America's Grand Strategy

A country’s grand strategy, whether explicitly or implicitly enacted by foreign policy elites, prioritizes foreign policy goals and provides guidance for future action given identified interests and resource constraints. Ultimately, grand strategy embodies the intervening ideational variables that manifest in foreign policy decisions reflecting the overall distribution of power within the international system. Although the prioritization of foreign policy goals change based upon temporal-specific material, social, and economic contexts (i.e., available means), the overall assessment of strategic ends should only infrequently change given the potential risk to national survival. When a country’s grand strategic approach does change it implies that the foreign policy elite changed their conceptions about the conditions required to ensure security. Therefore, I intend to research when, and under what conditions, does a country’s grand strategy change? Furthermore, given relevant contexts for change, in what ways should observers anticipate

This evolution surely contains answers as to the necessary conditions and likely timing of change within a country’s grand strategy. In fact, historians have noted suggestive patterns of the United States’ foreign policy behavior that suggest that such changes occurred. Walter Russell Mead notes four traditions that shaped, and continue to shape, US foreign policy. He argues that the Hamiltonian (protection of commerce), Jeffersonian (maintenance of a democratic system), Jacksonian (populist values, military strength), and Wilsonian (moral principle) traditions exist in tension with each other and shape foreign policy. Walter McDougall also notes several foreign policy traditions existing throughout US