At The Duck of Minerva Dan Nexon points out the irony of his teaching a college course on American Grand Strategy while being skeptical that the United States has a grand strategy:
I wrapped the 2022 edition of my undergraduate “Grand Strategy†seminar this past Tuesday.
This must have the eight or ninth iteration of the class. I like teaching it. I really do.
But I have significant reservations about “grand strategy†as a classroom subject.
I’m not at all convinced that grand strategy is a thing. Yes, plenty of people advocate for a preferred “grand strategies.†Not a few of them would love to become the ‘next George F. Kennan,’ which leads to some truly eyeroll-worthy titles.
It’s one thing to point to a proposal, such as containment or offshore balancing, and say “this is a grand strategy.†The problem comes when we try to develop consistent standards – ones that allow us to agree that “yep, that’s a grand strategy†or reply “no, that’s merely big tactics.â€
Read the whole thing.
It remains me a great deal of a college course I took as an undergraduate on the history of U. S. foreign policy. The very distinguished professor’s thesis was that the U. S. had no foreign policy. It was an argument that he and I had for the entire duration of the course.
I think that the U. S. has a foreign policy and, indeed, a grand strategy but it’s nothing like the foreign policy or grand strategy of, say, China in that it’s not an organized plan but an emergent phenomenon, formed of the individual decisions of hundreds of thousands or even millions of American diplomats, government officials at all levels, businessmen, consumers, and travelers, all much to the chagrin of the U. S. State Department I’m sure since they dream of running the show.
That’s the reason for the seeming conflict between the frequently encountered opinion encountered abroad that the people like Americans but don’t like the U. S. government. The federal government doesn’t actually reflect the American grand strategy.
