Military Means as Form of Foreign Policy

Kyle J. Wolfley’s book Military Statecraft and the Rise of Shaping in World Politics outlines how great powers use military means toward soft power ends and represents one of the first real efforts to holistically study this emerging instrument of U.S. foreign policy. The author presents shaping as a soft-power application of cooperative military-to-military engagement to proactively deter threats from emerging. Wolfley convincingly asserts that military shaping will continue to be one of the most important tools of statecraft to the United States. According to him, the use of this means is most effective when strategic uncertainty is high, and shaping is far more cost-efficient than hard power means such as coercion or actual warfighting. Given the complexity of the current, post-Cold War strategic environment, where power distribution is far more dynamic, shaping has been and will continue to be a preferred means of U.S. statecraft.