Second, despite hopes for democracy in the Middle East, another is that the once promising Arab Spring shows signs of chaos and violence. Egypt continues to struggle through the transition to democracy as it witnesses once again the dominating control of the military. Continuing political confrontation will likely keep the country on the edge of civil war. Meanwhile, Libya is a breeding ground for extremists while events in Yemen point to the rise of al Qaeda. The civil war in Syria, including the use of chemical weapons, shows no signs of abating. While U.S. policy once rightly encouraged the democratic “spring,” Washington’s strategy remains unclear. This includes strengthening American leadership in the region in order to maintain stability, safeguarding national interests, and reinforcing our alliances with moderate nations and forces.

Global trade and rapid technological change continue to alter relationships among individuals, firms, and states. With globalization altering the nature and distribution of power, American policymakers need a grand strategy, using soft and hard power, to help them manage unexpected developments in the public and private sectors. American grand strategy must contend with the rise of new and unforeseen non-state actors whose ideologies mobilize followers. Beyond its military and economic might, America’s soft power permits it to help shape a global community based on shared interests, universal values, and ideals. In working with non-governmental and civil-society actors, the United States must effectively communicate what values shape its foreign policy.

Policymakers also face the truly modern challenge of cyber warfare in the hands of non-state actors. Never before have non-state actors, groups, and movements possessed an instrument capable of inflicting such immense harm. One element of American grand strategy must consider how to deal with groups that could attack the physical and economic infrastructure of American society. Policymakers worry that cyber hackers from an extremist organization might be able to cut off U.S. electric power during the winter or hack into the safety controls of a nuclear reactor. These new and unpredictable sources of disorder make the old grand strategy of containment passé in the face of modern foreign and domestic challenges.

Lastly, policymakers also must contemplate self-generated sources of disorder. The United States, whose current grand strategy is seen as adrift and disengaging, remains deeply divided politically. It faces the additional burden of operating without a positive, reassuring, and bipartisan strategy to guide its foreign policy. How can policymakers expend resources—the nation’s blood and treasure—when it is unclear why they are doing so and for what purposes? How can policymakers ask the public to support policies when people rightly wonder about the purpose and objectives of American foreign policy? Why should we, much less others, make sacrifices when the goals of American foreign policy are unknown? These are the fundamental questions that a new American grand strategy, when developed and implemented effectively, seeks to answer.

A decaying grand strategy or one that may be seen as disengaging despite powerful sources of global disorder presents a serious problem. The United States will struggle to manage challenges from resurgent great powers, destabilizing middle powers, a rising authoritarian axis, and less predictable non-state actors as long as the nation lacks a coherent, positive, and compelling vision for its grand strategy. Ultimately, the sources of disorder and the inevitable crises will compel the United States to formulate a new grand strategy—one better aligned and more precisely attuned to the risks and opportunities we face. As this book strongly promotes, it is far better to do so now than to wait until a crisis strikes. In the end, grand strategy is about much more than responding to problems. To be effective, it must embrace the fundamental reasons and motivations that shape how, why, and to what ends the United States engages in foreign policy.

Establishing the broad outlines of the problems with which American grand strategy must deal will help policymakers overcome the current confusion. Policymakers must ensure that grand strategy deals with complexities and provides clear guidance that helps them articulate policies for dealing with the sources of disorder. Such disorder has disoriented our vision of policy and demoralized the present generation of policymakers whose failure to define a coherent grand strategy for helping the state deal with the expected ebbs and flows in world politics remains an enduring problem. While such strategic shifts are routine, these have destabilizing consequences when policymakers do not remain mindful of the critical sources of disorder facing the nation.

