Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Christopher McKnight Nichols ◽  
Andrew Preston
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
Strategic Culture ◽  
Interconnected System ◽  
National Values ◽  
Policy Objectives ◽  
Grand Strategies ◽  
The Stability ◽  
Relationship Of

This introductory chapter provides an overview of grand strategy. Grand strategy is best understood as a holistic and interconnected system of power, encompassing all aspects of society in pursuit of international goals “based on the calculated relationship of means to ends.” It is not simply about winning wars or attaining specific foreign-policy objectives, important as these priorities are; it is not only an answer to the question of what power is meant to achieve. Grand strategy is also about creating a durable peace that follows a war and then maintaining the stability of that peace long after the war has faded into a distant memory. It is—for the United States especially, with its global ambitions, widespread commitments, and enormous capabilities in all forms of power—about trying to shape world conditions so as to ensure the protection of national security and the flourishing of national values. The chapter then studies the grand strategies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Ultimately, this book argues for the relevance and usefulness of grand strategy, and builds on the concept of strategic culture.

Strategy on the Upward Slope

2021 ◽  
pp. 456-473
Author(s):  
Joshua Shifrinson
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Rise Of China ◽  
Upward Slope ◽  
Grand Strategies ◽  
The Rise Of China ◽  
Substantial Interest ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
New Framework

When a great power rises, what strategies does it adopt and why? Despite substantial interest in these questions due to concerns surrounding the rise of China and concomitant decline of the United States, research on rising state grand strategy remains underdeveloped. Not only do analysts lack a consistent way of describing how risers’ grand strategies vary, but insight into the drivers of rising state strategy remains inchoate. Accordingly, this chapter analyzes existing research, highlights the problems rising states confront in crafting grand strategy, advances a new framework for discussing strategy, and suggests avenues for future research.

American Grand Strategy

2021 ◽  
pp. 447-458
Author(s):  
Fredrik Logevall
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Foreign Affairs ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
Great Power Politics ◽  
Grand Strategies ◽  
Containment Policy ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
American Grand Strategy

This chapter assesses how grand American grand strategy has been. If the containment followed by the United States in the Cold War is the most successful, or at least most celebrated, grand strategy the United States has ever pursued, it is worthy of a closer look. This chapter considers two foundational writings from the early Cold War: George Kennan's “X” Article, published in Foreign Affairs in 1947 (under the pseudonym “X”), which laid out the containment policy—that is to say, the containment of Soviet power—and National Security Council Memorandum 68 (NSC-68) of April 1950. Both of these documents are held to have played major roles in shaping the grand strategy that helped the United States deal successfully with the Soviet threat and ultimately win the Cold War. Each has indeed been referred to as the “blueprint” for US policy in the struggle. The chapter then addresses a second question: How much does grand strategy matter in the context of American history? History suggests that grand strategies do not alter the trajectory of great-power politics all that much. In the case of the United States, even radically imperfect strategies have not fundamentally affected its rise and fall.

Rethinking Grand-Strategic Change

2021 ◽  
pp. 538-555
Author(s):  
Rebecca Lissner
Keyword(s):  
Strategic Change ◽  
International System ◽  
The United States ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
Definitive Answer ◽  
Continuity And Change ◽  
National Power ◽  
Grand Strategies ◽  
New Framework

Is the United States in the midst of a massive grand-strategic reorientation? IR scholarship cannot provide a definitive answer because the sources of grand-strategic change remain poorly understood. This chapter highlights the deficiencies of the existing literature and proposes a new framework for conceiving of and operationalizing grand strategy. This framework distinguishes between two levels of grand strategy. The first level is a state’s orientation toward the international system, while the second level examines subordinate levels of foreign policy behavior: assumptions about current and prospective threats and opportunities, and the availability and relative utility of the tools of national power. The chapter then illustrates how this framework advances the debate about grand-strategic change by setting up a distinction between grand-strategic overhauls (changes to grand strategy’s first level—or changes between grand strategies) and grand-strategic adjustments (changes to grand strategy’s second level—or changes within grand strategies). Theoretically, this distinction illuminates systemic shifts as a necessary but insufficient cause of overhaul, whereas adjustment results from more diverse causes. Empirically, this distinction permits a more nuanced treatment of the co-occurrence of continuity and change, as demonstrated in the chapter’s case study of US grand strategy in the early 1990s. Finally, the chapter concludes by discussing the implications for the future course of US grand strategy.

