Successful statesmanship demands assiduous compartmentalization. It is impossible for a government to fulfill its domestic commitments and exert international influence without dividing the multitudinous concerns and crises thrown its way into separate categories. This introduces the possibility of a destabilizing outcome, however: the jeopardization of grand strategy.
An exhaustive array of departments and agencies constitute the American federal government, each tackling microscopic problems specific to their responsibilities. As these entities swell in size, they acquire a life of their own. They reproduce the organizational structure of the overarching bureaucracy that holds them all together, obstructing communication and stagnating the decision-making process. This is only a problem if each department pursues conflicting objectives. If they are all guided by the same strategic blueprint, their operations will all tend toward a similar direction.
This is what renders a sound grand strategy indispensable. It forces individuals tasked with the diplomatic, political, economic, and military affairs of a country to direct their resources toward a comparable objective. No state can be programmed to follow an immovable set of principles in every given situation, but it is advantageous for leaders of each governmental agency to know what their administration expects of them. If it is made eminently clear from the start of the president’s term that a particular region of the world is the new area of focus, it becomes easier to overcome the sluggish, ossifying characteristics of a bureaucracy. All departments will generally orient their work toward the same target, accepting that there will be discrepancies and varying approaches along the way.
Not all academics, officials, and political scientists agree with this framework, though. In the May/June 2022 issue of Foreign Affairs, Dr. Eliot Cohen, Robert E. Osgood Professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), argued for “the need to substitute statecraft for grand strategy.” Dr. Cohen treats the two as distinct methods for shaping domestic and international policy in the face of evolving crises on the global stage. “Grand strategy relies on simplifications, and yet the world is complex,” he writes. Conversely, statecraft, as defined by Cohen, entails “the ability to quickly detect and respond to challenges, a penchant for exploiting opportunities as they arise.”
Hal Brands, Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins University’s SAIS and author of What Good is Grand Strategy?, explained to The Politic that “there have always been people… who are skeptical of the concept of grand strategy.” Brands clarified that a grand strategy does not automatically clean up the chaotic, unpredictable mess that comes with foreign policy— it is just the most effective way of dealing with it. “There is no alternative to grand strategic positioning,” said Brands. Articulating a high-level approach involves “reconciling priorities and means and ends” for a state to have a broad sense of trajectory which can be adapted in the face of momentous shifts.
Indeed, what is often forgotten about grand strategy is that it too can be dexterous and responsive to sudden cataclysms. In 1982, John Lewis Gaddis, one of the founders of Yale’s Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy, wrote about different presidents’ foreign policy during the Cold War in a book titled Strategies of Containment— not “strategy” in the singular— precisely because each administration took an ever-changing and flexible approach to combating the Soviet Union.
Gaddis offered a succinct definition of the term to The Politic. “My own view is that ‘strategy’ responds to any situation in which aspirations exceed capabilities.” In other words, an administration may shift its attention toward a particular region of the world even if the U.S. has limited material resources to execute such a transition. Whether this can be called a grand strategy, however, “depends on how significant the situation is to the person confronting it,” according to Gaddis.
An absence of strategic vision abets inconsistency, which damages credibility and risks hypocritical decision-making. For instance, if the State Department declares a particular country to be the United States’ principal adversary, it would be problematic for the president to authorize the transfer of key energy resources to that regime. This simply would not be sustainable in the long run.
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Since the republic’s inception, American citizens have always viewed themselves as tasked with the responsibility of charting a political and moral path distinct from the Old World from which they came. They exempt themselves from universal standards applied to other countries and hold that the principles and values enumerated in the founding documents represent the truly unique and exceptional nature of the American experiment.
Occasionally, this had led the United States to pursue contradictory policies. 18th-century lawmakers in the Northeast stressed the importance of the sovereignty of Native American populations while frontiersmen in the West uprooted them from their ancestral lands. Successive administrations scolded France and England every time these European monarchies approached the Latin American coast, ultimately leading to the establishment of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, but had no difficulty encouraging revolutionary activity abroad to promote American interests. And antislavery advocates in the North celebrated the Haitian Revolution as a manifestation of the postulates outlined in the Declaration of Independence but provided minimal support out of fear that this would spark rebellion in the South.
