A Review of “America's Grand Strategy in World Politics”

2010 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 381-382
Author(s):  
C. Dale Walton
Keyword(s):  
World Politics ◽  
Grand Strategy

Grand Strategy in 10 Words

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sven Biscop
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
European Union ◽  
21St Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Strategic Decisions ◽  
Key Terms

This book introduces ten key terms for analysing grand strategy and shows how the world's great powers - the United States, China, Russia and the European Union (EU) - shape their strategic decisions today and shows how the choices made will determine the course of world politics in the first half of the 21st century.

Grand strategy in a post-bipolar world: interpreting the final Soviet response

1992 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 355-375
Author(s):  
Raymond Taras ◽  
Marshal Zeringue
Keyword(s):  
International System ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
International Environment ◽  
Decision Making Processes ◽  
Grand Strategies ◽  
Distribution Of Power ◽  
Do So

All great powers have a grand strategy—including great powers on the verge of collapse. Each power develops its code of national security ends and means differently. Among the myriad factors which explain particular grand strategies, the most important consideration is the distribution of power capabilities in the international system. Regardless of each state's desire to operate independently—to be master of its own grand strategy—the structure of world politics offers little latitude to do so. As in the case of decision-making processes in organizations and bureaucracies, the international system imposes its own constraints and incentives on the security goals of individual states. Primarily addressing the international environment, however, systems theory ‘provides criteria for differentiating between stable and unstable political configurations.’ The first objective of this essay is to explore the role of structure as an indirect influence on the behaviour of its constituent actors, in this case, states. ‘The effects [of structure] are produced in two ways: through socialization of the actors and through competition among them.’

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georg Löfflmann
Keyword(s):  
Economic Policy ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Leadership Role ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
Washington Consensus ◽  
Hillary Clinton ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Global Engagement ◽  
Firm Believer

This chapter provides a summary of the book’s findings. The chapter argues that the geopolitical vision of a more restrained leadership role and more cautious global engagement Obama formulated was reflecting the post-American future rather than the hegemonic past of America’s role in world politics. It assesses that most influential scholars, pundits and policy makers in turn remained embedded in the Washington consensus of hegemony and mired in a unipolar worldview. The chapter identifies a further fracturing of the grand strategy consensus, between elite opinion and the foreign policy establishment denouncing ‘isolationist’ tendencies, and an American public increasingly in favour of non-interventionism and in acceptance of a less singular hegemonic role. The chapter briefly reviews how this conflict was also encapsulated in the contest for Obama’s succession between Hillary Clinton, a quintessential Washington insider and firm believer in America’s role as the world’s indispensable nation and Donald Trump, an anti-establishment populist that had aggressively questioned the elite consensus on US foreign and economic policy.

Grand Strategy of the Master Class

2021 ◽  
pp. 106-122
Author(s):  
Matthew Karp
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
Strategic Culture ◽  
Antebellum Era ◽  
Fugitive Slave

This chapter discusses the role of Southerners and slavery in US foreign policy from the antebellum era to the Civil War. Studies that explore slavery's specific impact on foreign policy have generally confined themselves to the ways that slaveholders worked to secure fugitive slave laws, enact restrictions on black sailors, or, at most, fight to add new slave states to the Union. However, the kind of domination that slaveholders desired went beyond the need to reinforce their narrow property rights, or even the desire to expand the amount of territory under slave cultivation. Antebellum slaveholders assumed national Cabinet posts to command the power of the entire United States, and then, crucially, to use that power to strengthen slavery in world politics. If grand strategy is “the intellectual architecture that gives form and structure to foreign policy,” slaveholding leaders were not merely provincial sectionalists but bold and cosmopolitan strategic thinkers. Their profound ideological commitment to slavery did not merely affect domestic politics within a divided republic; it left a deep imprint on the “strategic culture” of American foreign policy.

Franklin Roosevelt, the New Deal, and Grand Strategy

2021 ◽  
pp. 201-217
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Borgwardt
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
International Order ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
Economic Stability ◽  
International Crises ◽  
Playing Field ◽  
Franklin Delano Roosevelt ◽  
Franklin Roosevelt ◽  
The New Deal

This chapter assesses President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal. By 1941, FDR and his key advisers were distilling some hard-won wisdom from their trial-and-error approaches in devising what had become known as the New Deal, and applying them to the world's burgeoning international crises. The key, for Roosevelt, was a New Deal–inspired set of ideas and institutions that animated a capacious reframing of the national interest. Internationalizing the New Deal meant reconfiguring the playing field of world politics in three broad, institutional realms: collective security, economic stability, and rule of law institutions. These three institutional pillars are usually what contemporary international relations specialists mean when they refer to “the postwar international order.” What made this institutionally focused scaffolding into “grand strategy” was the way any resulting improvement to the functioning of the international order was dependent on negotiation and diplomacy.

