By Andrew Latham
Since the end of World War II, there have been three occasions when American policymakers have had the motive, means and opportunity to forge a new “grand strategy.”
The first was in the late 1940s, when American policymakers were forced to confront the new reality of an ideologically inflected bipolar competition with the Soviet Union. In this case, U.S. policymakers adopted a grand strategy of “containment,” defined broadly as the use of American power to check the expansion of Soviet influence and prevent the spread of communism more generally.
The second occasion was in the early 1990s, when American policymakers seized the opportunity presented by the end of the Cold War and the onset of the so-called Unipolar Moment. On this occasion, as the structural conditions of American geopolitical primacy and ideological hegemony became clear, U.S. policymakers settled on a grand strategy of liberal internationalism — that is, a strategy of U.S. military primacy in the service of creating and upholding a truly global liberal international order.
The third occasion, still ongoing, began in the mid-2010s, when unipolarity decisively gave way to the current era of multipolar great-power competition. A decade or so into this new era, the debate over how best to adapt to this new geopolitical reality has yet to be settled, with at least five competing visions of what the United States’s next grand strategy ought to look like remaining in contention.
This piece was originally published in The Hill on January 3, 2022. Read more HERE.