New Voices in Grand Strategy

Michael J. Zak

Source Link

Foreword

In June 2008, the Center for a New American Security published a compendium of essays to grapple with the central questions of American grand strategy.The volume compiled the views of leading senior strategists from across the political spectrum and from both academia and the policy community. Four years later, CNAS embarked on a similar venture, presenting the views of four more expert thinkers.

Today, the debate over America’s proper role in the world is perhaps wider than at any time in decades. The 2016 presidential election illuminated deep divides in the American public about the scope of the country’s interests, the nature of existing threats, the financial and military burdens the United States should shoulder, the degree to which values as well as interests should motivate national action, and the methods for attaining national objectives, however defined. The debate among national security experts on such matters should be just as wide and searching.

With the very vision for U.S. global leadership up for grabs, CNAS now seeks to broaden the existing debate by bringing new voices to the conversation. We have commissioned a series of essays on American grand strategy from a new generation of thinkers, strategists, academics, and policymakers. As will immediately become apparent, their contributions are not bound by the intellectual and strategic strictures of the past. Our goal was to question the assumptions and decisions that have guided U.S. foreign policy in the post–Cold War era, to assess how ongoing changes in the world should reshape U.S. grand strategy, and ultimately to propose recommendations and alternatives for the way forward. The essays in this volume are fresh, rigorously analytical, and provocative – deliberately so.

They also elucidate and deepen the range of grand-strategic options, identifying different and distinct approaches. These seven distinct, thoughtful contributions from rising leaders in the field serve as starting points for policymakers seeking to define America’s role in a changing world. We hope that they will also serve as a resource for all those wishing to thoughtfully consider the right grand strategy for the United States today.