opposition to government spending, including military spending. These factors certainly reinforced Obama’s decision to withdraw from Iraq and to limit America’s intervention in the Arab Spring, most recently in Syria’s civil war.

But Obama, like his predecessors, has also been faced with having to come to terms with situations in Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Syria, Afghanistan and Israel/Palestine, as well as in China/Taiwan and North Korea, where the scars from the long history of Western and Japanese colonialism are still visible. Sestanovich is critical of Obama for undermining the effort at nation building in Afghanistan by setting a deadline for withdrawal, but Obama’s real mistake may have been in listening too closely to the advocates of counterinsurgency (the heirs of Maxwell Taylor in Vietnam) who wanted him to commit the United States to long-term intervention. And Obama’s greatest success may come in defying the neoconservatives and America’s Israel lobby by extending a hand to Iran’s rulers.

Is Obama in these cases “retrenching,” or is he displaying a better understanding of the conflicts that have divided the world for a century? Sestanovich wants to see American foreign policy in the light of cycles of retrenchment and maximalism; I prefer to see it as two long twilight struggles—one to wage the Cold War and the other to come to terms with the turmoil unleashed by the age of imperialism and nationalism. The United States has won the Cold War, but in the Middle East, Africa, South Asia and the Far East the other struggle is far from over.

John B. Judis is a senior editor at the New Republic and the author of Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014).