Epilogue: Implications for American Grand Strategy

2021 ◽  
pp. 213-218
Author(s):  
Thomas Waldman
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Us Foreign Policy ◽  
Great Power ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Global Engagement ◽  
Long Run ◽  
American Grand Strategy

This chapter suggests some possible implications of the analysis for US grand strategy and considers the extent to which vicarious warfare might be eclipsed by the demands of re-emerging great power rivalry. It assesses the broad contours of US foreign policy and offers prescriptions regarding the best way forward. The chapter also focuses on the overarching purpose or 'vision' of US global engagement, identifying vital interests and suggesting how they can best be secured by employing the resources available to the nation in ways that accord with foundational values. The chapter then turns to the application of military force in some sweeping grand strategic articulations, especially those associated with the pursuit of continued US primacy and liberal interventionism. Ultimately, the chapter presents a way to escape the never-ending spirals of war, resistance and radicalization that characterizes current approaches, which, in the long run, will likely prove cumulatively more costly in blood, treasure and insecurity. It unveils the impacts of the application of ill-considered military force.

American Grand Strategy and Political Economy Theory

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Narizny
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
Defense Spending ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
International Economy ◽  
Rust Belt ◽  
Middle Ground ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
American Grand Strategy

Nearly everything a state does has distributional consequences, including grand strategy. Societal groups with different stakes in the international economy and defense spending often have conflicting strategic priorities, and these groups pursue their parochial interests by supporting the nomination and election of like-minded politicians. Thus, grand strategy is a product of political economy. An overview of American foreign policy over the last several decades illustrates this logic. In the 1980s, the Democratic and Republican coalitions had conflicting interests over the international economy, so the two parties diverged on grand strategy. The recovery of the Rust Belt in the 1990s and 2000s, however, brought increasing convergence. Political discourse over foreign policy was fiercely partisan, but, with the notable exception of George W. Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003, the two parties shared essentially the same view of America’s role in the world. The disastrous outcome in Iraq led the Bush administration back to the middle ground in its second term, and Obama followed the same course. In contrast, the election of Donald Trump augurs change. Trump’s electoral coalition consists of a different balance of interests in the international economy than that of past Republican presidents, so he is likely to pursue different strategic priorities.

scholarly journals Contemporary Problems of a “Grand Strategy” in the US Foreign Policy

2020 ◽  
pp. 27-39
Author(s):  
S. Kislitsyn
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Global Leadership ◽  
Us Foreign Policy ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Expert Community ◽  
Policy Elites

The research examines the main problems of a grand strategy in the US foreign policy. Attention is paid to the conceptual understanding of this term, its historical development, and the current state. The article analyzes the positions of American foreign policy elites and the expert community regarding the problem of the US self-positioning in the outside world. The article consists of three parts. The first analyses the main conceptual provisions of the “grand strategy” as a term. It describes its development from a military term, reflecting the general tactics in interstate confrontation to its comprehensive understanding as a coordination principle of long-term and medium-term goals with short term actions. The second part of the article focuses on the American foreign policy elites, their approaches, as well as public opinion on this issue. It is noted that the ideology of global leadership has become an important component of the establishment's thinking. It largely impedes the development of new foreign policy concepts and, as a result, reformatting the grand strategy. The third part is devoted to the positions of the expert community on the issue of grand strategy. Four main versions are considered: "Offensive", "Selective engagement", "Offshore Balancing", "Zero-sum". The author comes to a conclusion that the US foreign policy mixes several types of strategies at the moment. It is noted that as China strengthens, the United States faces a new competition, which, unlike the Soviet threat, implies not military-political, but economic confrontation. The implementation of the scenario of a "new Cold War" between Washington and Beijing can define the new goals of the grand strategy. At the same time, this also creates an ideological dilemma of recognizing a new challenge, an increasing alternative for American global leadership - the idea of which is still popular among representatives of American foreign policy elites.

