from Center for Preventive Action
from Center for Preventive Action

Preventive Engagement

How America Can Avoid War, Stay Strong, and Keep the Peace

Stares proposes a comprehensive new strategy for how the United States can manage an increasingly turbulent world and reduce the risk of costly military commitments.

Book
Foreign policy analyses written by CFR fellows and published by the trade presses, academic presses, or the Council on Foreign Relations Press.

Read an excerpt from Preventive Engagement.

To remain the preeminent global power, the United States must avoid costly conflicts that drain its resources and distract its leadership from addressing pressing domestic priorities, argues Paul B. Stares in his new book, Preventive Engagement: How America Can Avoid War, Stay Strong, and Keep the PeaceDoing so requires that the United States adopt a more forward-looking and preventive approach to managing foreign policy challenges.

Erudite, elegant, extremely well informed.
Michael O’Hanlon, Brookings Institution

“As the principal guarantor of global peace and security, America is—like no other country—at great risk of being drawn into potentially costly military engagements to counter emerging threats to international order,” warns Stares. The United States can avoid overextending itself by adopting “a comprehensive preventive strategy to manage the risks of a more turbulent world so as to lessen the likelihood that it will be increasingly confronted and potentially overwhelmed with excruciating and hugely consequential choices about the use of military force.”

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Conflict Prevention

U.S. Foreign Policy

Wars and Conflict

“The United States has a well-developed doctrine for fighting the nation’s wars but nothing remotely comparable for the task of preventing them,” observes Stares, the General John W. Vessey senior fellow for conflict prevention and director of the Center for Preventive Action at the Council on Foreign Relations. Stares proposes a strategy of “preventive engagement” that includes

  • “first, the promotion of policies known to lower the general risk of conflict and instability over the long term,” such as encouraging global trade agreements with expanded geopolitical benefits under the auspices of the World Trade Organization;
  • “second, a deliberate and prioritized effort to anticipate and avert those crises most likely to precipitate major U.S. military engagement in the medium term,” such as supporting external mediation via the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague over Chinese assertiveness in the South China Sea; and
  • “third, the ability to react rapidly to mitigate—and, better still, resolve—those conflicts that erupt in the short term before they escalate and increase the pressure for U.S. intervention,” such as the use of diplomatic pressure and financial sanctions on Russia to abide by the terms of the latest cease-fire in Ukraine.
A tonic for these times of potentially profound changes.
Nancy Lindborg, U.S. Institute of Peace

Instead of the United States pulling back from the world or relying on military superiority to deter and defeat potential adversaries, Stares demonstrates that preventive engagement is a smarter and less expensive strategy to maintain America’s predominant global role. He outlines how the United States can use it to manage emerging security risks before they become dangerous threats requiring costly military responses, in the South China Sea, Ukraine, and beyond. Stares offers several examples, including when the United States reacted to the warnings of incipient dangers between India and Pakistan and served as mediator to defuse the conflict in early 1990. That same year the United States failed to heed the warning signs that Iraq was gearing up to invade Kuwait and was caught completely unprepared.

“The United States cannot afford to be either naively passive or impulsively reactive to emerging international challenges,” Stares concludes. It “has not only the most to gain by perpetuating the liberal international order but also arguably the most to lose if it mismanages this task.”

A Council on Foreign Relations Book

More on:

Conflict Prevention

U.S. Foreign Policy

Wars and Conflict

Educators: Access Teaching Notes for Preventive Engagement.

Reviews and Endorsements

It is with impressive breadth and depth that Stares applies his multilevel approach to preventive action. . . . Stares goes a step further than many grand strategy theorists by detailing plans for how this strategy could actually be implemented with committed political leadership and specific bureaucratic reforms. While the current U.S. administration is unlikely to listen, Stares’s argument and prescriptions could certainly play a role in shaping future grand strategy debates.

Political Science Quarterly

Stares offers a timely, much needed antidote to a more turbulent world: a comprehensive strategy, drawing on all aspects of American power, to prevent conflict and advance U.S. interests without draining our human or financial resources. Far from disengaging America from the world, Stares rightly advocates greater but smarter engagement. His book is a compelling argument that strength and wisdom must be flip sides of the same foreign policy coin.

Tony Blinken, Former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State

An erudite, elegant, extremely well informed, and very thoughtful explanation of current American grand strategy, this book provides specific, finite, and feasible recommendations for improving the U.S. government’s ability to anticipate and manage the latent risks of war.