Not Quite the Same as It Ever Was

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
William C. Wohlforth
Keyword(s):  
Status Quo ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Peer Status ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
One Dimension ◽  
Rising Powers ◽  
Economic Output ◽  
The Status ◽  
Dominant State ◽  
Hegemonic Transition

The chapter addresses the claim that rising powers will seek to undermine the legitimacy of the current order and establish new rules using the classical Gilpinian framework as well as more recent rise-and-decline scholarship. It argues against this view and points to a more nuanced position: a harder-to-manage world has arrived, but the essential structural imperatives that have operated for twenty years are likely to remain. The chapter grounds this argument in the near certainty that all-out systemic war is off the table as a mechanism for hegemonic transition; the fact that the rising challenger to the system’s dominant state is approaching peer status on only one dimension of state capability, gross economic output; and the historically unprecedented degree of institutionalization in world politics coupled with the central role institutions play in the dominant power’s grand strategy. Each change favors the status quo states and makes revisionism harder.

Culture, Identity, and Grand Strategy

2021 ◽  
pp. 302-321
Author(s):  
David M. McCourt
Keyword(s):  
National Security ◽  
International Politics ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
Constructivist Approach ◽  
Ir Theory ◽  
Essential Components ◽  
The World ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Grand Strategies

What do culture and identity have to do with grand strategy—the task of matching broad national security aims to capabilities? Is grand strategy not the preserve of politics and power, and the timeless wisdom of realpolitik? This chapter argues that culture and identity are essential components of any realistic account of grand strategy, since grand strategies tell a story of who or what a country is, and should be, in world politics. Grand strategies are performative, making the world at the same time as speaking of it, and fashioning an identity for an international actor. The centrality of culture and identity in international politics are key insights from the constructivist approach to IR theory. The chapter outlines the constructivist challenge to mainstream approaches that emphasize material conceptions of power and interests. It then illustrates the ubiquity of culture and identity in the formulation of UK and US grand strategy. It explores recent developments in culturalist theorizing that caution against taking culture and identity as stable entities rather than often contradictory processes. This serves to connect the insights from this chapter to others in the volume on practice, discourse, legitimation, power, and expertise.

23. US decline or primacy? A debate

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Layne ◽  
William Wohlforth ◽  
Stephen G. Brooks
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
External Driver ◽  
Uncertain Future ◽  
Us Decline

This chapter focuses on the debate over whether U.S. power is in decline and if so, what is the best grand strategy that the United States needs to pursue. Three leading experts offer their views on the issue and its significance for U.S. foreign policy: Christopher Layne, William Wohlforth, and Steven Brooks. Layne argues that the United States is now in inexorable decline and attributes it to the end of unipolarity. He identifies two specific drivers of American decline, one external and one domestic. The external driver of U.S. decline is the emergence of new great powers in world politics, while domestic drivers include debt, deficits, and the dollar’s uncertain future. In contrast, Wohlforth and Brooks assert that the United States remains the sole superpower, and that multipolarity is not just around the corner.

Grand Strategy Under Nonpolarity

2021 ◽  
pp. 689-705
Author(s):  
Randall L. Schweller
Keyword(s):  
Current System ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
Power Bases ◽  
Process Variables ◽  
Digital Revolution ◽  
Complex Process ◽  
Systemic Constraints ◽  
Private Actors ◽  
Power And Influence

The random and indeterminate nature of the current nonpolar world suggests a condition of increasing entropy. Relative capability advantages in today’s system do not translate as easily as they once did into power and influence over others. Unlike past multipolar and bipolar systems, the current system exerts only weak, if any, systemic constraints on actors. Thus, polarity has become a largely meaningless concept. Instead, we see an increase in the number and kinds of actors that can affect the system’s outcomes. In addition, complex process variables at the systemic and micro levels—especially those related to globalization and the digital revolution—are fundamentally reshaping the current and future dynamics of world politics. The key to grand strategy in this “hybrid world” of many types of actors wielding various kinds of power will be, first, for states to recognize the limits of traditional power bases and, second, to identify and cooperate with private actors that possess issue-specific resources, expertise, and influence with respect to the task at hand. That said, it is a complex and unpredictable world, not well-suited to the linear thinking associated with grand strategy.

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