American presidents from George Washington to Theodore Roosevelt undertook transformative projects to propel the United States to a more favorable spot on the international stage in a way that aligned with the diplomatic tradition hammered out in Europe centuries prior. Cardinal Richelieu, the chief minister of France’s King Louis XIII and the progenitor of the concept of raison d’état, was the first to prioritize pragmatic expansion over religious alignment in statecraft. Unlike Ferdinand II, the Holy Roman Emperor obsessively preoccupied with eliminating Protestants from his domain, Richelieu was willing to align with states who did not follow France’s Catholicism if it meant preserving a balance of power on the European continent.
Richelieu’s legacy, perpetuated by notable European statesmen ranging from England’s William of Orange to Austria’s Klemens von Metternich, is also foundational to understanding the United States’ history up to World War I. Americans negotiated with foreign powers, fought wars, and turned inward from time to time based on the self-interest and power of the state. In his Farewell Address, Washington warned against short-term entangling alliances while the United States was still a nascent power but hinted that the country’s enlargement would eventually give it enough freedom to leverage its influence globally. A string of presidents in the pre-Civil War years advocated for an equal number of states to be added to the North and South to preserve the balance of power between two incompatible systems. Theodore Roosevelt, though not officially taking sides in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904, made his support for Japan explicit because he feared Russia’s pre-eminence on the Eurasian continent.
From the study halls of Princeton University, one president permanently revolutionized the tradition built on Richelieu’s premonitions: Woodrow Wilson. The first truly academic American president implemented the ideas expounded in Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace, envisioning a world where settlements would be resolved through international cooperative efforts and institutional arbitration. Wilson proclaimed the end of insulated empires vying for territory, stressed respect for basic values and human rights, and called for methodological procedures to guide international relations.
This was an abrupt shift from the balance of power that had guided Western geopolitics since the Treaty of Westphalia, which gave rise to a procedural international system where individual states are treated as sovereign. Wilson’s involvement in post-WWI negotiations was “really the first time that America looked out beyond the oceans and got deeply involved in the world, so of course it was going to bring its own historical experience with it,” explained Robert D. Kaplan, who holds the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. “And that historical experience [came] with mass democracy which it saw as giving to the world.”
Although America itself was not initially ready to abandon its isolationism, exemplified through the country’s aversion to the League of Nations, every single president since Wilson has operated within his worldview. Collective security, trust through long-standing alliances, and peace through democracy are the extension of the Westphalian system that European statesmen forged in the 17th century. The main divergence between isolationists, interventionists, neoconservatives, and neoliberals (among others) today hinges on the extent to which the United States should engage with multinational alliances and institutions in the way Wilson saw them.
“The baseline bipartisan assumption prior to Wilson was that the U.S. would stay out of European alliances,” said Dr. Colin Dueck, a professor in the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University and a non-resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “I don’t think that prior to Wilson most American politicians referred to themselves self-consciously as conservative or liberal,” Dr. Dueck added. “You had a Republican party and a Democratic party and people occasionally used ideological terms to describe them.”
The denouement of World War II presented an opportunity to fully implement Wilson’s liberal vision. Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had signed the Atlantic Charter in 1941 to outline the American and British goals of freedom once peace returned, paved the way for a U.S.-led international order upheld by associations like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). While every president since Wilson has been contained by his theoretical framework, they have not all agreed with his approach.
Richard Nixon, for example, pursued a policy of détente during the Cold War whereby it was acceptable for the Soviet Union and China to maintain their authoritarian systems as long as they did not impinge on America’s sphere of influence. Nixon, guided by his Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, was disposed to cooperate with regimes that explicitly countered the Atlantic Charter’s basic principles, believing that stability arose from several axes of power balancing out one another. Realist, quantifiable factors drove the duo’s foreign policy rather than Wilsonian ideological considerations.
The debate regarding the utility of grand strategy is more theoretical than concrete. The divergence between realist and liberal academics and politicians, however, profoundly shapes policy and the direction that a given administration will take. Understanding President Joseph Biden’s predilections and those of his cabinet can help elucidate the motivations behind past domestic and foreign policy decisions and the future trajectory of the administration.
“Biden is operating in the true vision of Wilson, [Franklin D.] Roosevelt, the Atlantic charter, and Reagan,” Ambassador Daniel Fried, who served as Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs from 2005 to 2009 and United States ambassador to Poland from 1997 to 2000, explained to The Politic. “He believes in the principles of the free world without irony. He is a pre-Vietnam Democrat.”
This ostensibly represents a significant break from Biden’s predecessor, President Donald Trump, who viewed the spread of American values abroad as secondary to retrenchment and national security at home. Trump cared little about the ideology of his counterparts, as seen by his handshake with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and his amicability toward Russian President Vladimir Putin. Biden, on the other hand, has framed the ongoing crisis in Ukraine as the epitome of an existential confrontation between democracy and autocracy.
