Rethinking American grand strategy

Abstract

How to do grand strategy is a key question in foreign policy studies. The subject's relevance is underlined—rather than undermined—by the rise of unconventional threats: terrorism, pandemics, autocracy and environmental problems. While the United States remains the most powerful country in the world, neither its status nor its ability to meet these new challenges on its own are unchallenged. Crucially, US grand strategy needs to be rethought––and that is the crux of this book. So what is grand strategy? How does it differ from strategic vision? Conventional attempts to define grand strategy often risk reducing it to military strategy and effectively sidelining politics, international law and economics. Moreover, other factors like race, gender, the environment and culture are also important, and a narrower understanding of grand strategy risks overlooking them. In some ways, this is what sets this book apart. Rethinking American grand strategy argues that the concept should take these previously ignored factors into account in order to be more effective (p. 3). The edited volume aims to show that American grand strategy would be more effective if it did not ignore marginalized voices in its design, especially those that traditional scholarship has neglected. The contributors featured include academics from Australia, the US and Europe. The chapters cover the history of American grand strategy up to and including the current era. Fortunately, they do so without the unfortunate ‘exceptionalist’––or rather nationalist––undertones that haunt most of this literature.