Though facing complex challenges, America’s foreign policy strategy must remain a continual work in progress

America today faces a number of complex foreign policy challenges, with few obvious routes towards their successful resolution. In light of this complexity, many may yearn for the clarity of the Cold War, but Daniel J. Sargent warns against this. He writes that the Cold War policy of containment was no roadmap for policy, and that within its relatively loose outlook policymakers improvised and adapted, and pursued diverse agendas. In contemporary foreign policy, strategists must also acknowledge the potential need to change quickly, and the validity of alternative perspectives on the world.