“Biden is clearly in the camp of freedom, but it’s never going to be a straight line,” said Ambassador Fried, noting that “there are professors and members of Congress who make a career out of pointing out the hypocrisies and inconsistencies” in a president’s conduct. One such moment of incoherence came when Biden called Saudi Arabia a “pariah” state but then subsequently traveled to the country to construct a coalition of Middle Eastern states against Iran and to forge an energy deal. “Foreign policy is seldom a place for purists,” Ambassador Fried said.
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In the early 1990s, following the implosion of the Soviet Union’s communist system, America seemed to have demonstrated that its values were irrefutable and inherently desirable by any world power. In that spirit, Francis Fukuyama declared that “the universalization of Western liberal democracy” had led to the end of history. While Fukuyama’s argument about the fundamental desirability of Western values has not stood the test of time, many practitioners are not discouraged. They believe that human rights and freedom will eventually penetrate the walls of autocracy that constrain individuals who could otherwise flourish economically, socially, and politically.
On the other hand, some thinkers believe that the short-lived unipolar decade under President Bill Clinton is proof that values come after realistic calculations of power. “We were a little deluded in the 1990s when we thought that we could transcend power politics,” believes Dr. Dueck. “In an odd way, the Trump phenomenon was a reaction to that.”
Another potential explanation for the resurgence of American adversaries is that the Cold War never really was an ideological triumph for the United States— the war over values is still being fought. With scarcely a decade between the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the rise of Putin, a country such as Russia has never given up on its anti-Western rhetoric. At the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in June of this year, Putin declared that the “Western elite… seem to believe that the dominance of the West in global politics and the economy is an unchanging, eternal value. Nothing lasts forever.” Similarly, Xi Jinping has insisted that Western ideas of democracy and human rights are a harmful “ideological fog.”
Some scholars attribute China and Russia’s rapprochement in opposition to the United States to a historically rooted desire for empire. This line of thought posits that recent or forthcoming territorial invasions undertaken by both countries are less motivated by irreconcilable cultural ties than they are by a desire for international influence and territorial expansion. Russian incursions into the Ottoman Empire, disputes with China over Central Asian land, and ceaseless western expansion up to the Balkans are all 19th-century events that support this thesis.
Russia returned to this expansionist grand strategy shortly after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In May of this year, Samuel Helfont, an assistant professor of Strategy and Policy in the Naval War College’s program at the Naval Postgraduate School, published a piece in War on the Rocks analyzing how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a continuation of Moscow’s approach toward Iraq about three decades ago.
Helfont describes how the United States and the Soviet Union both agreed that it was best to intervene in Kuwait to address the global Gulf Crisis of 1990. However, Iraqi troops were armed with Soviet weapons, so Moscow watched as its inferior armaments were shredded by superior American technology. Russia started to side with Iraq after the war and expressed outrage when it was not consulted about subsequent actions taken in the region. For instance, the U.S., Britain, and France launched airstrikes against Saddam Hussein, planning to topple a regime that restricted oil exports to the rest of the world. Since Iraq owed Russia enormous sums of money, this was problematic for the Kremlin. “Moscow’s dissatisfaction with its own weakness was and remains a much more fundamental issue than NATO expansion,” Helfont concludes.
Other scholars maintain that the fickleness of America’s grand strategy invites challenge. Since the United States is losing influence throughout the globe and declining economically, it is an opportune moment for other great powers to take down the Bald Eagle. A chaotic international environment facilitates challenges to American hegemony. “We have indeed entered a new, more dangerous and volatile age of disruption, a world of ambiguous, asymmetric, and potentially instantaneous threats,” according to Daniel Hamilton, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and president of the Transatlantic Leadership Network.
Hamilton identified key similarities between Russian and Chinese ambitions. Moscow is an openly “revisionist” power working “to roll back the changes in Europe since the end of the Cold War and subjugate its neighbors to a Russian sphere of influence.” In parallel, Beijing “poses a systemic challenge to the transatlantic community and other democratic nations.” Prominent Chinese scholars have advanced alternatives to the Westphalian framework of state organization, proposing conceptions similar to the ancient Chinese philosophy of the “mandate of heaven.” They envision a world where the dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency, U.S.-led institutions like the World Bank are meaningless, and democratic freedoms are eroded.
