America Needs a Grand Strategy

Abstract

At present, much of what passes for our national security debate focuses on re-litigating the past or on day-to-day crisis and escalation management. At the same time, little thought in the public square is being devoted to fostering a strategy to navigate the storms brewing over the horizon. America urgently needs a serious debate on the nation’s grand strategy for this new era of state-on-state conflict, one that eschews the heretofore dominant normative language about “defending the rules-based international order,” and instead speaks to the enduring verities of hard power.