One of my political science electives at Clark was a course on US National Security. The course focused on exploring America's national security policies and actions through a lens of international relations theories. The course involved reading a lot of established literature on the subject, and writing argument analyses. One of the articles I read and analyzed was Stephen Brooks, G. Ikenberry, and William Wohlforth's article “Lean Forward: In Defense of American Engagement”. In my response, I analyzed his argument and evidence, discussing the limitations and why their argument falls flat in our contemporary context.