Whether one frames China and Russia’s recent bellicosity as a continuation of expansionist policies or an opportunistic attempt to subvert the U.S.-led international order, both of these perspectives coincide in an important way: they both ultimately conceive of the U.S. as an exceptional country promoting values abroad that unlock social mobility, liberty, and economic freedoms. Whatever the reason for Xi or Putin’s escalating rhetoric or military power, Washington stands as a desirable actor on the global stage according to these two viewpoints.
It should be noted that not all academics agree with this perspective. “The ‘rules-based order’ is a galloping abstraction… because on inspection it turns out to be compatible with U.S. violations of international law,” Dr. David Hendrickson, Emeritus Professor of Political Science at Colorado College, told The Politic. In this framework, the difference between democratic and authoritarian values is less significant. America is not considered an untarnished force for good due to the hypocrisies one can find in the country’s history. Dr. Hendrickson cited the United States’ “invasion of Iraq” as an example of territorial encroachment just as “felonious” as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
To make such a comparison, scholars in this academic camp share a sense of skepticism toward American intentions. They tend to focus on the United States’ drawn-out presence in the Middle East and attempts at nation-building as examples of the expansion of an American empire rather than a well-meaning quest to save citizens from the horrors of terrorism. Consequently, this worldview justifies Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine as a natural reaction to the United States’ foreign crusades— Russia is simply responding by building an empire of its own and refusing to join American-led institutions because, ultimately, everything revolves around power. Realist scholars primarily agree with this sentiment. Liberal scholars, on the other hand, envision a peaceful world where states can cooperate with one another if they can overcome brutal leaders incapable of granting basic freedoms to their people.
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The practicality of grand strategy and the role that values play in foreign policy are two perennial debates within the discipline of international affairs. A third which has pitted practitioners and politicians against one another revolves around the concept of world order.
The phrase was coined by George H.W. Bush during the Gulf War when he described the conflict as the start of “a big idea; a new world order.” In a sense, Bush was harkening back to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s transformative ambitions to remake the world following World War II. With the United States guiding its democratic allies, the world would see a more organized, procedural, and virtuous network of countries capable of solving dilemmas through arbitration and courteous diplomacy rather than the horrendous fighting that ravaged Europe in the first half of the 20th century.
In the decades that followed the destruction, however, the Soviet Union presented a pervasive challenge to that vision. Communism, paired with restrictions to free speech and state-controlled economies, loomed to the east, rendering a Western conception of world order impossible to execute globally. The fall of the Soviet Union seemed to presage the victory of the liberal world order, a system of progress-driven, democratic states embodying Kant’s theory of Perpetual Peace.
President Barack Obama, for instance, urged his successor in a letter he left in the White House that the United States’ obligation is “to sustain the international order that’s expanded steadily since the end of the Cold War, and upon which our own wealth and safety depend.” When asked on CNN earlier this year about the U.S.’ wholehearted support for Ukraine in the face of Russia’s illegal aggression, Brian Deese, Director of the National Economic Council under President Biden, replied that it comes down to the “future of the liberal world order.”
Bush, Obama, and Deese are perpetuating a centuries-long American tradition that precedes even the Atlantic Charter. The U.S. has systematically turned its attention to individuals subjected to oppression and disenfranchisement abroad, recognizing that neglecting these violations undermines the ideal international system in which Americans want to live. But Washington’s record in this regard is far from perfect. Nixon’s collaboration with repressive regimes in Latin America, Clinton’s inaction during the Rwandan genocide, and most recently, Biden’s negotiations with Venezuela are all examples of administrations prioritizing American security and control over a liberal world order. For the most part, however, the United States has worked to promote reforms in countries abroad in the name of human rights, democracy, and rule of law.
The liberal world order is not all-encompassing. Robert Kagan, the Stephen & Barbara Friedman Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, emphasized the requirements needed to join this order during a Hudson Institute event in July. “The liberal world order includes the United States and those peoples around the world who share fundamental liberal principles,” he explained. This encompasses countries that embrace free elections, the rule of law, and an open civil society.
Not all scholars agree with this formulation, especially those that prioritize national interest over values. “I’m not a proponent of a liberal world order, but I am a proponent of a world order because injustice and oppression mean the world is imperfect,” explained Kaplan. The absence of a liberal world order does not drastically change the way that states operate, according to Kaplan, “but the lack of order is a much more devastating situation. Order comes before freedom because without order there is no freedom for anybody.”
