ABSTRACT
This book is about the evolution of American grand strategy in the post-Cold War era, and about the foreign policy elite that has been making this strategy. In contrast to most other approaches, we argue that it matters who the people that make up this elite are: what their social background is; which social networks they are part of; in which social context their agency is located. Only through an account of the actual agents situated within their social context can we come to a more comprehensive understanding of U.S. grand strategy. The core thesis of this study, then, is that in order to explain the evolution of American grand strategy we need to analyze its social sources, starting with the grand-strategy makers themselves and the networks of social relations in which they were and are embedded. Our key finding is that America’s foreign policy elite from the Clinton to the Obama administration has been firmly embedded in America’s corporate elite dominated by transnationally oriented capital. It is this continuity in the social sources of American grand strategy, we argue, that helps to explain much of the continuity in that grand strategy, even if we will also find important manifestations of intra-elite variation within that continuity.