Global versus National

Age of Iron ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 70-104
Author(s):  
Colin Dueck
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
The United States ◽  
Great Power ◽  
Power Politics ◽  
Long Run ◽  
Clinton Presidency ◽  
Great Power Politics ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter describes the efforts of various Republican presidents and congressional leaders to strike balances between nationalist and internationalist priorities between the 1960s and 2015. Barry Goldwater championed a hawkish Sunbelt conservatism that in the long run helped remake the Republican Party. President Nixon pursued a foreign policy based upon assumptions of great-power politics and realpolitik. President Reagan led an ideologically charged effort at anti-Communist rollback, although he was careful not to overextend the United States in any large-scale wars on the ground. Republicans during the Clinton presidency struggled to reformulate conservative foreign policy assumptions in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse. George W. Bush remade conservative foreign policy into a war on terror, aiming at the democratization of the Greater Middle East. Finally, during the presidency of Barack Obama, Republican foreign policy factions once again splintered, paving the way for a conservative nationalist resurgence.

American Grand Strategies

2021 ◽  
pp. 440-456
Author(s):  
Robert Jervis
Keyword(s):  
International Economic ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Economic System ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
Psychological Processes ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
Grand Strategies ◽  
Domestic Values ◽  
American Grand Strategy

How do we explain the vigorous debate about what American grand strategy should be? Most of the proponents are Realists, and this is particularly true for the alternatives of Restraint and Deep Engagement discussed here. These camps disagree not about whether the US is in decline, but in how secure it is, how tightly the world is interconnected, how much commitments can be kept within bounds, whether alliances and military ties are necessary to underpin a productive international economic system, and the links between foreign policy and domestic values. Few analysts in either camp are willing to acknowledge tradeoffs among the significant values they hold, which indicates that psychological processes as well as analytical differences are at work.

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.

American Grand Strategy under Obama

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georg Löfflmann
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
National Security ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
The Political ◽  
President Obama ◽  
Discursive Space ◽  
White House ◽  
Depth Analysis ◽  
American Grand Strategy

The book explores the breakdown of the elite consensus on America's role in the world. By emphasising military restraint and 'leading from behind' President Obama challenged the Washington foreign policy establishment and its strategic vision of liberal hegemony from within.Highlighting the identity performing function and discursive construction of grand strategy, the book demonstrates how the geopolitical identity of American exceptionalism is linked to the conduct of an activist and interventionist foreign policy, resulting in a dominant grand strategy of American primacy and global military pre-eminence. An intertextual framework of analysis is used to examine the political performance and validity of this dominant identity-policy link, and the success of countering discourses of cooperative engagement and restraint under the Obama presidency. The nexus of geopolitical identity and national security is traced through a multidimensional perspective that considers the common sense status of popular culture and media, the expertise of Washington think tanks and foreign policy experts, and the political decisions taken in the White House and the Pentagon.From an in-depth analysis of various competing discourses of national security and foreign policy, the book concludes that American grand strategy under Obama no longer represented a coherent and consistent equation of material resources and political ends, but a contested discursive space, where identity and policy no longer matched. This resulted in the conflicted and contradictory nature of the Obama Doctrine.

Unipolarity’s unpeacefulness and US foreign policy: consequences of a ‘coherent system of irrationality’

2017 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Haro L Karkour
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Us Foreign Policy ◽  
Coherent System ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Empirical Reality ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
National Security Strategy ◽  
The Social

Drawing on Hans J. Morgenthau, this article argues that a key contributor to the unpeacefulness of the post–Cold War unipolar order was the irrationality of US foreign policy. Post–Cold War US foreign policy was irrational in that it failed to base its strategy on the prudent evaluation of the empirical facts in the social and political context in which it was formulated. Instead, it reinterpreted reality in terms of a simplistic picture of the world as accepted by US policymakers a priori, and sought the use of military force as the sole national security strategy to impose the inviolability of the ideals entailed in this picture. This turned post–Cold War US foreign policy into a self-contradictory endeavour as far as the results were concerned: not only did it confuse desirable for essential interests in standardising the enemy – whether Milosevic, Saddam or Qaddafi – to fit the a priori categorisation, but it also opened a gap between the desirable and the possible. For one thing such an irrational post–Cold War US foreign policy failed to accommodate or annul was the empirical reality of conflicting interests in the social and political contexts upon which it sought to impose its a priori picture. This resulted in consequences that were untenable from the standpoint of US objectives and international peace and security, contributing, overall, to the unpeacefulness of the post–Cold War unipolar order.

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