Indeed, the concept of a liberal world order initially seems contradictory. Why should a “world” order not account for every state across the globe? One explanation may emerge by analyzing the official doctrine of regimes excluded from this order. In a book titled Strategic Support for Achieving the Great Chinese Resurgence, published by Beijing’s National Defense University, China’s scorn for the values that have buttressed the West’s framework for international affairs is undeniable. “Today, the age in which a few strong Western powers could work together to decide world affairs is already gone and will not come back,” the authors, Ren Tianyou and Zhou Zhouxian, write. “A new world order is now under construction that will surpass and supplant the Westphalian System.” The text is translated in Ian Easton’s book, The Final Struggle: Inside China’s Global Strategy.
Despite Russia’s history of acceding to the Westphalian System before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Putin, like Xi, has decided that he has no interest in seeing the liberal world order come to fruition. His admiration for the Soviet Union and its top-down, authoritarian structure guides his foreign policy. Such an approach is evidently incompatible with the liberal world order, an idea that Putin wants to see replaced with his own alternative. A few months after the invasion of Ukraine, he warned that “tectonic shifts in… the entire system of international relations” will subvert the “dominance of the West in global politics.”
The liberal world order depends on the United States’ ability to develop a concerted, well-defined strategy to combat hostile authoritarian influence. However, since the concept is fundamentally rooted in values, some realist international relations scholars don’t believe that there is any order in the first place. Others flip the idea on its head to emphasize the unprecedented turbulence defining today’s geopolitical landscape.
Last spring, Professor Andy Knight, the MacMillan Center’s Canadian Studies visiting chair, spoke to a cohort of Yale students in the Nicholas J. Spkyman Fellowship about a “new world disorder.” Patterns that have traditionally defined domestic activities and international alliances between states have radically changed compared to previous centuries, Knight argued. A key element of this revolutionary shift comes down to one ubiquitous word: technology.
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It has become trite to observe that technology is drastically transforming every element of social and political interactions. Instant communications, the Internet of Things, networks capable of sustaining high-speed transfers of information, mechanized weapons, digitized infrastructure, and surveillance apparatuses have become deeply integrated in countries’ national security and citizens’ everyday lives.
According to Hamilton, “emerging technologies are changing the nature of competition and conflict. Digital transformations are upending the foundations of diplomacy and defense.” This was confirmed during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Satellites provided accurate images of troop movements preceding the conflict. Intelligence regarding Russian intentions was relayed almost instantaneously to Washington, permitting the American government to emit critical warnings ahead of time. And, perhaps most important of all, Putin has rattled his nuclear sabor more frequently than at any other time in Russian history to make the West squeamish about sending additional aid to Ukraine.
Russian-state TV boasted the annihilating power of a new missile capable of striking any point on Earth before defensive systems would be alerted of the threat. China is concurrently engaging in the largest and fastest nuclear buildup in its history. “Destructive capabilities unthinkable a decade ago are now in the hands not only of big powers, but also smaller state and non-state actors,” Hamilton said. Indeed, the West’s hesitancy to throw all of its weight behind Ukraine due to Putin’s nuclear weapons has inspired smaller countries to prioritize the acquisition of the bomb.
Iran, despite warning the world that it has no intention of obtaining nuclear weapons, has enriched enough uranium to make this possible in the imminent future. Saudi Arabia has pledged that it will pursue the bomb if Iran does so first. Increasingly vocal movements in South Korea and Japan are calling for indigenous nuclear weapons programs in response to China’s security threat.
Below the nuclear threshold, technology is driving much of the rapprochement and animosity reshaping state relationships. American vigilance toward Chinese espionage has heightened considerably. Cell towers and infrastructure located near American military bases are being scrutinized to see whether Chinese technology companies like Huawei contributed to their construction. The United States is aiming to develop medical supplies and household appliances at home rather than depend on Beijing. Companies suspected of harboring malicious intentions toward the American government are increasingly blacklisted for national security purposes.
This effort requires coordination between private industry and government. “Technology companies should make transparency the norm,” Jessica Brandt, policy director for the Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology Initiative at the Brookings Institution. “Government can encourage transparency, but these are steps companies can take—and some are taking—on their own.” Brandt analyzed how Beijing is manipulating search results through Google to influence public opinion about Xinjiang, where the majority of the Uyghur population lives, and the origins of Covid-19. Google’s algorithms and potential ties to spiteful actors remain opaque, a cause for concern in a world driven by the World Wide Web.
