The debacle over the Congressional Progressive Caucus’ letter on Ukraine reflects the underlying tensions between progressive values and realist grand strategies of restraint—as well as the danger of progressives failing to see the difference between the two.
I think a lot of people are kidding themselves about what grand strategy is—it’s worldmaking. It’s an attempt to put the power of the state in service of grand political purpose. States big and...
So the New York Times reported on Beverly Gage, a history professor at Yale University, resigning from her post as head of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy because of donor pressure....
Here’s my argument: Late 80s/early 90s Soviet Union. The United Kingdom in 2016. The United States 2016 to now. Three contemporary examples of international suicide that conventional IR neither...
by Anonymous US National Security expert, as part of a new series of posts providing insights into the policy-making process Sir:Per your request at the 0500 stand-up, I have compiled the full set of analogies developed to wrap around the pending National Military Strategy. Staff were told to supply a framework analogy appropriate for supporting the following: Because we cannot be certain when, where, or under what conditions the next fight will occur, the Joint Force must maintain an [insert analogy] stance—with the strength, agility, endurance, resilience, flexibility, and awareness to...
It won't be too long before we start to get a better understanding of what foreign policy in a Trump Administration will actually look like. It's useful to keep in mind that current rhetoric is no guarantee of future grand strategy. Remember when we all worried that the Bush Administration was going to be too isolationist? Good times. But let's assume, for a moment, that the past is prologue. Or the prologue is the main part of the book. Or whatever. This raises an interesting puzzle: what the $@!#* • #!*$$%*(!! is he doing? Seriously. What the !#(&--^&!# stupid #$#(*$!! is going on?...
[Note: This is a guest post by Sean Kay, Robson Professor of Politics at Ohio Wesleyan University and Mershon Associate at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at the Ohio State University. He has long-researched and written on NATO policy and worked in the US Department of Defense during the first round of NATO enlargement planning. His forthcoming book is America’s Search for Security: The Triumph of Idealism and the Return of Realism (Rowman and Littlefield, 2014).] Russia’s incursion into Ukraine presents the United States with a dilemma. The cries to “do something” are...
The word 'global' has become so frequently used in Western strategic debate that is has almost become background music. On one level, overuse robs it of resonance. But on another, it might be contributing to the conceptual and rhetorical overstretch that has led the US to overextend itself. Consider just one recent example. In making the case recently for maintaining the Pax Americana, the expansive grand strategy in which the US tries to hold on to unipolar supremacy with a worldwide military presence, Stephen Brooks, John Ikenberry and William Wohlforth deploy the word 'global' (or words...
And thus Bret Stephens lambasts Democrats for daring to tell the GOP to moderate its foreign policy. Stephens' recipe for "Getting the GOP's Groove Back"? Obama foreign policy, but with an assist from the Resolve Fairy on Iran. I'm not kidding. If you have a Foreign Affairs subscription, you can check it out for yourself. The sad thing is that once you wade through Stephens' boilerplate invocation of supply-side economics (it works! Kennedy cut taxes! Europe bad!) and his anodyne proposals for how big-defense and small-government conservatives can teach one another important lessons... well,...
We should stop using the term “isolationism” to describe policies tht entail a more restrained U.S. role in the world.
It bears repeating that nobody votes on foreign policy, and most folks don't know anything about it anyway (remember that a nontrivial number of Americans think South Korea is our greatest enemy). I'll quote myself: [N]obody gives a damn about foreign policy. Theories of democratic responsiveness and empirical models of foreign policy choice need to begin with this fact. Nobody cares! That thing we do? The international relations bit? It's somewhat less important than professional bowling or HGTV. [Americans] only care about security--and their understanding of that is about as sophisticated...
The first decade of the 21st century was a heady time for foreign-policy wonks. Why? Because their world was awash with Great Debates about Grand StrategyTM. Now things seem much less exciting. Perhaps that's because, despite the best efforts of the usual suspects, the partisan debate no longer maps well onto big ideas about grand strategy. Remember how vacuous the Romney-Obama debates were on foreign policy issues? Yeah, that. The groundwork for the current lull in Great Debates about Grand StrategyTM predates 2012. The Bush Administration largely abandoned neo-conservativism in the latter...