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.""--

Introduction / Christopher McKnight Nichols and Andrew Preston -- Getting grand strategy right : clearing away common fallacies in the grand strategy debate / Hal Brands -- The blob and the mob : on grand strategy and social change / Beverly Gage -- Turning the tide : the application of grand strategy to global health / Elizabeth H. Bradley and Lauren A. Taylor -- Extending the sphere : a Federalist grand strategy / Charles Edel -- Grand strategy of the master class : slavery and foreign policy from the antebellum era to the Civil War / Matthew Karp -- A useful category of analysis? Grand strategy and US foreign relations from the Civil War through World War I / Katherine Epstein -- Grand strategies (or ascendant ideas) since 1919 / David Milne -- Woodrow Wilson, W.E.B. Du Bois, and beyond : American internationalists and the crucible of World War I / Christopher McKnight Nichols -- Franklin Roosevelt, the New Deal, and grand strategy : constructing the postwar order / Elizabeth Borgwardt -- Foreign policy begins at home : Americans, grand strategy, and World War II / Michaela Hoenicke Moore -- National security as grand strategy : Edward Mead Earle and the burdens of world power …