The omnipresence of technology in national security decisions extends far beyond search engines. The vehicles, cell towers, domestic appliances, defense systems, and infrastructure that Americans have come to rely on follow the evolution of technological developments. As a result, semiconductors—the force behind modern electronics systems—have become an integral part of political autonomy since they enable a country to maintain indispensable elements of society.
An unhealthy dependence on Taiwan’s semiconductor industry, paired with concerns that China may encircle and subjugate the island in the event of a forced reunification, bolstered American policymakers to pass the Chips and Science Act earlier this year. “It’s the question of what happens to Taiwan that shapes the security issue. If [China does] anything to disrupt the supply from Taiwan, that’s an immediate concern,” said Dr. James Lewis, Senior Vice President and the Director of the Technology and Public Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. To mitigate this threat, the bill funneled over $52 billion to American companies and tax credits to support computer chip production and investments in chip manufacturing.
Does this signal that the American commitment to Taiwan will waver in the decades to come? Domestic investment in chip manufacturing could certainly presage a decrease of strategic interest in the island’s fate, and the Taiwanese are acutely aware of this. They “are spending a lot of money to expand their semiconductor industry. There is a foreign policy element to that,” explained Dr. Lewis. They get “more leverage with the U.S.”
Navigating the United States’ relationship with Taiwan is the epitome of skilful statesmanship. Continuing to demonstrate support for a democracy, valuable trading partner, and vibrant entrepreneurial population right off the coast of Washington’s main adversary will require a balancing act like no other. Global conflicts start when neither side is able to modify its redlines, but if the United States backs down in the name of global peace, this sets a dangerous precedent in Asia. As American politicians learn lessons along the way, introducing legislation such as the Chips and Science Act, they also risk sending Taipei the message that the United States is prepared to detach itself from the island. Thus, the Taiwanese issue will require effective, transparent communication with our allies, several back-up plans, and a grand strategy that articulates how much the United States is willing to hedge its support in the Indo-Pacific compared to Eastern Europe.
“China has made it clear that they’re not going to wait forever to invade Taiwan,” said Dueck. “It’s not good enough to lay out speeches about world order; you need to increase defense spending… You cannot have a pivot to Asia while letting defense spending atrophy.”
For the first time in its history, the United States is in a two-peer threat environment with adversaries that rival its military capabilities. Forgetting the great responsibility that comes with being a preeminent global power, the post-Cold War years were a time that Brands describes as “historical amnesia” in The Lessons of Tragedy, a book co-written with Charles Edel in 2018. Brands asks: Why did the Greeks perform tragic plays at the height of their resplendent cultural empire? They needed to push themselves forward and find a source of motivation in the dark side of life instead of lapsing into a state of inertia and languor.
Similarly, the United States needs to remember that the order—whether it be rules-based, liberal, international, or a combination of the three—established after WWII cannot be taken for granted. Americans need to constantly invest in its perpetuation. The rise of adversarial great powers is serving as a wake-up call for the Biden administration. The U.S. is moving closer to a coherent grand strategy “with help from Putin and Xi,” said Gaddis. “What the overall objective is, though— a world safe for democracy, or for a balance of power, or for U.S. hegemony— remains unclear.”
Whether officials call it grand strategy or nimble statecraft, the United States will need to think long-term, pay close attention to its limited resources, and curb assumptions that could entail misleading assessments. Scholars and practitioners in the realist camp advocate for an approach based solely on power and national interest. Those who are values-based, often dubbed liberals, believe that ideology has a fundamental role to play in shaping the world’s future, and they increasingly frame the world as a Manichean struggle between democracy and authoritarianism. Geostrategists draw heavily from the former group but emphasize the importance of geography and other factors preordained by the world’s physical construction.
Where all these schools of thought intersect, however, is in the recognition that the world is changing at an unparalleled pace thanks to technological development and that the United States’ pre-eminence is being challenged globally. Their prescriptions for setting the country back on track, though, differ significantly.
America’s history is riddled with hypocrisies and inconsistencies that make it easy for each aforementioned group to cherry-pick foreign policy decisions as a way of reinforcing their worldview. They will certainly continue to do so to justify their remedies to Sino-Russian rapprochement. The challenge for the current and future presidential administrations is to choose one course based on a rigorous analysis of the costs and benefits of each before hammering out a corresponding strategy. If it is marked by coherence, consistency, creativity, and a commitment to the success of the United States and its allies, the statesman is successfully practicing his craft.