Why American Grand Strategy Has Changed: International Constraint, Generational Shift, and the Return of Realism

Nicholas Kitchen

Department of Politics, University of Surrey, Guildford, United Kingdom

n.kitchen@surrey.ac.uk

Author Biography

Nicholas Kitchen is Lecturer in International Relations and Co-Director of the Centre for International Intervention at the University of Surrey. He is also a Visiting Fellow at LSE IDEAS. He has written extensively on US grand strategy, concepts of power, and neoclassical realism.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the editors and contributors of this Special Issue for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper, in particular Oz Hasan and Hilde Restad. Mick Cox, Gustav Meibauer, and Adam Quinn also offered helpful comments.

Abstract

From Clinton to Bush to Obama to Trump: the personalities, rhetoric, and policies of Presidents charged with defining US foreign policy in the post-Cold War era could hardly appear more different. Yet recent treatments of American grand strategy have sought to highlight a lack of debate about grand strategy, and to emphasise groupthink and ‘habit’ within the US foreign policy establishment. This article argues that US grand strategy has changed, and suggests that those who prioritise continuities rely on an overly restrictive definition of grand strategy. Employing policy paradigms as an analytical framework, this paper finds significant variation in US grand strategy across the four post-Cold War presidencies. Where the variation between Clinton and George W. Bush’s presidencies can be explained by differing strategic ideas among American foreign policymaking elites, a trend towards less active hegemonic management running through the Obama and Trump presidencies is more structural in nature, reflecting both international constraints and generational change.

Introduction

When the New York Times journalist David Samuels interviewed Ben Rhodes, President Obama’s young foreign policy advisor, he was struck that Rhodes seemed to believe American grand strategy had essentially been made by ‘morons’: members of a foreign policy establishment so characterised by group-think that Rhodes dismissed them as ‘The Blob’ (Samuels, 2016). Such an assessment of the quality of American policymaking may not be universally shared, but Rhodes is not alone in thinking that US foreign policy has been driven by assumptions about the purpose of American power that are rarely interrogated. Inside the Beltway, observers see little debate about grand strategy (B. H. Friedman & Logan, 2016), leading some to conclude that US foreign policy is driven more by habit than anything else (Porter, 2018). In this understanding, American grand strategy has been the pursuit of the obvious, driven by path dependency that renders decision-making axiomatic. Such arguments suggest that American grand strategy has been fundamentally resistant to change, and that foreign policymaking is captured by ways of thinking that reproduce themselves and rewards a particular orthodoxy.

This article takes issue with such claims, which are rooted in highly restrictive understandings of grand strategy. In making the argument that US grand strategy is habituated, Patrick Porter employs a Clausewitzian definition that is focused on military-strategic goals: US grand strategy, he writes, is characterised by “preponderance, reassurance, integration, and nuclear inhibition” (Porter, 2018, pp. 18-19). But military-strategic doctrine is only one part of grand strategy (B. Posen, 1984). Over time, as Kitchen’s (2010) review of the historical development of the concept makes clear, a broader understanding of grand strategy as comprehensive policy has emerged:

“When we speak of grand strategy as an analytical concept, we are speaking of that considered set of national policies in peace and war that both set out the goals of the state in international politics and prescribe how a broad range of national resources should be utilised in pursuit of those goals. The study of grand strategy is therefore the study of states’ attitudes to the international environment – of how they mobilise which elements of their power in pursuit of which causes in global politics.” (Kitchen, 2010, p. 121)

Narrower definitions analytically subordinate the role of foreign economic policy, diplomacy, or softer forms of power, as means of strategy; and deny – or ignore – the presence of non-military ends of strategy. As Nina Silove notes, this neglect of non-military variables is not unusual in the

literature, but it remains at odds with prevailing definitions of grand strategy that explicitly incorporate political and economic factors (Silove, 2018, pp. 28-29).

Such a restrictive, correlation of forces understanding of strategy does not require any particular mindset on the part of the US foreign policy establishment to explain the absence of military retrenchment in the post Cold War period. For any state, a minimal task of strategy is to seek to preserve its extant power position. It would have been extremely surprising – and requiring of particular ideational or bureaucratic explanation – had the United States committed itself to a strategy short of primacy after the end of the Cold War. What primacy refers to, in this sense, is maintaining the international structure that had emerged after 1991. For most states, power maintenance is also the maximal end of strategy, in that it secures your interests against threats. But for a state that is militarily preponderant, maintaining that position of primacy is both a minimal requirement and a means to other ends: great powers with a surfeit of power have the luxury of being able to set auxiliary goals beyond strictly defending the national interest. The policymaking elites of superpowers, in short, get to debate and engage in worldmaking.

