America Doesn’t Need a Grand Strategy
IN 2014, AS SYRIA FELL APART AND RUSSIA INVADED UKRAINE, criticism of U.S. President Barack Obama’s foreign policy mounted. Perhaps frustrated by questions about why he wasn’t solving these complex problems, the president and his advisors summarized the administration’s foreign policy as “don’t do stupid stuff.” The phrase took on a life of its own and became the subject of derision for those claiming Obama did not have a coherent foreign policy. The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman suggested that this was the “Obama doctrine.”
Unsatisfying as Obama’s explanation may have been, the sentiment wasn’t wrong. Ever since the U.S. strategy of containment was thought to have won the Cold War, the United States has searched, mostly in vain, for a new grand strategy. The gravitational pull for policymakers and experts to develop an overarching vision for America’s role in the world—encouraged by high-level officials and congressional mandates—is strong and can be an important process that establishes policy priorities for the bureaucracy, sends signals to friends and foes, and helps evaluate assumptions and refine goals.
But that search can also be a misguided and dangerous exercise, forcing simplifications of a complicated world and justifying counterproductive policies. Attempts at grand strategy can become nationalistic rallying cries—like “America First” or “the global war on terrorism”—that do far more harm than good.
Today, the United States doesn’t need a grand strategy. Instead, U.S. leaders need to identify their priorities and craft strategies for each of them. The foreign-policy issues that matter to the lives of Americans—from climate change to pandemic diseases to cyberattacks—increasingly require global responses. And leaders need to convince the American people that these challenges affect them directly and that tackling them requires robust U.S. engagement in the world.
revolves around America’s Cold War foreign policy of containment—the brainchild of the diplomat George Kennan—which sought to prevent
