Grand Strategy Program

“Grand strategy” defined

The “grand” in grand strategy refers to the multiplicity of means states have at their disposal to advance their foreign policy and national security interests in a world characterized by incessant competition and in which war, while by no means inevitable, always lurks in the background.

“Strategy,” grand or not, seeks to align means and ends by distinguishing among goals that are critical, important, and secondary. While military power—“hard power”—is certainly one of the relevant means, states have many others. There are economic ones: trade, investment, technology, foreign aid, and sanctions, for instance. There are normative means (commonly referred to as “soft power”): the values that underpin a country’s sense of what defines it and what its purpose is, as reflected by its foundational political principles, economy, and culture, broadly defined.

A restraint-based grand strategy

DEFP believes the means available to the United States—and they are substantial and variegated—should be used to serve ends that increase the security and prosperity of American citizens. While this may seem self-evident, such prudence has been absent in recent decades—partly because the peerless military might of the United States creates temptations to use it far and wide for a host of purposes, without ranking interests in order of their importance. Resisting this temptation is the hallmark of restraint.

Military power is an important part of grand strategy. But it should be used for ends that are essential to Americans’ security and in ways appropriate to the goal and context. Using it to promote democracy abroad, or to reshape political orders and societies, can lead to entrapment in quagmires—consider the Iraq and Afghanistan wars—that consume blood and treasure for decades, and with little success. The same is true of humanitarian intervention. It has an appealing, even alluring, moral aura but often produces outcomes, as in Libya, that contradict the human rights principles that animate it.

The United States will perforce face threats that necessitate the use of military might, even the resort to war. But waging war ultimately requires sending people to fight—and risk getting wounded or even killed. Modern warfare is also expensive. The United States has spent $5 trillion just since the end of the Cold War—money, raised by borrowing, that could have been used for higher priorities, especially given the myriad problems accumulating at home.

Empires and great powers tend to believe they are exceptional and timeless. But their primacy eventually wanes—in part because their economic and technological successes contribute to the emergence of competitors, some well-disposed to them, others not. Seen thus, the dominant position the United States enjoyed at the end of the Cold War was indeed a “unipolar moment.” But that moment has proved short-lived. New centers of power, above all China, are emerging, and the United States’ relative power has therefore diminished. The new conditions call for a rethinking of strategies that the United States pursued during the Cold War and in the decades immediately after it came to an end.

Key questions to answer

This program seeks to shape the debate on American grand strategy by promoting restraint as an alternative to the current and long-dominant one, which we call primacy but is also known as liberal hegemony. Unlike restraint, liberal hegemony has an extravagant conception of foreign policy and national security that consequently fails to align ends and means prudently.

Based on these principles, and through our research and other activities, DEFP’s Grand Strategy program will promote restraint-based policies by exploring a variety of questions, such as:

• What role should allies—countries to which the United States has made formal defense commitments—play in American grand strategy as the international balance of power shifts and the U.S. share of global wealth continues its decline?
• Under what circumstances do alliances contribute to U.S. security and when and how might they detract from it?
• How should U.S. alliances be reformed, or even ended, to ensure that allies with the economic and technological wherewithal to do so take the lead in ensuring their own security, individually or collectively?
• What does a policy of restraint imply for the size of the United States’ military budget, weapons procurement policy, and military presence overseas?
• What does a comparison of the costs and benefits of relatively minor uses of force—for example, drone strikes, Special Operations Forces operations, and humanitarian interventions—reveal about their efficacy in promoting U.S. interests?
• When do arms sales or long-term training programs for foreign militaries serve American interests and when do they have harmful consequences?
• Should the United States retain its extensive network of foreign military bases or pare it down? If the latter, which ones are expendable?
• What are the implications of seeing international politics as a contest between democracy and autocracy in which the United States serves as the guardian of the former?
• How is the moral standing of the United States affected when it supports governments that spurn the liberal democratic practices that are presented as the foundation of American politics and foreign policy?
• In what ways have U.S. primacy and military preponderance contributed to inertia: ideas that remain entrenched and are fiercely defended by various internal constituencies (bureaucracies, civil society groups, and experts) and policies that persist despite the emergence of new conditions for which they are ill-suited?
• What are the implications of China’s rise for American strategy, and what would constitute an effective but judicious policy toward this increasingly powerful country?
• Given the degree of security the United States enjoys relative to other countries, how might more attention and resources be focused on internal needs while maintaining an effective national security policy?
• What are the most effective ways in which a restraint-based strategy can be combined with robust diplomatic engagement and cooperation abroad?

Guided by the general principles and questions outlined above, DEFP will promote thoughtful conversations and debates about a grand strategy best suited to our times.