ABSTRACT
The mainstream of American foreign policy has been defined since the 1940s by two grand strategies that have built the modern international order, where the starategies are realist in orientation, and liberal in orientation. These two grand strategies are rooted in divergent, even antagonistic, intellectual traditions. For the first time since the dawn of the Cold War, a new grand strategy is taking shape in Washington. It is advanced most directly as a response to terrorism, but it also constitutes a broader view about how the United States should wield power and organize world order. It begins with a fundamental commitment to maintaining a unipolar world in which the United States has no peer competitor. America's well-meaning imperial strategy could undermine the principled multilateral agreements, institutional infrastructure, and cooperative spirit needed for the long-term success of nonproliferation goals. The imperial grand strategy cannot generate the cooperation needed to solve practical problems at the heart of the foreign policy agenda.
