Looking beyond the headlines to address the enduring grand strategic questions facing the United States today. American foreign policy is in a state of upheaval. The rise of Donald Trump and his "America First" platform have created more uncertainty about America's role in the world than at any time in recent decades. From the South China Sea, to the Middle East, to the Baltics and Eastern Europe, the geopolitical challenges to U.S. power and influence seem increasingly severe—and America's responses to those challenges seem increasingly unsure. Questions that once had widely accepted answers are now up for debate. What role should the United States play in the world? Can, and should, America continue to pursue an engaged an assertive strategy in global affairs? In this book, a leading scholar of grand strategy helps to make sense of the headlines and the upheaval by providing sharp yet nuanced assessments of the most critical issues in American grand strategy today. Hal Brands asks, and answers, such questions as: Has America really blundered aimlessly in the world since the end of the Cold War, or has its grand strategy actually been mostly sensible and effective? Is America in terminal decline, or can it maintain its edge in a harsher and more competitive environment? Did the Obama administration pursue a policy of disastrous retrenchment, or did it execute a shrewd grand strategy focused on maximizing U.S. power for the long term? Does Donald Trump's presidency mean that American internationalism is dead? What type of grand strategy might America pursue in the age of Trump and after? What would happen if the United States radically pulled back from the world, as many leading academics—and, at certain moments, the current president—have advocated? How much military power does America need in the current international environment? Grappling with these kinds of issues is essential to understanding the state of America's foreign relations today and what path the country might take in the years ahead. At a time when American grand strategy often seems consumed by crisis, this collection of essays provides an invaluable guide to thinking about both the recent past and the future of America's role in the world.

American foreign policy is the subject of extensive debate. Many look to domestic factors as the driving forces of bad policies. Benjamin Miller instead seeks to account for changes in US international strategy by developing a theory of grand strategy that captures the key security approaches available to US decision-makers in times of war and peace. Grand Strategy from Truman to Trump makes a crucial contribution to our understanding of competing grand strategies that accounts for objectives and means of security policy. Miller puts forward a model that is widely applicable, based on empirical evidence from post-WWII to today, and shows that external factors—rather than internal concerns—are the most determinative.

This book investigates the drivers, tactics, and strategy that propel the Trump administration’s foreign policy. The key objective of this book is to look beyond the ‘noise’ of the Trump presidency in order to elucidate and make sense of contemporary US foreign policy. It examines the long-standing convictions of the president and the brutal worldview that he applies to US foreign policy; and his hard-line negotiation tactics and employment of unpredictability to keep America’s major foreign interlocutors off-guard, such as NATO members, China, Mexico, Canada, North Korea, and Iran – each of which are considered here. In strategy terms, the book explains that the president is responding to a new multipolar structure of power by engaging a Kissingerian strategy that eschews liberal values and seeks to adjust great power relations in Washington’s favor. By drawing upon a range of evidence and case studies, this book makes a number of compelling and provocative points to offer a new vector for debate about the workings, successes and failures, and ultimately the long-term implications for the world, of the Trump presidency. This book will be of much interest to students of US foreign policy, security studies, and IR in general.

This book maintains that the theory of imperialism should incorporate the concept of an "operational code" of political elites to account for agencies' actions. This concept would explain the strategic continuity and tactical change in US grand strategy from Obama to Trump. While both presidents pursued a strategy of off-shore balancing, their competing worldviews led to tangible differences in the way they sought to restore American power after Bush and to contain the rise of China. This book offers an important contribution after the departure of Bush concluded the 21st century debate on imperialism, at a time when an increasingly post-American world order has undermined the "end of the state" thesis. Indeed, over the last twelve years US grand strategy has emphasized inter-state competition rather than the annihilation of rogue regimes. These events require renewed efforts for the theory of imperialism to contribute to Globalisation Theory at this crucial historical junction. Zeno Leoni is a Teaching Fellow in "Challenges to the International Order" at the Defence Studies Department of King's College London, UK, and the Defence Academy of the UK. He is affiliated with the Lau China Institute at King's College London and currently writes on the new Cold War between US and China.

An informed modern plan for post-2020 American foreign policy that avoids the opposing dangers of retrenchment and overextension Russia and China are both believed to have "grand strategies"--detailed sets of national security goals backed by means, and plans, to pursue them. In the United States, policy makers have tried to articulate similar concepts but have failed to reach a widespread consensus since the Cold War ended. While the United States has been the world's prominent superpower for over a generation, much American thinking has oscillated between the extremes of isolationist agendas versus interventionist and overly assertive ones. Drawing on historical precedents and weighing issues such as Russia's resurgence, China's great rise, North Korea's nuclear machinations, and Middle East turmoil, Michael O'Hanlon presents a well-researched, ethically sound, and politically viable vision for American national security policy. He also proposes complementing the Pentagon's set of "4+1" pre-existing threats with a new "4+1" biological, nuclear, digital, climatic, and internal dangers.

This book offers a comprehensive explanatory account of Trump's foreign policy by assessing its nature, determining the extent to which it broke with the policy of preceding presidencies, and explaining how this shift came about. We argue that Trump has succeeded in remaking America’s grand strategy by unmaking its long-standing strategy of what we call Open Door Globalism, a strategy of economic expansionism through the promotion of open markets across the globe and its institutionalization into a US-led liberal world order. Trump has broken with Open Door Globalism in probably lasting ways by adopting an outlook and strategy of neo-mercantilist economic nationalism based upon an ‘America First’ redefinition of US sovereignty and national interests. We explain this Trumpian shift in US foreign policy by focusing on the social sources of Trump’s foreign policy-making elite’s agency, analysing it both in terms of foreign policy-makers’ embeddedness in elite networks and within the changing global and domestic context. The latter, coupled with a crisis of established elite power, also indicates why Biden has not returned to Open Door Globalism but doubled down on some aspects of the Trumpian economic nationalist break.

What is grand strategy ? What does it aim to achieve? And what differentiates it from normal strategic thought--what, in other words, makes it "grand"? In answering these questions, most scholars have focused on diplomacy and warfare, so much so that "grand"? In answering these questions, most scholars have focused on diplomacy and warfare, so much so that "grand strategy" has become almost an equivalent of "military history." The traditional attention paid to military affairs is understandable, but in today's world it leaves out much else that could be considered political, and therefore strategic. Just as contemporary world politics is driven by a wide range of non-military issues, the most thorough considerations of grand strategy must consider the bases of peace and security--including gender, race, the environment, and a wide range of cultural, social, political, and economic issues. Rethinking American Grand Strategy assembles a roster of leading historians to examine America's place in the world. Its innovative chapters re-examine familiar figures, such as John Quincy Adams, George Kennan, and Henry Kissinger, while also revealing the forgotten episodes and hidden voices of American grand strategy. They expand the scope of diplomatic and military history by placing the grand strategies of public health, race, gender, humanitarianism, and the law alongside military and diplomatic affairs to reveal hidden strategists as well as strategies. --