American Grand Strategy and National Security
The Dilemmas of Primacy and Decline from the Founding to Trump
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Beschreibung
This book explains 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. In particular, this book demonstrates that the American pursuit of primacy was facilitated by the predominance from the mid-19th century onward of the extroverted and vindicationist Hamiltonian and Wilsonian forms of statecraft, which reached a peak of influence at the end of the Cold War. The grand strategic overreach of the George W. Bush administration, however, stimulated the resurgence of the long dormant, introverted, and exemplarist Jeffersonian and Jacksonian forms of statecraft under the Obama and Trump administrations, respectively resulting in grand strategies of “decline management” and decline "denial." Ultimately, the return of exemplarist sentiment suggests a breakdown in elite consensus about the nature and purpose of American power in the 21st century.
Dr. Michael Clarke is Senior Fellow at the Centre for Defence Research, Australian Defence College, and Visiting Fellow at the Australia-China Relations Institute, University of Technology Sydney, Australia.
This 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.
Presents a historically informed and conceptually rigorous account of the evolution of American grand strategy since 1945 Provides an explanation for the apparent disjuncture between the continued enduring material and strategic primacy of the United States and domestic and international perceptions of its decline through the application of neoclassical realist perspective Offers particular insights into, and alternative explanations for, the grand strategy approaches of the Obama and Trump administrations
Autor*in
Michael Clarke
Themen in »American Grand Strategy and National Security«
National Security US international affairs strategic primacy Bill Clinton George H. W. Bush primacist grand strategy George W. Bush America First American primacy