A restrictive definition of grand strategy can say nothing about the purpose to which preponderance is to be put: ‘American Power, For What?’ as a symposium in Commentary magazine put it in 2000. This paper argues that this question has been important: far from being defined by habit, American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War has shown significant variation, as a result of ideational competition in a robust and ongoing debate about the United States’ role in the world. Certain realists, who are themselves part of that debate, appear to claim continuity on the basis that their particular preference hasn’t been tried, rather than on a theoretically grounded account of change (John J. Mearsheimer, 2018; B. R. Posen, 2014; Walt, 2018). Yet increasingly, that debate is even wider, being had by a generation of policymakers whose foreign policy worldviews were forged after the Cold War rather than during it. This – and a more constrained international environment than that which persisted in the first decade and a half after the collapse of the Soviet Union – is leading more longstanding and fundamental tenets of American grand strategy to become open to question.

Theorising Grand Strategic Change

Contributions which emphasise stability are important, since much analysis is inherently conditioned to prioritise change over continuity. Elections, and new leaders, create moments of intense interest where the demand to discover what is different dominates. In foreign policy, and in particular the study of US Grand Strategy, the attempt to articulate a new ‘doctrine’ for an incoming administration is something of a cottage industry, one that operates inside the White House, as well as on the think-tank stages, op-ed pages, and – sometime later – in academic journals.

Beyond commentary, attempts to analytically delineate foreign policy difference has taken two approaches. The first is to typologise grand strategic forms: Kal Holsti’s work on realignment identifies strategic postures of “isolation”, “self-reliance”, “dependence”, and “diversification” (Holsti, 1982); Charles Kupchan describes “compellent”, “deterrent” and “accomodationist” strategies (Charles A Kupchan, 1994); and Edward Luttwak contrasts “expansionist” and “status quo” strategies (Luttwak, 2001).

The use of only two, three, or four ideal-types necessarily allows for sizeable variation within them, and so sets the bar for what constitutes strategic change rather high. A second approaches therefore seeks to theorise the amount of change, and interrogate how and why that occurs. Engaging this

issue, Dueck suggests we benchmark change by reference to policy instruments, but his distinction between “massive” first-order changes and “less fundamental” second order shifts provides few clear criteria for assessment (Dueck, 2006, pp. 12-13). Both Hermann, and Rosati et al., mirror this ‘degrees of change’ approach, albeit with four gradations rather than two (Hermann, 1990; Rosati, Hagan, & Sampson, 1994).

In foreign policy analysis, scholars have been largely concerned with the myriad causal variables that can contribute to foreign policy adjustment, rather than theorising what might constitute significant change. Such approaches may allow us to infer change from the presence of such causal processes as learning (Levy, 2009); the role of policy entrepreneurs (Carter & Scott, 2009); the psychology of individual leaders (Goldgeier & Tetlock, 2001); or the machinations of bureaucratic politics (Allison & Halperin, 1972). Yet as Gustavsson notes, models that draw on a range of these causal variables are essentially ‘checklists’ (Gustavsson, 1999). Less attention has been paid in these works to theorising major strategic change itself. Indeed, scholars have sought to examine why the agents of change often have little impact. David Welch roots his own answer in the path dependencies of large organisations. “The ship of state”, he writes, “is ordinarily ponderous, not nimble… it goes about its business today more or less the same way it went about its business yesterday, unless it has some very compelling reason to do something dramatically different.” (Welch, 2005, p. 7)

Welch’s emphasis on continuity might very well be a form of habit, as Porter suggests. Within International Relations, authors have invoked strategic culture – “semi-permanent elite beliefs, attitudes, and behaviour patterns socialized into a distinctive mode of thought” (Snyder, 1977, p. 8) – in order to explain the tendency of particular states to react to systemic stimuli in particular ways. For example, Christopher Layne sees the roots of America’s commitment to extra-regional hegemony in ‘Open Door’ ideology (Layne, 2006a), and Colin Dueck has emphasized how internalised ideological assumptions have conditioned American strategic adjustment (Dueck, 2006).

The role of strategic ideas in formulating grand strategy is complex, since those ideas mediate pressures imposed upon the state from outside (Kitchen, 2010, 2012). There is clearly an important distinction between exogenous, material drivers of grand strategic change and purely endogenous ideational drivers. But even adjustments in direct response to structural shifts arise from the ideational frameworks of foreign policy elites that allow them to understand the nature of those shifts and conceptualise a policy response. One sense in which Rhodes’ assails the ‘blob’, is its failure to deal with ‘the world as it is’, and to make appropriate adjustments to external changes (Rhodes, 2019). Why states fail to respond effectively to the structural pressures has, of course, been the subject of significant work, principally by neoclassical realists (Schweller, 2004, 2006; Taliaferro, 2006; W. Wohlforth, 1993). However, this body of work explicitly seeks cases where there are structural pressures that ought to compel strategic adjustment; and to explain why the necessary policy change was not enacted.