Michael O’Hanlon, Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution

The liberal international order as we know it is in retreat. The rise of Russia and China, combined with America’s pullback and the uneven progress of globalization, have all shaken the foundations of our global political system—but as Paul B. Stares rightly points out, that doesn’t mean all is lost. If Americans and/or members of the Trump administration still harbor hope of keeping any semblance of U.S. primacy intact, Stares’ book is a good place to start.

Ian Bremmer, President and Founder, Eurasia Group

National security officials often prepare to fight the last war. In Preventive Engagement, Stares argues for doing more to prevent the next one. In an era when the United States is overcommitted and tensions are multiplying, learning to anticipate and head off trouble makes eminent good sense. Readers may not agree with all of Stares’ recommendations, but his systematic, lucid, and forward-looking perspective is a valuable contribution to the broader debate on America’s role in the world.

Stephen Walt, Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Affairs, Harvard University

Stares offers an optimistic—yet realistic and pragmatic—plan for using all elements of national power to better anticipate and mitigate global problems before they become unmanageable.

Peter Feaver, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy, Duke University

Preventive Engagement is a tonic for these times of potentially profound changes and rising anxiety about the durability of the current international order. Stares offers a convincing, very practical long-term strategy for preventing and mitigating the kind of global conflict that could otherwise engulf the United States and its allies, with an emphasis on reducing costly military action. Stares seeks to make prevention as much a cornerstone of foreign policy as it is of medicine.

Nancy Lindborg, President, U.S. Institute of Peace

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At the Shangri-La dialogue in Singapore last week, U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said that the United States would be expanding its defense partnership with India. His statement was in line with U.S. policy over the last two decades, which, irrespective of the party in power, has sought to cultivate India as a serious defense partner. The U.S.-India defense partnership has come a long way. Beginning in 2001, the United States and India moved from little defense cooperation or coordination to significant gestures that would lay the foundation of the robust defense partnership that exists today—such as India offering access to its facilities after 9/11 to help the United States launch operations in Afghanistan or the 123 Agreement in 2005 that paved the way for civil nuclear cooperation between the two countries. In the United States, there is bipartisan agreement that a strong defense partnership with India is vital for its Indo-Pacific strategy and containing China. In India, too, there is broad political support for its strategic partnership with the United States given its immense wariness about its fractious border relationship with China. Consequently, the U.S.-India bilateral relationship has heavily emphasized security, with even trade tilting toward defense goods. Despite the massive changes to the relationship in the last few years, and both countries’ desire to develop ever-closer defense ties, differences between the United States and India remain. A significant part of this has to do with the differing norms that underpin the defense interests of each country. The following Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) memos by defense experts in three countries are part of a larger CFR project assessing India’s approach to the international order in different areas, and illustrate India’s positions on important defense issues—military operationalization, cooperation in space, and export controls—and how they differ with respect to the United States and its allies. Sameer Lalwani (Washington, DC) argues that the two countries differ in their thinking about deterrence, and that this is evident in three categories crucial to defense: capability, geography, and interoperability. When it comes to increasing material capabilities, for example, India prioritizes domestic economic development, including developing indigenous capabilities (i.e., its domestic defense-industrial sector). With regard to geography, for example, the United States and its Western allies think of crises, such as Ukraine, in terms of global domino effects; India, in contrast, thinks regionally, and confines itself to the effects on its neighborhood and borders (and, as the recent crisis with Pakistan shows, India continues to face threats on its border, widening the geographic divergence with the United States). And India’s commitment to strategic autonomy means the two countries remain far apart on the kind of interoperability required by modern military operations. Yet there is also reason for optimism about the relationship as those differences are largely surmountable. Dimitrios Stroikos (London) argues that India’s space policy has shifted from prioritizing socioeconomic development to pursuing both national security and prestige. While it is party to all five UN space treaties that govern outer space and converges with the United States on many issues in the civil, commercial, and military domains of space, India is careful with regard to some norms. It favors, for example, bilateral initiatives over multilateral, and the inclusion of Global South countries in institutions that it believes to be dominated by the West. Konark Bhandari (New Delhi) argues that India’s stance on export controls is evolving. It has signed three of the four major international export control regimes, but it has to consistently contend with the cost of complying, particularly as the United States is increasingly and unilaterally imposing export control measures both inside and outside of those regimes. When it comes to export controls, India prefers trade agreements with select nations, prizes its strategic autonomy (which includes relations with Russia and China through institutions such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the BRICS), and prioritizes its domestic development. Furthermore, given President Donald Trump’s focus on bilateral trade, the two countries’ differences will need to be worked out if future tech cooperation is to be realized.