Making Grand Strategy in Practice

2021 ◽  
pp. 141-158
Author(s):  
Christian Bueger ◽  
Frank Gadinger
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Research Program ◽  
Network Theory ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
Field Theories ◽  
Strategic Culture ◽  
Theories Of Practice ◽  
Grand Strategies ◽  
Point Of Departure

Theories of practice are widely seen as the most innovative recent research program in international relations. They also provide important avenues to understand how grand strategy is made and why and how it has effects. Strategy is understood as the outcome of practical activities and struggles between actors. This chapter presents an overview of how practice theories have productively revisited concepts such as “strategic culture” or “security communities.” It also demonstrates how frameworks derived from field theories, actor-network theory, and narrative theories illuminate grand strategies and the processes that produce them. Theories of practice provide a major innovative point of departure for understanding strategy differently.

Grand Strategies (or Ascendant Ideas) since 1919

2021 ◽  
pp. 143-172
Author(s):  
David Milne
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
World War I ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
The United States ◽  
Us Foreign Policy ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
World War ◽  
Global Power ◽  
Grand Strategies

This chapter investigates the most ascendant ideas at work in America's rise to become a global power and then a superpower after the end of World War I. Segmenting US foreign policy since 1919 by “grand strategy” would seem to require grand simplification. Even those administrations commonly identified as practicing quintessential grand strategy appear more inchoate when approached from the protagonists’ perspectives at the time. To give one such example, the sequence of foreign policy innovations that the United States spearheaded from 1945 to 1949 were collectively possessed of considerable foresight. But they were also a series of strategies advocated by various actors at different times with motives that do not necessarily reduce to a mono-strategic essence. Even in regard to post-1945 US foreign policy, a period that has been sub-divided by many distinguished scholars, it is difficult to identify clearly demarcated grand strategies that provide overarching clarity. The chapter focuses on the ascendant ideas that have informed policymaking, shaped public discourse, forced other ideas into decline, and that can perhaps even be identified as “representative” of particular eras.

scholarly journals ‘GRAND STRATEGIES’, MILITARY AND POLITICAL DOCTRINES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: TRENDS OF EVOLUTION AFTER THE END OF THE COLD WAR. LESSONS FOR UKRAINE

2016 ◽  
pp. 40-50
Author(s):  
Valentyn Petrov
Keyword(s):  
National Security ◽  
Security Policy ◽  
National Level ◽  
The United States ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
Asia Pacific ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Grand Strategies ◽  
Defense Planning

The conceptual and practical aspects of security policy of the USA in terms of their reflection in the ‘Grand Strategy’, military and political-military doctrines are analyzed. The hierarchy of strategic documents that determine US security and defense policy, together with the approaches towards their development in the context of the domestic policy, global trends and forecasts, are examined. The mechanism of working out various national level strategies and doctrines in the USA can be studied as an example. This world superpower has a definitely clear set of relevant documents. First of all, we are talking about the so-called Grand strategies & High strategies that can be determined as a specific component of the political and defense planning in the US. At the current moment, any other country can hardly challenge the US Power. That is why the American ‘Grand Strategy’ is not only a strategy of the national security, but also a leverage partly influencing the international, global, Euro-Atlantic, Asia-Pacific, etc. security. Taking into account above-mentioned possible implementation of the US experience in Ukraine’s defense planning in respect to actual threats and challenges to national security is studied.

scholarly journals Why America's Grand Strategy Has Not Changed: Power, Habit, and the U.S. Foreign Policy Establishment

2018 ◽  
Vol 42 (04) ◽  
pp. 9-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Porter
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Global Financial Crisis ◽  
The United States ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
Natural Choice ◽  
The Status ◽  
Grand Strategies ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The U.S