In what follows, I argue that in the post-Cold War period, we can see American grand strategy change both in the absence of systemic incentives impelling it (endogenous change), and, later, in response, at least partially, to shifting systemic incentives (exogenous change). In the first fifteen years after 1991 the structural environment for the United States is essentially permissive: it has both structural power and huge relational advantage over any potential peer competitors, and it is able to act virtually unfettered.1 Post-financial crisis, and with the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns wearing on, the United States, whilst remaining structurally dominant (Kitchen & Cox, 2019), faces increasing costs in order to secure relational outcomes, principally due to the economic and strategic

1 In this period, a vast literature seeks to conceptualise the United States’ dominance, the most popular frameworks being ‘empire’ (Colas, 2008; Cox, 2001; Hardt & Negri, 2000) and ‘unipolarity’ (Guzzini, 2005; Ikenberry, Michael, & William, 2009; Jervis, 2009; W. C. Wohlforth, 1999).

alternatives increasingly being offered by China and Russia.2 At the same time, generational change within the foreign policymaking elite has meant that policymakers are less likely to rely on Cold War-era ideational frameworks, bringing deeper assumptions about hegemony and the necessity of American leadership increasingly into question.

In a similar way, the concept of policy paradigms shows how dominant modes of thinking can limit the framework of policy debates in practice. Invoking Thomas Kuhn’s work in philosophy of science (Kuhn, 1962), Peter Hall developed the notion of policy paradigms to capture pervasive consensus among economic policymakers (Hall, 1986, 1993). Whilst the theory has been only rarely invoked within International Relations,3 there is nothing conceptually specific to disbar its use in other policy contexts, including grand strategy formation. Indeed, the literature on policy paradigms offers a more systematic framework for understanding hegemonic strategic ideas – and crucially, the processes that may lead to change in those ideas – than does the literature on strategic culture.

For Hall, state policymaking actors – for our purposes, the foreign policy executive – do not simply respond to and navigate the power and preferences of external political actors, whether domestic or international. Rather, they are relatively autonomous: they think for themselves, assessing past policies, assimilating new information, and re-evaluating assumptions. Hall therefore describes policymaking, following Heclo, as “a form of collective puzzlement on society's behalf” (Hall, 1993, p. 276).

However, that puzzlement takes place “within a framework of ideas and standards that specifies not only the goal of policy and the kind of instruments that can be used to attain them, but also the very nature of the problems they are meant to be addressing.” This framework, or policy paradigm, generates a particular definition of the national interest, and is “influential precisely because so much of it is taken for granted and unamenable to scrutiny as a whole” (Hall, 1993, p. 279).

The emphasis within the literature on policy paradigms on way in which they shape policy learning facilitates a somewhat clearer differentiation of the type and source of change than we typically see in the literature on grand strategic adjustment. Hall distinguishes incremental first order shifts in the settings of policy; more strategic second order adjustments to the instruments used, and third order paradigmatic changes that alter the goals of policy. The latter entails a less scientific, more sociological, and likely political process, in which the prevailing policy is upended, and eventually replaced (Hall, 1993, pp. 281-287).

This article therefore uses Hall’s framework to assess the extent of US grand strategic change following the Cold War. It utilises a definition of grand strategy that encompasses “that considered set of national policies in peace and war that both set out the goals of the state in international politics and prescribe how a broad range of national resources should be utilised in pursuit of those goals.” (Kitchen, 2010, p. 121) Whilst adjusting the settings of foreign policy (Hall’s first order shifts) should not clear the bar of grand strategic change, second and third order alterations to the primary means employed, or revision to the overall goals of the United States internationally, would.

In stress-testing the level of habituation to a grand strategic paradigm, we clearly need look at the policies themselves and their relative stability over time. But we can also analyse the debate around

2 Much of the work on aggregate ‘power shifts’ rest on flawed underpinnings in terms of the measurement of power (Kitchen & Cox, 2019; Quinn & Kitchen, 2018). However, more specific work that specifies scope and domain does indicate an decreasing ability for the United States to dictate terms. See, for example (Long, 2015).3 Hall’s concept is central to analyses of public policy, but it has rarely been operationalised in International Relations or Foreign Policy Analysis. Hassan’s ‘constructivist institutionalist’ methodology is the only application of Hall’s concept to US foreign policy (Hassan, 2012). Other invocations in FPA include (Brighi, 2007; Exadaktylos, 2015; Kleistra & Mayer, 2001)

policy. Reappraising more fundamental assumptions is likely to be controversial: as Goldmann notes, “the more advanced the process of stabilisation, the larger a disturbance must be in order to have an impact.”(Goldmann, 1988, pp. 76-77) Of course, mere debate may not result in change, since it requires policymakers to accept the costs of admitting existing policy is flawed, and “to admit error, take responsibility, or embrace risk”(Welch, 2005, p. 45). And even then, replacing an old approach with a new one will only be complete once a new policy has become stabilized around reconfigured ideas, organisation, and standard operating procedures (Hall, 1993, pp. 280-281). All of which suggests that second and third order shifts in foreign policy are difficult to achieve, that they face significant bureaucratic barriers to implementation.

