ABSTRACT
This study has shown that American grand strategy in the post-Cold War era has continued to be aimed at the further opening of foreign markets and thereby the expansion and deepening of a U.S.-centered global capitalism; the spread of liberal institutions and ideas, thus expanding and entrenching a (neo)liberal world order, while defending this order and America’s hegemonic position within it against any state or non-state contender threatening closure. In short, the United States has continued to pursue a grand strategy of the global Open Door, a strategy that has its origins in the end of the nineteenth century and has in terms of its overarching ends remained largely unchanged throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. It has been a grand strategy, to repeat a quotation from what America’s grand-strategy planners wrote 65 years ago in the Cold War blueprint NSC-68, “designed to foster a world environment in which the American system can survive and flourish” (Department of State, 1950). The American system here is, above all, a liberal capitalist system, and its flourishing has for over a century been deemed by America’s foreign policy elite to be dependent upon the existence of a global capitalism premised on open markets. This, then, has involved a strategy of the extension of the American system as a liberal market “democracy,” creating an economically unified yet politically fragmented global space in which, above all, U.S. transnational capital can roam freely.
