ABSTRACT
This chapter considers American grand strategy after the end of the Cold War – what the United States does (and what some strategists think it should do) with its commanding position in world politics. Strategy summarizes the logic and principles used to set priorities, and as Barry Posen has explained, grand strategy – distinguished from particular strategies for dealing with specific situations, problems, and opportunities – is a state’s theory about how it can “cause” security for itself.1 It offers, or purports to offer, an explanation of how the means at a state’s disposal (alliances, investments, deployments of troops) will achieve the ends a state seeks. Grand strategy links economic, military, political, diplomatic, geographic, and even demographic assets.
