BY ANDREW LATHAM
U.S. President Joe Biden, right, stands with Chinese President Xi Jinping before a meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit meeting, Monday, Nov. 14, 2022, in Bali, Indonesia. Biden says Chinese counterpart Xi has agreed to resume crucial talks on climate between the two countries. The Chinese and U.S. leaders met on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in Bali.
Since the end of World War II, there have been three occasions when American policymakers have had the motive, means and opportunity to forge a new “grand strategy.”
The first was in the late 1940s, when American policymakers were forced to confront the new reality of an ideologically inflected bipolar competition with the Soviet Union. In this case, U.S. policymakers adopted a grand strategy of “containment,” defined broadly as the use of American power to check the expansion of Soviet influence and prevent the spread of communism more generally.
The second occasion was in the early 1990s, when American policymakers seized the opportunity presented by the end of the Cold War and the onset of the so-called Unipolar Moment. On this occasion, as the structural conditions of American geopolitical primacy and ideological hegemony became clear, U.S. policymakers settled on a grand strategy of liberal internationalism — that is, a strategy of U.S. military primacy in the service of creating and upholding a truly global liberal international order.
The third occasion, still ongoing, began in the mid-2010s, when unipolarity decisively gave way to the current era of multipolar great-power competition. A decade or so into this new era, the debate over how best to adapt to this new geopolitical reality has yet to be settled, with at least five competing visions of what the United States’s next grand strategy ought to look like remaining in contention.
The first of these is liberal internationalism. This strategy represents a continuation of the U.S. strategy of the post-Cold War years, but adapted to the realities of the new international order. It focuses on using American power to uphold what is now called the rules-based international order (RBIO). In its contemporary form, liberal internationalism envisions a worldwide U.S. military presence in support of an international order built on open and free trade, democracy and human rights.
While conceding that the unipolar moment has passed and that the rise of rival great powers is inevitable, liberal internationalism envisions enmeshing those powers in a dense web of U.S.-led institutions that will limit rivalry, facilitate cooperation and dissuade potentially revisionist powers from attempting to overthrow the existing international order. It also holds that, as U.S. primacy underpins the RBIO, Washington must maintain unrivaled military forces capable of deterring or defending against any potential threat to that order.
The second grand strategy currently in contention is that of deep engagement, which is similar in some respects to liberal internationalism but differs from it in important ways. It is similar in that it advocates U.S. primacy and a robust forward presence of U.S. forces.
But deep engagement differs from liberal internationalism in that it focuses more tightly on those regions of the world – Asia, Europe and the Middle East – that its advocates hold to be of particular importance to the United States. It further holds that Washington should maintain military forces in those regions not only to prevent hostile regional hegemons from emerging but generally to dampen any potential regional rivalries that could erupt absent the reassuring presence of U.S. forces. While one of its objectives is a stable, U.S.-led international order, unlike liberal internationalism, deep engagement tends to downplay the promotion of democracy and human rights as strategic goals.
A third contending grand strategic vision is that of strategic competition. This is a grand strategy that fully embraces the idea that the current international order is one of multipolar great power competition and recommends that the United States compete more purposefully and effectively. It comes in both minimalist and maximalist versions.
The minimalist version – managed strategic competition – emphasizes that the goal of strategic competition with the United States’s only real rival, China, is a stable form of competition in which the adversary is neither demonized nor treated as an existential threat, and the objective of which is not total victory. Another, more maximalist, variant frames the new strategic context as “Cold War II” and calls for adopting an updated version of the Cold War grand strategy of containment, with China as its new object.
Restraint, the fourth contending vision, is a grand strategy premised on the assumption that the United States should not use its national power resources to uphold and defend the rules-based international order, but instead use that power to pursue the more limited objectives of defending the U.S. homeland, securing the global commons and otherwise maintaining a stable balance of power in the world’s key regions.
While this overlaps somewhat with deep engagement, it differs from that grand strategy in that it rejects the argument that maintaining such a stable balance requires a robust forward military presence with its associated extensive web of alliance and basing agreements. Realist-restraint grand strategy favors instead securing the United States’s home region (North America or the Western Hemisphere) and deploying forces abroad only to prevent the emergence of a hegemon in the key regions of Europe, Northeast Asia or the Persian Gulf, or to prevent a state from dominating the global commons. Instead of policing the world, the United States would encourage other countries to take the lead in checking potential regional hegemons, intervening itself only when necessary.
The final contender goes by the label of “progressive” grand strategy. This vision (currently on the margins of the debate, but an intellectually serious contender nonetheless) bears a superficial resemblance to restraint in that both advocate reducing defense spending, shrinking the United States’s military footprint abroad and abjuring wars of choice and other forms of military adventurism.
The two grand strategies differ fundamentally, however, in terms of their underlying theoretical logic. Whereas restraint grand strategy proper is grounded in realism, progressive grand strategy is anchored in a more progressive social theory — one that sees both domestic and international society as shot through with structural inequalities and that sees the point of grand strategy as working to end these inequalities on a global level. As a result, progressive grand strategy tends to prioritize objectives such as environmental justice, countering authoritarianism and in general addressing the world’s social ills in ways that realist-restrainers do not.
Precisely how this debate will play out remains uncertain. That the future course of U.S. grand strategy will be shaped by a degree of continuity seems unquestionable — the liberal internationalist and deep engagement instincts of the U.S. foreign policy establishment remain as strong as ever. But there are powerful systemic pressures (most emanating from the return of multipolar great-power competition) that are pushing in the direction of change. Climate crisis: 4 reasons for hope in 2023Latin America’s challenges and changes ahead
If the past is any guide, these new systemic pressures are likely to result in a major shift in U.S. grand strategy — one akin to the shift to containment as the bipolarity of the Cold War era set in, and the shift to liberal internationalism as that bipolarity gave way to the unipolarity of the post-Cold War era.
While the precise outcome of this process of strategic reorientation is impossible to predict, I for one am rooting for restraint.
Andrew Latham is a professor of international relations at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minn., a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities in Washington, D.C., and a Senior Fellow with the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy in Ottawa, Canada. Follow him on Twitter @aalatham.
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