Strategic Variety in the Post-Cold War Period

The Clinton Administration: Primacy Cloaked

The first post-Cold War presidency represents a profoundly different approach to American grand strategy from the geopolitical thinking and assumptions of the Cold War period. Clinton fused liberal ideas around globalisation, interdependence, and democracy, to resolve more inward-looking critiques of America’s approach to the world. The immediate politics of the post-Cold War moment were domestic. The reactionary populist nationalism of Pat Buchanan presented a strong primary challenge to the sitting President, and Ross Perot’s economic nationalist candidacy decisively shaped the 1992 election itself (Eldersveld & Walton, 2000, p. 69). Pressures for a foreign policy driven by greater burden sharing generated significant debate within the foreign policy establishment. Unsurprisingly, in such circles the Cold War had established an internationalist assumption (Steel, 1995, pp. 113-114), and proposals for more limited engagement swiftly attracted the label of ‘neo-isolationism’, much to the irritation of realist and populist dissidents (Harries & Lind, 1993; Weyrich, 1990).

Nonetheless, arguments for foreign policy retrenchment were made with some skill. A first strand of arguments sought to rebut a search for new missions and visions that the CATO Institute concluded constituted a “campaign of threat procurement” (Carpenter, 1992, pp. 153-154). A second strand focused on the impact of continued foreign entanglements on American security and prosperity (Asmus, 1993). Such arguments were present in both Buchanan’s writings (Buchanan, 1990), and the more sophisticated realism of some significant luminaries of the foreign policy establishment, including Charles Maynes, editor of Foreign Policy magazine (Maynes, 1990); Morton H. Halperin, who joined the Clinton administration arguing passionately against the anti-democratic dominance of the United States’ foreign-military-intelligence complex (Halperin & Woods, 1990); and the veteran diplomats Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick, who saw the opportunity to and in reap a peace dividend and return the United States to the position of a ‘normal country in a normal time’ (Kirkpatrick, 1990; Moynihan, 1990).

Whilst these arguments never grabbed the reins of policy, the new administration was forced to triangulate between these pressures and more robust arguments for more assertive internationalism. Clinton’s approach was to take liberal ideas about the benefits of trade and tie them to both American domestic prosperity and the purpose of US foreign policy. The administration presented the choice between domestic and foreign policy priorities as false, repeating “over and over” the mantra that “increasing global interdependence was erasing the divide between foreign and domestic policy” (B. Clinton, 2004, p. 502). “Overarching everything

else” the President argued, was the “amorphous but profound challenge in the way humankind conducts its commerce” (W. J. Clinton, 1993).

This reductionism left some of the more experienced hands in Clinton’s foreign policy team uncomfortable, not least given the complexity of the more traditional foreign policy challenges the breakup of the Soviet Union had precipitated.4 But whilst making the case for continued internationalism, Clinton’s prioritisation of geoeconomics was more than simply a rhetorical strategy to head off conservative nationalist sentiment. Instead, trade was placed at the very heart of American grand strategy. A National Export Strategy overturned the US’s longstanding rejection of tied aid and revamped security-driven export controls (T. L. Friedman, 1994; Morillo, 1994). It also committed the United States to high-level advocacy of American companies and products overseas, coordinated by the Secretary of Commerce and involving embassies, foreign missions and ‘personal appeals’ by the President.

The result was over 200 bilateral trade agreements; major multilateral accords including NAFTA, APEC and the creation of the WTO attest to emphasis the United States placed on using its economic power to establish multilateral norms that bound other states to its own preferences. This was facilitated by a bureaucratic reorganisation of American foreign policy, with the new National Economic Council often side-lining NSC processes (Dumbrell, 2009, pp. 49-50).

At the sharp end of this economic diplomacy were the transitions of states of the former Soviet Union. When a National Security Strategy came, it was focused on ‘enlargement’: a kind of domino theory in reverse that was conceived as much in economic as in political terms (Lake, 1993). Enlargement linked the domestic success of the American people to US engagement in a globalising world. Markets for American goods, better jobs for American workers, profits for American companies: all were predicated on sustaining and expanding the community of market democracies with which the United States could build prosperous trade relationships.

