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,” The National Interest (June 23, 2014). 4. Brands, What Good Is Grand Strategy? p. 192. 5. The best example of this argument is Bret Stephens, America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder (New York: Sentinel, 2014); on retrenchment, see Stephen Sestanovich, Maximalist: America in the World From Truman to Obama (New York: Knopf, 2014). 6. Ryan Lizza, “The Consequentialist,” The New Yorker, May 2, 2011. 7. See Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009). 8. See David Milne, Worldmaking: The Art and Science of American Diplomacy (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2015), p 16. 9. See interview with Marc Maron, Podcast, Episode 613, available at http://www.wtfpod.com/podcast/episodes/episode_613_-_president_barack_obama 10.
