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The End of Grand Strategy: America Must Think Small
Article in Foreign Affairs · April 2020
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4/14/2020
The End of Grand Strategy
e End of Grand Strategy
America Must
ink Small
By Daniel W. Drezner, Ronald R. Krebs, and Randall Schweller
May/June 2020
Play Audio
An U.S. soldier in Zhari District, Afghanistan, July 2010
Christoph Bangert / Laif / Redux
W
hatever else U.S. President Donald Trump has done in the eld of international
relations, he can claim one signal accomplishment: making grand strategy
interesting again. For decades, American foreign policy elites in both parties
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embraced liberal internationalism, the idea that Washington should sustain and expand a
global order that promoted open markets, open polities, and multilateral institutions. But
Trump has repeatedly attacked the key pillars of liberal internationalism, from questioning
the value of nato to blowing up trade agreements to insulting allies. When, in July 2017, his
national security team met with him in a windowless Pentagon meeting room known as “the
Tank” to educate him about the virtues of the liberal international order, Trump blasted
them as “a bunch of dopes and babies,” according to
e Washington Post.
Trump’s disruptions have forced foreign policy analysts to question rst principles for the
rst time in decades. With bedrock assumptions about liberal internationalism dislodged,
the debate over U.S. grand strategy has experienced a renaissance. New voices have entered
the fray, ranging from far-left progressives to populist nationalists on the right. Advocates of
retrenchment and restraint have received a fuller hearing, and unusual alliances have formed
to advance common agendas.
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Yet even as these debates have owered, the very concept of grand strategy has become a
chimera. A grand strategy is a road map for how to match means with ends. It works best on
predictable terrain—in a world where policymakers enjoy a clear understanding of the
distribution of power, a solid domestic consensus about national goals and identity, and
stable political and national security institutions. In 2020, none of that exists anymore.
e changing nature of power, along with its di usion in the international system, has made
it much more di cult for the United States to shape its destiny.
e rise of multiculturalism
and the populist backlash against it have eroded shared narratives and a common identity.
Political polarization has hollowed out the country’s domestic political institutions, meaning
that each new administration takes o ce bent on reversing whatever its predecessor did.
Antiestablishment fever has debased policy debate and loosened the checks on executive
power that generate consistency.
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We write as three scholars who do not agree on much when it comes to politics, policy, or
ideology. We do agree, however, that these new factors have rendered any exercise in crafting
or pursuing a grand strategy costly and potentially counterproductive. None will be e ective,
and none will be long standing. Rather than quarrel over contending strategic doctrines,
academics, pundits, think tankers, and policymakers should focus on more pragmatic forms
of problem solving. From military intervention to foreign aid, policy made on a case-by-case
basis will be at least as good, and likely better, than policy derived from grand strategic
commitments. To debate grand strategy is to indulge in navel-gazing while the world burns.
So it is time to operate without one.
POWER PROBLEMS
A successful grand strategy must be grounded in an accurate perception of the global
distribution of power. One that grossly exaggerates a foe or underestimates a threat is not
long for this world, because it will trigger policy choices that back re. Indeed, one reason so
many have attacked the United States’ strategy of liberal internationalism over the past
decade is that they believe the strategy failed to appreciate the rise of China.
Power in global politics is no longer what it once was.
e ability of states to exercise power,
the way they exercise power, the purposes to which they put power, and who holds power—
all have fundamentally changed.
e result is an emerging world of nonpolarity and disorder.
And that is not a world where grand strategy works well.
Many things remain the same, of course. People still de ne their identities largely in terms
of nationality. Countries still seek control over crucial resources and access to vital sea-lanes
and clash over territory and regional in uence.
ey still want to maximize their wealth,
in uence, security, prestige, and autonomy. But amassing territory is no longer the prize it
used to be. Today’s great powers seem determined to do two things more than anything else:
get rich and avoid catastrophic military contests.
ey understand that states move up the
ladder of international power and prestige by building knowledge-based economies and by
promoting technological innovation and connectedness within global networks.
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Meanwhile, power is becoming more about the ability to disrupt, block, disable, veto, and
destroy than it is about the ability to construct, enable, repair, and build. Consider the “antiaccess/area-denial” (A2/AD) capabilities that China is pursuing—mainly cyberwarfare
techniques and antisatellite weapons—with the goal of raising the risks to U.S. forces
operating in the western Paci c. Iran is believed to be doing the same thing in the Persian
Gulf, using submarines, antiship missiles, and sophisticated mines in an e ort to make the
area a no-go zone for the U.S. Navy.