Critics returned to the ideas of William Appleman Williams to argue that globalisation was nothing more than the rhetoric of hegemony (Bacevich, 1999). And by tying America’s domestic prosperity to the smooth functioning of the global economy, the administration created a rationale not just for rejecting isolation, but for mandating American engagement everywhere. At the same time, Clinton’s grand strategy was hardly global containment redux: the absence of peer competitors facilitated cuts to defence budgets of 25% – effectively reversing the Reagan buildup – and enabled the administration to focus its strategy on economic, as opposed to security, outcomes. In doing so, Clinton’s ideas inaugurated clear second order shifts in the instruments of policy, whilst replacing security goals with economic aims in third order ways.

George W. Bush: Primacy Unleashed

True to the predictions of policy paradigms, Clinton’s reshaping of US grand strategy around geo-economics was unsettling for the establishment (Rodman, 1992), Henry Kissinger memorably demurring of Sandy Berger that “you can't blame a trade lawyer for not being a global strategist” (Sciolino, 1998). So many viewed the incoming George W. Bush team with some relief, being comprised as it was of experienced Cold Warriors in key positions. A number of these ‘vulcans’ had, in the last days of the Bush administration, created a blueprint for post-Cold War American grand strategy based around military dominance, and had continued to push their ideas out of government (Mann, 2004). By the end of Clinton’s second term, the Project for a New American Century had reprised and developed into specific details the ideas of the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance.

4 Anthony Lake recalled finding Clinton’s mantra ‘not an immediately attractive concept’ (Klein, 2002, pp. 78-79)

Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century offered a clear goal for US strategy, concluding that since the United States was faced with no peer competitor, “America’s grand strategy should aim to preserve and extend this advantageous position as far into the future as possible.” (2000, p. i)

It is worth considering exactly how these ideas differed from those of the Clinton administration. After all, no US leader seeks to encourage peer competitors. At one level, arguments for primacy after the Cold War are simply status quo positions: the United States is a unipolar power, it should seek to remain so. Yet where Clinton viewed continued primacy as an outgrowth of US economic success, the latter being the fundamental goal of American strategy, the neoconservative and assertive nationalist strategists within Republican circles saw primacy as both the means and end of strategy. Maintaining preponderance – by continuing to invest heavily in American military power – would ensure preponderance, by ensuring a capabilities gap so large that no rival would seek to bridge it.

This approach is based on specific assumptions about international relations that are not necessarily widely shared. Perhaps most fundamental is that unipolarity is a potentially stable structural order. Using the offensive realist logic that revisionist powers are the norm in the system, at the same time as ignoring Mearsheimer’s important caveat about the stopping power of water (John J Mearsheimer, 2001, pp. 40-42), proponents of primacy suggest that “global hegemony is the best grand strategic response to the fear and uncertainty that are endemic to international politics” (Layne, 2006b, p. 130). Unipolarity is peaceful because it removes two of the major sources of instability from the system: hegemonic rivalry and balance-of-power politics among major powers. Primacy therefore present second-order states with inconsequential strategic options ranging from enthusiastic bandwagoning with the polar power to studious avoidance of direct enmity (W. C. Wohlforth, 1999, pp. 23-28).

Those in the Clinton administration who were sympathetic to the possibility of unipolarity enduring used the logic of ‘self-binding’, in which restraint, multilateralism and the promotion of joint gains render power benign (Charles A Kupchan, 1998). But for primacists, such self-binding is itself a prima facie dilution of preponderance: multilateralism necessarily restricts the agency of the strongest. Their views had been shaped by the ‘Reagan buildup’ that they credited with hastening the Soviet Union’s demise, and rather than seeing benefit in self-binding, advocates of preponderance tended to regard treaty constraints with scepticism, preferring to rely instead on the direct deterrent effects of military capabilities (Kirkpatrick, 2000, p. 34).5

The Bush administration’s focus on predominance, inaugurated wholesale after 9/11 and articulated most clearly in the 2003 National Security Strategy, was predicated on not diluting American power and freedom of action. It does not envisage America leading primus inter pares, as the language of multilateralism under Clinton often suggested. Alongside the brute material fact of the capabilities gap, a values-based argument suggested that the United States would be seen as benign because the United States is benign. This basic truth, grounded in American exceptionalism, meant proponents of primacy felt assured that “most of the world’s major powers… prefer America’s benevolent hegemony to the alternatives.” (Kristol & Kagan, 1996, p. 21)

The impact of this worldview after 9/11 was stark. Whilst the structural environment itself remained completely permissive – Al Qaeda hardly represented a peer competitor, and the gap between the United States and its nearest rivals actually grew in the first few years of the war on terror – the

5 Missile defense is a good example. With its roots in Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, space-based ballistic missile defense required withdrawal from the 1972 ABM Treaty in order to pursue a “vital shield that would free the United States to play its leading role.” (Kagan & Schmitt, 1998, p. 25)

attacks facilitated a shift in ideas among American foreign policy elites. The United States became a revolutionary power, prepared to engage in large scale military occupations to reshape states. At one level, the Clinton and Bush administrations shared ideas derived from democratic peace theory about the conduciveness of democratic polities to US interests. But in policy terms, the Clinton administration sought to support democracy through open markets and diplomacy, and to contain ‘rogue’ states, hoping that their isolation from the benefits of globalisation would impel internal change. For Bush, the failure to use American power to do something about such states had led to 9/11, and US strategy would became focused on politically reshaping those parts of the world where preponderance had apparently failed to deter.

