Competing perspectives on American grand strategy

How should the next president refine American Grand Strategy? That is the subject of a report released today by the Center for New American Security (CNAS). CNAS herded a bunch of us cats (including yours truly) in the hopes of starting a cat fight. You can judge for yourself, or come see the fur fly in person at the CNAS Annual Conference on June 13.

As I read the report, there is greater overlap among the competing perspectives than one might expect (perhaps even more than the CNAS cat-herders expected). Dick Betts calls for the greatest amount of change from the status quo grand strategy, but I wonder if that isn’t because he pegs the status quo to somewhere around January 2003, at the high-water mark of what he would consider to be wrong-headed American military interventionist impulses. I call for the least amount of change to the status quo strategy, but that is because I consider the second-term Bush grand strategy, which Obama has largely tried to implement (whilst rhetorically repudiating), to be a reasonable exemplar of a post-Cold War approach that has been more successful than not. Bob Art has his own take, which I consider to be fairly compatible with what I call the "legacy grand strategy." And Anne-Marie Slaughter emphasizes the prevalence of networks, which, she argues, requires a fundamental rethink of grand strategy. I think she is right about the importance of networks, and I am all for a rethink of grand strategy. After doing that rethink, I end up more comfortable with the strategy that has hitherto guided us than she is, but I think the differences are a matter of nuance.

I am willing to bet that my FP colleagues who also blog on grand strategy from time to time will agree with me on this narrow point — that the CNAS group has a lot more in common than in dispute — even if they disagree profoundly with my own preferred strategy. Since the CNAS group does not include a true-believer in "off-shore balancing," or other such more-radical alternative retreats from American global leadership, it will be interesting to read a substantive critique-and-proposal along those lines.