Good Luck With That Grand Strategy

Excerpt

Thought leaders and foreign policy veterans can’t stop themselves from writing about the new era of great power competition with China and America’s lack of a grand strategy. Gen. James Mattis wrote about it in 2015. Former National Security Adviser John Bolton penned an opinion piece about it earlier this year. The RAND Corporation has a Center for Analysis of U.S. Grand Strategy. Universities are adding grand strategy programs—Yale, Harvard, Duke, Georgetown, Texas, and most recently Florida, to name a few. Would-be diplomats and policy wonks are poring over writings of Sun Tzu, Carl von Clausewitz, and Henry Kissinger. They debate the Thucydides Trap and the clashes that often result from a rising power’s efforts to replace a ruling power. 

Efforts to ensure American strength and containment of those who most threaten the rules-based order are laudable. Democrats seek to channel Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Republicans invoke the spirit of Ronald Reagan. Each landed upon a whole-of-government approach to face the challenges of their times, be they Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, or Soviet totalitarianism. 

Jonathan Schanzer is senior vice president for research at Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Follow him on Twitter @JSchanzer. FDD is a nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.