Barack Obama: Divested Hegemony

In one sense then, Iraq is exhibit one for the difference in the Clinton and Bush doctrines. The ultimate goal – regime change – may have ultimately been the same, but the means utilised were radically different. Yet the incoming Obama administration sought to reject both legacies, viewing Iraq, and, albeit in different ways, Afghanistan, as examples of liberal hubris. President Bush had admitted as much by the end of his administration, writing that, despite America’s immense military might, “our government was not prepared for nation building.” (Bush, 2010, p. 220) As a result, the Obama administration approached the world with a far more sceptical and circumspect view of what American power could achieve than either of its predecessors.

In part, such a view was in continuity with the second Bush term, which had begun to refocus American foreign policy around great power challenges. Russia’s invasion of Georgia in August 2008, which took place as the US President and Vladimir Putin watched Beijing its Olympics to showcase China’s rise, was an important turning point. The global economic crisis which dominated the agenda of the transition and the administration’s first months in office reinforced perceptions of structural change, and as the 2010s wore on, Russian and Chinese resistance to American-led order became more concrete.6 But the Obama administration also entered office with a foreign policy team made up of the first generation of foreign policymakers whose formative experiences of international politics occurred after the end of the Cold War. They believed they thought differently about America’s role in the world from their predecessors.

Secretary of State Hilary Clinton had been the Arkansas governor’s wife before becoming First Lady in the 1990s, when Samantha Power had risen to prominence for her reporting on America’s approach to genocide and intervention. Susan Rice and Ivo Daalder had served in junior national security positions in the Clinton administration during that time, while Denis McDonagh had been a junior aide to the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Ben Rhodes, who led Obama’s secret negotiations with Cuba, was just the most prominent of coterie of national security council staffers who were still in high school in 1991 (Rhodes himself was just 14). Dennis Ross, a significant voice on the NSC, was a rarity in having first served under Jimmy Carter. Of Obama’s senior advisors, only John Kerry was really sufficiently long-steeped in foreign policy to have internalised Cold War frameworks, but he had tended to be a dissenting voice going all the way back to his opposition to the Vietnam War.

In the early months and years of the administration the crisis of American power was acute, even if in certain ways the financial crisis demonstrated the durability of American structural power and even enhanced it (Prasad, 2014). The administration essentially diagnosed two core problems of American grand strategy: a resource base limited by economic malaise and a lack of legitimacy stemming from the Bush administration’s policies. The central analysis of the 2010 NSS was that the

6 It is important to note the significance of perception in interpretations of the balance of power (Guzzini, 2009, p.5)

United States needed to rebuild its capacities, viewed primarily in terms of economic strength; as Obama put it in debate, ‘making sure that we’re doing nation building here at home” ("Transcript of the Third Presidential Debate," 2012). Alongside that, symbolic ‘resets’ of diplomatic relationships and a return to engagement in multilateral fora sought to make American power ‘smarter’, and more sensitive to contexts and perceptions (Naughton, 2009).

Three key principles dominated Obama’s grand strategic approach. First, was the administration’s willingness to engage rogue states, a clear departure from the previous administrations attempts to contain or reshape states that rejected core premises of the prevailing international order. The specific motivations behind the outreach to Cuba, Iran, and Myanmar, were of course borne of particular necessities and opportunities, but the wider motivation was to re-establish the United States’ reputation for responsible statecraft (Charles A. Kupchan, 2010). This work had started in Bush’s second term, with the administration keenly aware of the weakness of its public diplomacy (Hallams, 2011), but Obama’s willingness to pursue diplomatic engagement with enemies was the mark of a more fundamental revisioning of the role of diplomacy in US foreign policy (Hayden, 2011; Sharp, 2011).

Second, Obama sought to reshape the War on Terror, committing to move the United States off its “permanent war” footing. There were certainly rhetorical shifts and a repudiation of certain methods from the Bush years (McCrisken, 2013), as well as a tactical shift that came with the increasing availability of drone technology (Miller, 2011). Yet even sympathetic observers worried about the administration’s reliance on kill-lists and signature strikes and questioned the overall impact in dismantling terrorist networks (Zenko, 2013). In its practice, Obama’s remote war on terror was far from a more circumspect use of military force, but rather a bureaucratised normalisation of violence in which American capabilities were felt across an ever expanding battlespace (Shaw, 2016).

