Books

President George H. W. Bush assumed office at a critical juncture, as the Cold War came to an end and the world shifted to a new era of international relations. In The Gulf War, Spencer Bakich argues that Bush, upon taking office, fashioned a grand strategy to bring about a New World Order, an order designed to transform international politics after the Cold War by promoting democratization in Central and Eastern Europe and instantiating great power cooperation through the United Nations. Bush used the crisis in the Persian Gulf to put his strategy into action.  The Gulf War was intended by Bush to exercise, and thereby firmly establish, the UN’s collective security function in the post–Cold War era. 

Bush’s New World Order grand strategy was remarkably coherent, powerfully affecting how his administration decided to go to war to evict Iraq from Kuwait, how it waged war in the Persian Gulf, and ultimately the reasons why the fighting was terminated before the coalition’s war aims were completely achieved. In the end, the Gulf War’s outcome exposed faulty assumptions about the international system that underpinned Bush's grand strategy, weakening the president’s fidelity to his own approach. In the absence of strong presidential advocacy for the New World Order, alternative visions of American statecraft emerged from the national security bureaucracy.

Common and destructive, limited wars are significant international events that pose a number of challenges to the states involved beyond simple victory or defeat. Chief among these challenges is the risk of escalation—be it in the scale, scope, cost, or duration of the conflict. This book investigates a crucial and heretofore ignored factor in determining the nature and direction of limited war: information institutions.  Traditional assessments of wartime strategy focus on the relationship between the military and civilians, but this book argues that we must also take into account the information flow patterns among top policy makers and all national security organizations. By examining the fate of American military and diplomatic strategy in four limited wars, this book demonstrates how not only the availability and quality of information, but also the ways in which information is gathered, managed, analyzed, and used, shape a state’s ability to wield power effectively in dynamic and complex international systems.  Utilizing a range of primary and secondary source materials, Success and Failure in Limited War makes a timely case for the power of information in war, with crucial implications for international relations theory and statecraft. (From the University of Chicago Press catalog.)

Susan Strange Book Prize, short-list (British International Studies Association)

Reviewed by Aaron Rapport in Perspectives on Politics (June 2016).

Reviewed by Derrill T. Goldizen in the U.S. Naval War College Review (Spring 2016), 139-140.

Debating Success and Failure in Limited War-- David Dixon and Spencer Bakich in The Strategy Bridge (2016).

Reviewed by John Arquilla in Michigan War Studies Review (November 2014)

Reviewed by Stéphane Taillat, in Politique étrangère, vol. 4 (2014)