Why has U.S. grand strategy persisted since the end of the Cold War? Despite shocks such as the 2008 global financial crisis and the costs of the war in Iraq—circumstances that ought to have stimulated at least a revision—the United States remains committed to a grand strategy of “primacy.” It strives for military preponderance, dominance in key regions, the containment and reassurance of allies, nuclear counterproliferation, and the economic “Open Door.” The habitual ideas of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, or the “Blob,” make U.S. grand strategy hard to change. The United States' military and economic capabilities enable the U.S. government to pursue primacy, but the embedded assumptions of the Blob make primacy the seemingly natural choice. Thanks to the Blob's constraining power, alternative grand strategies based on restraint and retrenchment are hardly entertained, and debate is narrowed mostly into questions of execution and implementation. Two cases—the presidency of Bill Clinton and the first year of the presidency of Donald Trump—demonstrate this argument. In each case, candidates promising change were elected in fluid conditions that we would expect to stimulate a reevaluation of the United States' commitments. In each case, the Blob asserted itself successfully, at least on the grand strategic fundamentals. Change in grand strategy is possible, but it would require shocks large enough to shake the assumptions of the status quo and a president willing to be an agent of change and prepared to absorb the political costs of overhauling Washington's traditional design.

Introduction

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Stedman Jones
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
The United States ◽  
International Network ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Organizational Character ◽  
The Way

This introductory chapter discusses how the nuances of postwar neoliberalism, the relationship of its political and organizational character to the thought of its main academic representatives, and the way such ideas were mediated through an ideological infrastructure and international network have yet to be fully explored by historians. The transatlantic character of neoliberalism has often been taken for granted without its origins and development being properly excavated. The degree to which neoliberalism is seen as the ideology of a malevolent globalization by critics has prevented an understanding of the sources of its broad popularity, as it was dressed up in the rhetoric of the Republican and Conservative Parties, among electorates in the United States and Great Britain.

The United States of America

2019 ◽  
pp. 25-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Dombrowski ◽  
Simon Reich
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
Cultural Influences ◽  
The United States ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
Historical Evolution ◽  
Continuity And Change ◽  
Grand Strategies ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
American Grand Strategy

The study of American grand strategy is dominated by historians who describe former grand strategies, and international relations scholars who prescribe what it should be. In contrast to either approach, this chapter has three components: First, it identifies the national cultural influences, the key elements of the mythic “American Creed,” that provide the emblematic foundations of contemporary American grand strategy. Second, it describes the historical evolution of the institutional mechanisms that both formulate and implement American grand strategy, and how those institutions actually operate in the modern era. And third, relating these elements, it explains the parameters of American grand strategic planning—how it operates in practice. This includes an overt reliance on military instruments and a conscious sensitivity to field conditions in implementation that may undermine the most grand strategic designs. The chapter concludes by contemplating the prospects for continuity and change in American grand strategy.

Alternatives to Grand Strategy

2021 ◽  
pp. 619-636
Author(s):  
Peter Dombrowski
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Great Power ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
Military Leaders ◽  
Potential Conflict ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Grand Strategies

The other contributions in this volume take seriously the proposition that having a universal grand strategy is essential for a great power. This chapter considers three alternative propositions: (1) that in many cases grand strategy in a classic sense is not achievable given bureaucratic and political impediments, (2) that all great powers do not require a grand strategy, and, (3) that under some circumstances, the great power can thrive by pursuing calibrated grand strategies depending on both region and threats. The first proposition will build upon the work of scholars (Jervis 1998; Metz 1997) who have argued that the United States and other countries often “muddle through” both strategic formulation and implementation. The second considers arguments about the process of developing grand strategies, such as those advanced by Ionut Popescu (2017) who advocate focusing on “emergent strategies” as understood by scholars studying business corporations. The final proposal builds upon my own research (Reich and Dombrowski 2018) that argues that it is impossible to implement one coherent grand strategy: there are six variants and the United States has inevitably pursued many if not all of them simultaneously in the post–Cold War era. Inverting top-down formulations, the choice of any one strategy in a theater of (potential) conflict is contingent upon the nature of the threat, the actors, and the potential conflicts as interpreted by senior political and military leaders, and the bureaucratic environment in which they operate. In the end, this chapter offers both conceptual and substantive challenges to traditional understandings of grand strategy.

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