Third, the administration sought to contain rising power assertiveness, acting with European allies to impose sanctions on Russia in the aftermath of the annexation of Crimea and the Kremlin’s incursion into Eastern Ukraine. But it was on China that the administration was clearly focused. The military strategic efforts were relatively limited, although the ‘Pivot’ or ‘Rebalance’ did incorporate a number measures that taken together constituted an increased American presence in Asia (Turner, 2014). There was diplomacy too, as the United States actively re-engaged with ASEAN and other regional forums, a direct response to what the administration viewed as Bush’s inattentiveness to broader structural trends (Bader, 2012, pp. 1-4). But it was through the economic logic of TPP, together with the proposals, never realised, for TTIP, that United States strategy in Asia moved. These agreements sought to tie allies more closely together in economic terms to the exclusion of China, at both the East and Western limits of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative. (Kitchen, 2013)

These principles added up to an approach to the international system in which the United States carried a lighter footprint. In seeking to do so, the administration increasingly engaged alliance partners to take on greater responsibility for security. Some viewed this as retrenchment (Drezner, 2011), and it certainly stood in stark contrast to the willingness of the first-term Bush administration to assume unilateral responsibility for global security. The United States under Obama was increasingly less prepared to “pay the bill” for others’ security, or to assume the responsibilities primacists asserted power extracted (Joffe, 1997). Instead, the Obama administration actively sought to transfer costs and responsibilities to an enlarged set of partners with like interests, in the belief that management of international order need not require the United States to do everything everywhere in order for the outcomes to be substantively aligned with long-term US interests (Brands, 2016; Clarke & Ricketts, 2017). Rather than retrenching per se, Obama sought to divest hegemonic assets to preferred regional states, with the aim of maintaining stability through

diversified commitment to and investment in the maintenance of international order, rather than direct action. A United States previously committed to preponderance and unilateralism had embraced a form of divested hegemony (Kitchen, 2016).

Donald Trump: Leadership Abandoned

Obama’s approach was not wholly new: in its second term, the Bush administration had begun this process by seeking to internationalise the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. But the idea of making others pay their way was one that was familiar to the new President, albeit in less strategic ways.

At this point, a note on the analysis of grand strategy, and on Presidential doctrines. Whilst segmented here for convenience by administrations, it should be apparent that the debate around grand strategy continues across electoral timelines, and that the shifts in practice are less clearly delineated by political party or individual presidents: as we’ve just noted, George W. Bush tacked strongly in his second term away from the positions advocated by earlier neoconservative advisors. However, and whilst the distinction between grand strategy and emergent strategy can be overdrawn (Popescu, 2018), we do tend to take Presidential rhetoric seriously when identifying grand strategy.

This all becomes rather difficult when evaluating the Trump administration. Not only has it been variously under- and un-staffed, chaotic, and incoherent in its processes, at is head there is a President who appears to neither understand the basic tasks of foreign policy nor to be psychologically capable of doing so (Conway, 2019). Some have suggested that a clear worldview can be discerned, or at least that Trump has held particular positions – for example on NATO, and trade – over a long period of time (Laderman & Simms, 2017). However, given that even on these topics Trump’s impulses are based on fundamental ignorance of what alliances and trade deficits are and how they work, it seems a stretch to assign these the status of ‘ideas’. All of this makes identifying strategy particularly difficult, since we may ascribe to decisionmaking outcomes that resulted from processes that were nothing of the sort.

This caveat delivered, and proceeding with due caution, the Trump administration to date suggests a similarly restrictive interpretation of US interests to that which underpinned Obama’s divested hegemony. In part this flows from Trump’s having attracted during the campaign a cast of advisors whose stock-in-trade was conspiracy and ethnic nationalism, including Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, Michael Flynn, and Sebastian Gorka. Whilst the strategic impact of these advisors was tempered by internecine conflicts and the influence of the more experienced ‘adults in the room’, with a corrupt and corruptible President as a willing accomplice they nonetheless managed to destabilise long-standing presumptions of American foreign policy, including as the promotion of democracy and human rights.

Beneath the headline-grabbing outrages such as Trump’s bonhomie with dictators and the Muslim Ban – issues which, as Hilde Restad notes in this issue, are profoundly significant of themselves – there has been a certain continuity with the Obama administration in the conceptualisation of how much active management of international politics the United States should do. At the same time, it is clear that the Trump administration takes a completely different tactical approach to divestment (Brands, 2018). Rather than partnering in hegemonic management with Asian and European partners to reduce risk and share costs, the Trump administration has taken the strategy of divestment rather more literally, seeking to shed what it views as under-performing or costly commitments that – in a narrow, faintly Hobbesian understanding of international affairs – do not

represent relative gains for the United States. This has involved a much more aggressive approach to securing compensation for US alliance commitments, effectively setting a net-positive trade balance test for trade agreements, and questioning the benefits to the United States of liberal international order writ large (Fidler, 2017). Where the Obama administration’s ‘Pivot to Asia’ elicited some concern in European capitals, there was nonetheless the reassurance that the United States continued to view Europe as important partners, as evidenced by the efforts on Russia and Ukraine. Trump’s personal antipathy towards Angela Merkel in particular evoked something more significant, that rather than simply shifting its geographic focus, the United States was abandoning long-shared ideas about how international politics should be organised.

