Rethinking American Grand Strategy

"In recent years, historians and other scholars have offered useful definitions, most of which coalesce around the notion that grand strategy is an amplification of the "normal" strategic practice of deploying various means to attain specific ends. "The crux of grand strategy," writes Paul Kennedy, co-founder of the influential Grand Strategy program at Yale University, "lies...in policy, that is, in the capacity of the nation's leaders to bring together all the elements, both military and nonmilitary, for the preservation and enhancement of the nation's long-term (that is, in wartime and peacetime) best interests." John Lewis Gaddis, the program's co-founder with Kennedy, defines grand strategy succinctly as "the alignment of potentially unlimited aspirations with necessarily limited capabilities." Hal Brands, an alumnus of Yale's program and a contributor to this volume, observes that grand strategy is best understood as an "intellectual architecture that lends structure to foreign policy; it is the logic that helps states navigate a complex and dangerous world." Peter Feaver, who followed Yale's model when establishing a grand strategy program at Duke University, is somewhat more specific: "Grand strategy refers to the collection of plans and policies that comprise the state's deliberate effort to harness political, military, diplomatic, and economic tools together to advance that state's national interest." International Relations theorist Stephen Walt is even more precise: "a state's grand strategy is its plan for making itself secure. Grand strategy identifies the objectives that must be achieved to produce security, and describes the political and military actions that are believed to lead to this goal. Strategy is thus a set of 'contingent predictions': if we do A, B, and C, the desired results X, Y, and Z should follow.""--