When power is used for constructive purposes, it is becoming increasingly issue speci c,
unable to translate from one domain into another. Military power rarely achieves national
goals or xes problems anymore; interventions usually only make bad situations worse.
e
yawning outcome gap between the rst and the second Gulf wars makes this plain. Power
simply isn’t as fungible as it used to be. No wonder, for example, that the Trump
administration’s e orts to hinge security and intelligence cooperation on renegotiated trade
deals have fallen at.
With traditional power no longer buying the in uence it once
did, global order and cooperation will be in short supply.
Finally, the di usion of power throughout the international system is creating a nonpolar
world. Many point to the rise of China and other competitors to say that the world is
returning to multipolarity (or to bipolarity within a more multipolar setting), but that view
understates the tectonic shift currently underway. International relations will no longer be
dominated by one, two, or even several great powers. Because economic and military power
no longer yield in uence as reliably as they once did, the top dogs have lost their bite.
weak and the mighty su er the same paralysis and enjoy the same freedom of action.
e
Moreover, new actors, from local militias to nongovernmental organizations to large
corporations, each possessing and exerting various kinds of power, increasingly compete with
states. Relatively few states represented in the un can claim a monopoly on force within their
territorial borders. Violent nonstate actors are no longer minor players. Ethnic groups,
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warlords, youth gangs, terrorists, militias, insurgents, and transnational criminal
organizations—all are rede ning power across the globe.
ese changes in power are producing a world marked by entropy. A world populated by
dozens of power centers will prove extremely di cult to navigate and control. In the new
global disorder, even countries with massive economies and militaries may not be able to get
others to do what they want. It is essentially impossible for modern states, no matter how
militarily and politically powerful, to in uence violent groups that prosper in ungoverned
spaces or online. Not only do such actors o er no clear target to threaten or destroy, but
many are also motivated by nonnegotiable concerns, such as the establishment of a caliphate
or their own separate state. Worse still, violence is for many a source of social cohesion.
With traditional power no longer buying the in uence it once did, global order and
cooperation will be in short supply. International relations will increasingly consist of messy
ad hoc arrangements.
e danger comes not from re—shooting wars among the great
powers or heated confrontations over human rights, intellectual property, or currency
manipulation.
e danger comes instead from ice—frozen con icts over geopolitical,
monetary, trade, or environmental issues. Given the immense costs of warfare, great powers
that cannot resolve their disputes at the negotiating table no longer have the option—at
least if they are rational—of settling them on the battle eld. When political arrangements
do materialize, they will be short lived. Like ocking birds or schooling sh, they promise to
lose their shape, only to form again after a delay.
Grand strategy is not well suited to an entropic world. Grand strategic thinking is linear.
world today is one of interaction and complexity, wherein the most direct path between two
e
points is not a straight line. A disordered, cluttered, and uid realm is precisely one that does
not recognize grand strategy’s supposed virtue: a practical, durable, and consistent plan for
the long term. To operate successfully in such an environment, actors must constantly
change their strategies.
A NATION DIVIDED
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A sustainable grand strategy must also rest on a shared worldview among key political
constituencies. If each new government enters o ce with a radically di erent understanding
of global challenges and opportunities, no strategy will last long. Each new government will
tear up its predecessor’s policies, shredding the very idea of a grand strategy. Containment
endured because every U.S. president from Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan largely adhered
to its underlying vision of global a airs. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama
all embraced variations on liberal internationalism.
Such a consensus no longer exists. Over the last half century, across the West, there has been
rising skepticism of the virtues, and even the reality, of nations—of “imagined communities,”
in the words of the political scientist Benedict Anderson, each uni ed by a shared narrative.
at skepticism arose from a good place: a growing awareness that dominant narratives can
be repressive, that they often re ect the interests and experiences of the powerful and silence
the voices of communities on the margins. Beginning in the early 1970s, in the Vietnam
War’s dying days, multiculturalism began to hold sway, at least in the United States. More
than just a strategy to manage diversity in a fair and inclusive way, the concept was grounded
in mounting doubt that societies should be rooted in some common identity.
Some e ects of this cultural revolution, such as the explosion of weeks and months
designated to celebrate speci c ethnic and racial heritages, strike most Americans as
innocuous and even good. But one consequence is particularly problematic: Americans today
lack a common national narrative. For good reason, few speak any longer of the assimilative
“melting pot.” As the historian Jill Lepore lamented in these pages in 2019, historians
stopped writing about the nation decades ago. Listen to any Democratic debate this
presidential campaign season, and you will see how uncomfortable American politicians on
the liberal left have become with the rhetoric of American nationalism.
