Obama's Grand Strategy

[Bill Moore]

On SWJ we repeatedly see posts that the Obama administration doesn't have a grand strategy. Either those posting don't understand what a grand strategy is, or more likely they disagree and believe his grand strategy is ineffective. That is quite different from not having a grand strategy. Dr. Hal Brands provides a simple summary of Obama's grand strategy, and while a little dated little has changed:http://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/dspace...Grand Strategy


Breaking Down Obama's Grand Strategy

Grand strategy is essentially an integrated set of principles and priorities that give structure to a country’s statecraft. It consists of a series of considered, interlocking judgments: about the nature of the global environment, a country’s highest goals and interests within that environment, the primary threats to those goals and interests, and the ways that finite resources can be deployed accordingly. These judgments make up a sort of intellectual calculus that informs policy, the various concrete initiatives—diplomacy, foreign aid, the use of force—through which states interact with the world. Put simply, a grand strategy is the basic conceptual framework that helps nations navigate a complex and dangerous international environment.

The very endeavor of grand strategy requires countries to prioritize among competing challenges and opportunities, and to make painful decisions about trade-offs between various goals and objectives. It forces officials to relate short-term policies to long-term interests, and to both exploit and preserve the myriad sources of national power. Moreover, they must do all of this in a constantly evolving international environment, and amid the furies of domestic and bureaucratic politics at home.

3 Principles of Obama's grand strategy

1. Preserve the international order by sustaining the American leadership and primacy on which it rests.

2. Engage with smarter, cheaper, and more prudent ways for exerting leadership, especially when the use of force is required.

This means avoiding prolonged stability operations that the country can no longer afford, and finding more discreet ways of applying force.

3. Rebalance to the Asia-Pacific

These principles have generally anchored the administration’s thinking about big-picture global issues, that they cut across key strategy documents and policy statements, they relate to one another in fairly coherent ways, and their influence can be seen across a broad range of actual initiatives.

Obama’s grand strategy may be plausible enough, but it also carries within it 5important problems and dilemmas.

1. It lacks rhetorical punch (no rallying cry)
2. Means and Ends are aligned (and increasingly they are misaligned)
3. Challenges in Europe will hinder the rebalance to Asia
4. Pivoting from strength to weakness (specifically in the Middle East)
5. Under reach can be as dangerous as overreach

Above all, there is the broader danger that too much retrenchment or caution could undermine the stability of the post–Cold War system in which the United States has thrived and prospered

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