Robert Gates’ “Exercise of Power: American Failures, Successes, and a New Path Forward in the Post-Cold War World” constitutes the most coherent of recent attempts to catalogue the key instruments of modern America’s national power and then discern how the use of these instruments has evolved following the end of the Cold War and to what effect. Gates particularly excels in dissecting why, how and to what effect America has underutilized the non-military components of its power, which is all the more remarkable given that he has spent most of his U.S. government career in the American equivalent of Russia’s power agencies, such as the CIA and the Pentagon. “Answering how we got to where we are today internationally … lies also in the mistakes of post–Cold War presidents and Congresses and, in particular, their failure to recognize, resource, and use the arsenal of nonmilitary assets that proved of critical importance in the long contest with the Soviet Union,” he writes in his 2020 volume.
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