Current Void in American Grand Strategy

By the beginning of the 20th century, with its resource-rich territory now stretching from coast to coast and its thriving industrial economy, the United States was poised to become a great power. Until then, American grand strategy had been focused inward, driven largely by the desire to build the nation’s territorial and economic foundations of power, and subsequently in the early twentieth century by a bout of isolationism. However, the outbreak of two world wars forced the United States off the sidelines and toward a more robust foreign policy. At the end of World War II, the United States claimed a new position of global leadership, as President Truman enjoyed the political license to articulate the more activist grand strategy of containment that was implemented through such policies as the Marshall Plan and documents as NSC-68.

More than four decades later, the end of the Cold War left America without a grand strategy to guide its foreign and domestic policies. While American leaders during the Cold War successfully marshaled the nation’s resources for the purpose of containing and perhaps defeating the Soviet Union, the United States today lacks a coherent and unified grand strategy. A nation without such a grand strategy is vulnerable to having policies that are shifting, erratic, and ineffective. This is an urgent issue because with signs of drift in American foreign policy, scholars are paying more attention to this void in grand strategy.[10] The increasing volume of literature devoted to U.S. grand strategy will be useful if it helps policymakers deal with the most enduring problems, rather than simply the most urgent priorities.

Ultimately, only grand strategy provides the broad vision that helps policymakers conduct foreign policy. Grand strategy encompasses the totality of the concepts upon which a state builds its policies, allowing it to guide its foreign, domestic, and economic policies towards agreed-upon and unified ends. In effect, no state can articulate and implement coherent and effective foreign and domestic policies unless these derive from a consistent set of principles. Without such principles, the state’s foreign policy will show signs of chaos and confusion. Scholars and policymakers must understand that they cannot articulate a coherent grand strategy without first achieving a consensus on the political goals that shape the state’s policies and allow policymakers to garner broad public support for that goal. For the United States, achieving this working consensus is more important than ever and yet so illusive.

When the state lacks a central adversary, its ability to prioritize interests is extremely difficult, particularly at a time when the nation confronts a complex mix of transnational problems. This includes, inter alia, terrorism, global economic crises, uncontrolled migration, world food shortages, narcotics trafficking, pollution, and climate change. The challenge for American grand strategy is to balance foreign and domestic priorities so that the nation can marshal the economic, military, and diplomatic clout necessary to maintain a world that contributes to peace, democracy, prosperity, and free markets. Failing to balance ends and means in the context of the principles governing American grand strategy puts at risk the nation’s substantial economic, military, and political advantages.

Although it is rare for a grand strategy to come to a formal end, this can occur when a major adversary is defeated or collapses. For example, what passes for American grand strategy today is influenced by the country’s experiences during the Cold War.[11] What shifted was the consensus following the 9/11 attacks about the nature of the threat posed by non-state armed groups. The United States now finds itself at another critical junction, as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan come to an end, as the nation pivots east to Asia despite chaos in the Middle East and elsewhere.

One area of consensus in the current literature holds that grand strategy emerges when the state faces a period of great struggle or new threats. One consequence is that grand strategy, albeit misleadingly, can become too reactive. When societies to conduct foreign policy in the midst of disorder, taking actions without a coherent grand strategy, they naturally fall prey to difficulties and anxieties. How could citizens of states, which face an increasingly disordered world, and yet lack a grand strategy to guide their actions, feel or act otherwise? Disorder without strategy is a recipe for confusion and failure.

To start with, Americans generally want to exercise leadership, but it is unclear whether the United States is willing and able to provide that leadership. Worse, it is difficult to articulate a grand strategy when policymakers do not have a coherent framework that relates the arc of problems to core principles in that strategy. The United States will remain in intellectual limbo until policymakers come to grips with building a grand strategy that deals effectively with the sources of disorder. Beyond the usual domestic political differences, one source of political polarization in Washington is profound uncertainty about what really matters in foreign policy. Americans are especially vulnerable to weariness from the daily grind of foreign policy, particularly when their actions are not guided by a positive vision of foreign policy. Grand strategy, then, is essential for establishing a consensus on goals and maintaining domestic support for long-term foreign policies.