Yet nationalism has proved an enduring force, as has people’s desire for a shared narrative to
make sense of their world. Cultural conservatives in the United States have long mined this
vein.
ey have sought to de ne a cultural core, manifest in such books as
e Dictionary of
Cultural Literacy, in which the academic E. D. Hirsch, Jr., attempted to list the gures,
events, and works that “every American needs to know.”
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ey have waged war against
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bilingual education, and they have led a decades-long campaign—successful to date in over
half of American states—to declare English the o cial language.
ey have charged that the
United States is coming apart at the seams, blaming new immigrants for refusing to buy into
the national creed. Liberals have vacillated on American exceptionalism, as in 2009, when
Obama declared, “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits
believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”
Conservatives, by contrast, have leaned into it. Unlike the Democrats, Trump is very
comfortable with nationalist language—although he deploys it in a manner that excludes
half the country.
Among the victims of a fractured national narrative has been
grand strategy.
Among the victims of a fractured national narrative has been grand strategy. Grand strategy
rests on a security narrative that sets out the main protagonists of global politics, tells a story
about what those actors have done and will do, and depicts the global backdrop against
which events will take place. Debates over contending grand strategies are typically debates
over one or more of these narrative elements.
ose advocating deep engagement, for
instance, believe that American and global security are indivisible, whereas those calling for
restraint believe the opposite. In the absence of the rhetorical tropes that a shared national
narrative supplies, crafting a grand strategy that can resonate with diverse constituencies
becomes impossible. It becomes harder to implement a particular strategy across various
policy areas and to sustain that strategy over time.
One manifestation of the narrative divide in the United States is the stark polarization that
has come to de ne American politics, and not just on hot-button domestic issues. Across a
wide array of foreign policy questions—climate change, counterterrorism, immigration, the
Middle East, the use of force—Americans are divided along party lines.
at is no
environment for a useful debate about grand strategy. For one thing, it eviscerates the utility
of expert feedback. Political scientists have found that an expert consensus can alter public
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attitudes about issues on which the public was not already polarized, such as how to respond
to China’s currency manipulation. When the public is already split along party lines,
however, as it is on climate change, polarization renders an elite consensus worse than
useless. Expert opinions from nonpartisan sources simply make partisans double down on
their preexisting beliefs.
Political polarization also makes learning di cult. For grand strategy to improve, there has
to be agreement on what failed and why. In a polarized political environment, the side that
fears being held responsible will not accept the premise that its policy failed until long after
the fact. Republicans, for example, insisted that the Iraq war was a triumph for years after it
was obvious that the United States had lost the peace. To support their leader, partisans have
a persistent incentive to bend the truth to t their arguments, robbing the foreign policy
discussion of the agreed-on facts that ordinarily frame debate.
Most important, polarization means that any party’s grand strategy will last only as long as
that party controls the executive branch. Because Congress and the courts have granted the
president a near monopoly on the articulation of the national security narrative, a single
president can radically shift the country’s grand strategy. And so can the next president from
the other party.
THE PEOPLE VS. THE EXPERTS
Grand strategy requires a robust marketplace of ideas, backed by sturdy institutions, to help
policymakers correct course over time. Even an enduring grand strategy must cope with
changes in the strategic environment, and even well-considered strategies will result in
policy missteps that need to be reversed.
e United States made its share of foreign policy
errors during the Cold War, but the push and pull between the establishment and its critics
and between the executive branch and Congress eventually reined in the worst excesses of
American activism and prevented the overembrace of restraint.
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Over the last half century, once-stable structures of authority have eroded, and the American
public has grown increasingly skeptical of the federal government, the press, and every other
major public institution. Americans’ distrust extends to the foreign policy establishment, and
on this, it is hard to blame them. U.S. foreign policy elites largely endorsed the use of force
in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, and none of those interventions could be called a success.
As revealed in “
by
e Afghanistan Papers,” a collection of government documents published
e Washington Post late last year, for over a decade, civilian and military leaders lied to the
public about how the war in Afghanistan was going.
e 2008 nancial crisis and the Arab
Spring caught foreign policy elites unprepared. Clearly, some healthy skepticism of experts is
warranted.
Too much skepticism, however, can be corrosive. Calling into doubt the value of foreign
policy expertise undermines a healthy marketplace of ideas on grand strategy. As the
journalist Chris Hayes warned in Twilight of the Elites, “If the experts as a whole are
discredited, we are faced with an inexhaustible supply of quackery.” Furthermore, new
entrants are advancing their arguments in part by bashing the preexisting consensus on
grand strategy.
ey are exploiting narratives about failed foreign policies of the past to
argue that they could hardly do worse. As Trump told voters at a campaign rally in 2016,
“
e experts are terrible.
ey say, ‘Donald Trump needs a foreign policy adviser.’ . . . Would
it be worse than what we’re doing now?”
