Peter D. Feaver's research while affiliated with Duke University and other places

The central concern of civil–military relations theory is how to have a military institution simultaneously strong enough to protect society and the state from enemies while also properly sized and obedient enough not to pose a threat itself to that society and state. When scholars wrestle with this question, they must engage the seminal contributions from Samuel Huntington and Morris Janowitz, as I did in “The Civil-Military Problematique: Huntington, Janowitz, and the Question of Civilian Control.” In hindsight, it is clear that I was right enough in theory but perhaps not in practice. Thirty years of American civil–military relations shows the importance of norms and the strain on military professionalism imposed by the principal norm for democracies: that civilians have the right to be wrong. Future scholars must emphasize the shoring up of norms that build the trust that lubricates day-to-day civil–military interactions.

What explains the high levels of public confidence in the US military, and does high confidence matter? Proprietary survey data show that confidence is partly based on public beliefs about the military’s high competence, adherence to high professional ethics, and a determination to stand apart from the bitter divisions of partisan politics. However, confidence is also propped up by other factors that do not fit neatly within this comfortable story of complete deservedness. It is shaped by partisan considerations—in particular a partisan blame game in which the military is at least a passive participant—and by social desirability bias, the idea that some individuals express confidence in the military because they believe that it is the socially approved attitude to hold. The still-high confidence the military enjoys today could well be more tenuous than a superficial glance at poll numbers might suggest. Confidence matters because it reinforces support for raising and maintaining the defense forces the country needs and support for using the military to defend important national interests. High confidence is not an unalloyed benefit, however, since it can lead to a desire to use the military in the service of policies where the military tool may not be as well suited. Even more problematically, high confidence does not bring with it an understanding of or support for the best practices in democratic civil-military relations and can even lead to situations where the military is put on a pedestal from which it might look down on civilian society.

Grand Strategy is a state’s “theory of victory,” explaining how the state will utilize its diverse means to advance and achieve national ends. A clearly articulated, well-defined, and relatively stable grand strategy is supposed to allow the ship of state to steer a steady course through the roiling seas of global politics. However, the obstacles to formulating and implementing grand strategy are, by all accounts, imposing. The Oxford Handbook of Grand Strategy addresses the conceptual and historical foundations, production, evolution, and future of grand strategy from a wide range of standpoints. It seven constituent sections present and critically examine the history of grand strategy, including beyond the West; six distinct theoretical approaches to the subject; the sources of grand strategy, ranging from geography and technology to domestic politics to individual psychology and culture; the instruments of grand strategy’s implementation, from military to economic to covert action; political actors’, including non-state actors’, grand strategic choices; the debatable merits of grand strategy, relative to alternatives; and the future of grand strategy, in light of challenges ranging from political polarization to technological change to aging populations. The result is a field-defining, interdisciplinary, and comparative text that will be a key resource for years to come.

This chapter explores first-hand insights from President Bush's national security advisor, Stephen J. Hadley, and two National Security Council staff members, Meghan O'Sullivan and Peter Feaver, about the logic of the surge strategy and the process by which that strategy emerged. The “surge” is generally understood as the deployment to Iraq of 20,000 to 30,000 US troops in 2007 to supplement the roughly 160,000 already there. More importantly, however, it reflected a change in strategy in how US forces would be used. They would deploy with Iraqi military and police units and live out among the Iraqi people rather than on US military bases. Their priority would be to help Iraqi forces provide security for the Iraqi people. The surge would also create more time and a better environment in which to build Iraqi security forces. The essential feature of the decision-making process that produced the surge was that from the beginning President Bush was at the center of the process. Ultimately, President Bush's decision to launch the surge ended a major strategic debate within his administration.

This book is the real story of how George W. Bush came to double-down on Iraq in the highest stakes gamble of his entire presidency. It offers an unprecedented look into the process by which Bush overruled much of the military leadership and many of his trusted advisors to authorize the deployment of roughly 30,000 additional troops to the warzone in a bid to save Iraq from collapse in 2007. The adoption of a new counterinsurgency strategy and surge of new troops into Iraq altered the American posture in the Middle East for a decade to come. The book provides access to the deliberations among the decision-makers on Bush's national security team as they embarked on that course. In their own words, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Stephen Hadley, Condoleezza Rice, Joshua Bolten, Robert Gates, and others, recount the debates and disputes that informed the process as Bush weighed the historical lessons of Vietnam against the perceived strategic imperatives in the Middle East. For a president who had earlier vowed never to dictate military strategy to generals, the deliberations in the Oval Office and Situation Room in 2006 constituted a trying and fateful moment. Bush risked losing public esteem and courted political ruin by refusing to disengage from the costly war in Iraq. The book is a portrait of leadership in the Bush White House. The personal perspectives are complemented by critical assessments. Taken together, they are a first draft of the history of the surge and new chapter in the history of the American presidency.

Contemporary judgments of George W. Bush's foreign policy were often quite harsh and polemical. In this article, we argue that a moderate form of Bush revisionism is likely to emerge in the coming years, as scholars take a more dispassionate look at his achievements in global affairs and the difficult circumstances under which his administration labored. We offer the six most persuasive arguments in favor of Bush revisionism; we then discuss the most reasonable critiques of these arguments. The overall thrust of this essay is not that Bush will someday be seen as one of America's most successful statesmen, but simply that his reputation should improve as partisan passions fade and new evidence is considered.

This article reassesses the foreign policy legacy of George W. Bush in light of the emerging historical record of his administration. We conclude that, whereas Bush’s foreign policy was in widespread disrepute when he left office in 2009, that reputation is likely to improve – perhaps significantly – in the coming years. We identify six particular arguments that lend credence to an emerging ‘Bush revisionism.’ To be clear, we do not necessarily argue that the balance sheet on Bush’s foreign policy was positive, but the arguments presented here are likely to generate a more sympathetic and favorable historical assessment of Bush’s presidency over time.