Description
Book SynopsisThis book is focused on explaining the grand strategic behavior of the United States from the Founding of the Republic to the Trump administration. To do so it employs a neoclassical realist framework to argue that while systemic change explains the broad evolution of US grand strategy, the precise shape and content of the grand strategies pursued has been conditioned by domestic political culture and interests. The book argues that distinct political cultures of statecraft (Hamiltonian, Jeffersonian, Jacksonian and Wilsonian) have acted as permissive filters through which policy-makers have interpreted and responded to systemic stimuli making some grand strategy choices more likely than others in the pursuit of national security. The book demonstrates that while primacist grand strategies were facilitated by the predominance from the mid-19th century to the early 21st century of the vindicationist Hamiltonian and Wilsonian forms of statecraft, the costs of primacy have now stimulated the resurgence of the long dormant, exemplarist Jeffersonian and Jacksonian forms of statecraft under the Obama and Trump administrations, resulting in grand strategies that seek to either manage or stave off decline in America’s relative power position.
Table of ContentsChapter 1. American Grand Strategy and National Security
Chapter 2. Before Primacy: American Grand Strategy from the Founding to “Manifest Destiny”Chapter 3. Priming for Primacy: Building an” Empire of Principles” in the Progressive EraChapter 4. Primacy Deferred: American Grand Strategy from Wilson to FDRChapter 5. Primed for Primacy: American Grand Strategy and National Security during the Cold WarChapter 6. Primacy in the Service of (Inter)national Security: The Promises and Pitfalls of the Unipolar MomentChapter 7. Primacy Constrained: Barack Obama and the Perils of Grand Strategic Under-reachChapter 8. Power without Primacy: Donald Trump and the Future of American Grand Strategy