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Wreckage from the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, September 2013
Esam Omran Al-Fetori / Reuters
e death of respect for expertise is just one element of the biggest political story of the
twenty- rst century: the proliferation of right-wing populist nationalism as part of
mainstream politics across the West. It is no ash in the pan, because its rise is rooted partly
in economic dislocation but equally, if not more, in the politics of cultural reaction. And
populism renders grand strategy moot.
At the heart of all forms of populism lies a simple image of politics.
e populist leader
asserts the existence of a morally pure people, set in contrast to corrupt elites, and he claims
that he alone knows the people’s will. Populist politics therefore tilts authoritarian. In
sweeping away supposedly corrupt elites and institutions, the populist leader weakens all
forces standing in his way. Asserting his unmediated line to the people, the populist leader
claims to represent them better than any political process can. Critics becomes enemies,
constitutional constraints become obstacles to democracy, and the tyranny of the majority
becomes a virtue, not a vice.
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Populism is not hospitable to grand strategy. First, populism accentuates internal divisions.
Polarizing by design, it narrows the sphere of the supposedly authentic people so that,
within the nation as a territorial and legal entity, there can be no unity. Second, populist
politicians regularly mobilize the people in righteous anger against enemies. When heated
rhetoric is in the air, emotional responses to the crisis of the day threaten to overtake rational
strategy. Strategy becomes less supple, as leaders have trouble pursuing conciliatory tactics in
a climate of a ront and retribution. Finally, populism concentrates authority in the
charismatic leader. It disempowers bureaucrats and institutions that can check ckle rulers
and block extreme decisions. Policy in a populist regime is thus a re ection of the leader—
whether of his ideological commitments or his whims. If the populist leader does pursue
something akin to a grand strategy, it will not outlive his rule.
WE COME TO BURY GRAND STRATEGY
Grand strategy is dead.
e radical uncertainty of nonpolar global politics makes it less
useful, even dangerous. Even if it were helpful in organizing the United States’ response to
global challenges today, an increasingly divided domestic polity has made it harder to
implement a coherent and consistent grand strategy. Popular distrust of expertise has
corroded sensible debate over historical lessons and prospective strategies. Populism has
eviscerated the institutional checks and balances that keep strategy from swinging violently.
e nation’s strategic thinkers, however, remain in the early stages of grieving for grand
strategy.
denial.
e raging debate over contending strategic options suggests that many are still in
e ire directed at the Trump administration for its lack of strategic thinking implies
that many are stuck on anger. We ourselves di er on whether to mourn or to celebrate the
demise of grand strategy, but we agree that it is high time we moved on to the nal stage of
the grieving process: acceptance.
Moving forward without grand strategy requires embracing two principles: decentralization
and incrementalism. Highly uncertain conditions call for decentralized but mutually
coordinated decision-making networks.
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e corporate sector has learned that managers must
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avoid the temptation to control every decision and instead gure out how to steer
innovation, by shaping the environment within which choices emerge. Smart corporations
decentralize authority and responsibility, encourage employees to address problems through
teamwork, and take an informal approach to assigning tasks and responsibilities.
Governments should organize their foreign policy machinery in the same way. Appreciating
regional knowledge and trusting expert feedback is a better way to handle trouble spots and
emergent problems and to defuse crises before they metastasize.
Organizational change must go hand in hand with a cultural one: toward prizing the virtues
of bottom-up experimentation. Grand strategy wagers that careful planning at the center
produces the best results. It presumes that the costs of being too exible outweigh those of
being too rigid. But that is unwise when change can occur rapidly and unpredictably.
Incrementalism is the safer bet. It does not require putting all your eggs in one basket. It
cannot achieve victory in one fell swoop, but it does avoid disastrous losses. It allows for
swift adaptation to changing circumstances. In practice, it would mean devolving
responsibility from Washington to theater commanders, special envoys, and subject-matter
experts. In other words, it means taking the exact opposite tack of so many past
administrations, which concentrated ever more decision-making in the White House.
Aspiring national security advisers should give up competing for the title of the next George
Kennan. Crafting a durable successor to containment is neither important nor possible for
the near future. Improving U.S. foreign policy performance is. Given the recent record of
U.S. foreign policy, that goal doesn’t seem half bad.
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