Robert D. Blackwill
The United States faces the most dangerous international circumstances since the end of World War II, and perhaps in its history. An ever more formidable, authoritarian China remains determined to replace the United States as the leading nation in Asia and eventually the world. The need for an effective U.S. grand strategy to deal with that threat, among others, is accordingly urgent. Grand strategy refers to a nation’s collective deployment of all its relevant instruments of power to accomplish key strategic goals. Given the United States’ longtime material, institutional, and ideational strengths, American grand strategy involves projecting its great power for the survival of world order. To that end, sustaining prosperity, which derives substantially from the United States’ dominance in technological innovation, becomes the economic precondition for protecting its own homeland, the homelands of its allies, and its diverse national interests. It can achieve those goals through both military and non-military methods, but force is acceptable only if it represents an inescapable choice to protect vital national interests. Promoting democracy is never such an inescapable choice.
This report analyzes five alternative schools of American grand strategy and then proposes a sixth school, resolute global leadership. The primacy school of grand strategy, which includes neoconservatism, asserts that the United States must remain the world’s unrivaled superpower in every region and, toward that end, prevent the reemergence of a peer competitor. The liberal internationalist school envisions a U.S.-led, open, rules-based world order that champions the rule of law, liberal democracy, and human rights, and accepts using military force as a last resort to safeguard U.S. vital national interests. The restraint school, often associated with realism and offshore balancing and scarred by recent unsuccessful wars, seeks to slash American global commitments and argues that U.S. military intervention is almost always ill-advised. The American nationalist school insists that the United States should concentrate its attention and strength on the Western Hemisphere, that previous presidents have foolishly agreed to trade and security agreements that hollowed out the nation’s economy, and that only U.S. power, not alliances and global organizations, guarantees enduring benefits for the United States. And Trumpism, a version of American nationalism that depends on the personal preferences of President Donald Trump, radically redefines U.S. vital national interests to emphasize bilateral and transactional trade relationships, business deals, and quick diplomatic successes over geopolitical considerations—without collaboration with traditional U.S. allies or fidelity to core American values, including human rights.