Much of this, and in particular the abdication of any sense of moral leadership by the White House, remains a function of the particular psychology of the President, as well as his inability to staff his administration in order to mitigate his own decisionmaking flaws. One might acknowledge too, that the sense of generational change has been less evident than under Obama, with individuals like Mattis, McMaster, Bolton and Pompeo more firmly rooted in traditional conservative internationalism. It is therefore difficult to argue that Trump is some kind of fulfilment of a trend; away from liberal fantasies of globalisation, from the conviction that American leadership is both indispensable and benign. Large pluralities of voters continue to support NATO, free trade and the promotion of democracy abroad in numbers that have remained broadly consistent over the last twenty years. But under first Obama and now Trump, the United States has been markedly less willing to commit American resources to the task of active hegemonic management or in pursuit of systemic interests. In limiting its grand strategic goals in this way, the US has begun to behave like a normal great power: pursuing its own interests, prioritising relative over absolute gains, and relegating high church ideas of human rights or liberal order to secondary concerns.

Conclusion

From this review of the strategic postures of the last four US administrations, it’s striking the extent to which each defined itself in contrast to what had come before: if the post-Cold War period really was characterised by continuity, this certainly wasn’t the image incoming administrations had of themselves. Rather, they not only sought, but succeeded, in changing course: we can see significant variation in both second order adjustments to the instruments used to pursue US interests, and also third order shifts in terms of how US interests ought to be constituted.

The first two post-Cold War administrations differed in how they understood the goal of primacy, and enacted second-order changes in the means by which the United States pursued it. But the last decade has seen an even more fundamental rethinking in terms of the logics of American foreign policy. Ben Rhodes’ characterisation of the foreign policy establishment as ‘the Blob’ points to the Obama administration’s claim to have recast American grand strategy in ways that explicitly rejected what consensus there was between liberal internationalist democrats and republican neoconservatives. That consensus revolved around the idea that American leadership was indispensable in the world, that hegemonic management should be activist, and that the continued flourishing of the United States at home required liberal democratic governance and open markets abroad. The questioning of this consensus reveals divergent ideas about both how the world works and what policies are most likely to succeed, but also more fundamentally about what it means for the United States to be powerful (Quinn & Kitchen, 2018).

Whilst employing very different ideas about the question of what constitutes American power, both Obama and Trump’s foreign policies might be cast as declinist, in that they seek to respond to an international system that is less permissive of the direct application of American power (Kennedy, 1992, pp. 239-240). Obama’s response to perceived decline might be characterised as politeness (Quinn, 2011). Reaffirming commitments to multilateral institutions, reinvigorating alliance partnerships, and above all, seeking to steer clear of policy choices that might further hasten decline – the administration-endorsed bumper stick was “don’t do stupid shit” (Rothkopf, 2014) – were all designed to slow the pace at which the United States’ unipolar position was inevitably eroding, and to extract greater returns from structural power (Kitchen & Cox, 2019).

Trump’s response to perceived decline is the opposite, not least because in his dystopic rhetoric Trump used decline as a political strategy, as Oz Hassan highlights in this issue. In a thoughtful reflection on Kennedy’s Rise and Fall thesis in 1991, the Australian historian Neville Meaney wrote that “no treatment of American decline is adequate which does not face up to the problem of American nationalism and its impact on American social psychology.” (Meaney, 1991) It is not simply the nationalist and reactionary character of Trump’s rhetorical response to decline: his mercantilism, alliance backsliding, and focus on great power relations over institution-building has echoes of Nixon’s foreign policy in a former period of economic malaise and status anxiety (Cha & Seo, 2018).

Indeed, the United States’ strategic approach during the course of the last decade has echoes of American grand strategy in times when American power was less obviously dominant. Through the nineteenth and early twentieth century, before Washington’s post-war ascension to the position of ‘leader of the free world’, American foreign policy was steeped in realism: geographically focused, cautious, and suspicious of grand designs. In this sense, the Cold War period is an outlier, characterised by ideologically fuelled global ambition. Now that the generation of foreign policy establishment that experienced the Cold War is fading away, replaced by a younger coterie animated by the damage caused by American adventurism in the post-Cold War period, the cognitive frameworks of US foreign policy have changed. For all Trump’s particular capriciousness, a sense of realism is returning to the heart of American grand strategy.

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