Symposium: The Politics of Great Power Retrenchment

[This is a post-publication review symposium] Concerns about America’s relative military and economic decline loom large in contemporary debates about United States grand strategy (Wallerstein 2013, Morgan 2012). The wisdom of policies of retrenchment occupies an important place in these disputes. Advocates argue that Washington should take proactive steps to avoid strategic overextension, including deprioritizing or even withdrawing from some regions of the world (Nexon 2013; McDonald and Parent 2011). Opponents contend that, at best, this will trigger a self-fulfilling prophecy that hastens American decline. At worst, it will lead to greater turmoil  and threaten the interests of the United States and its allies (Brooks et al. 2012/2013; Brooks et al. 2013; Muravchik 2013). In his International Studies Quarterly article, “Decline and Devolution: The Sources of Strategic Military Retrenchment,” Kyle Haynes (2015) contributes to this debate by asking a more basic question: what conditions lead declining powers to retrench from specific regions. He argues that “a declining state will choose to withdraw foreign military deployments and security commitments when there exists a suitable regional ‘successor’ to which it can devolve its current responsibilities. The degree of a successor's suitability and the strategic importance of the region to the declining state interact to determine when and how rapidly retrenchment will occur.” p[...]