George F. Kennan, Memoirs 1925–1950 (New York: Pantheon, 1967), p. 322. 2. Hal Brands, What Good Is Grand Strategy? Power and Purpose in American Statecraft from Harry S. Truman to George W. Bush (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014), p. 3. 3. Hal Brands, “Breaking Down Obama’s Grand Strategy,...
Some of them have been called neoconservatives, but they have now become, in fact, “the new pessimists”—although they would presumably resist the description. The new pessimists tend to see their worst fears about the decline of American power coming true. Many of them pre...