June 17, 2013
In making the case for an activist U.S. grand strategy, Stephen Brooks, G. John Ikenberry, and William Wohlforth (“Lean Forward,” January/ February 2013) cite an article we wrote in Orbis as evidence that the budgetary savings of a strategy they pejoratively call “retrenchment” would be small. Because the “radical reduction” in defense expenditures that we proposed would reduce spending by only $900 billion over a decade, they reason, more mainstream versions of retrenchment would save an economically irrelevant pittance.
