It’s an election year, so talk of Grand Strategy is in the air across the land, at least across think-tank land and academia. I was reminded this was a worthwhile pursuit at New America's recent event, "Reframing U.S. Strategy in a Turbulent World: American Spring?"

The country’s foreign policy could use a clearer mission statement.  If you rummage around on the White House’s web site, you’ll eventually stumble across something called The National Security Strategy of the United States. In fact, you’ll find more than half a dozen National Security Strategy documents, since Congress mandates that each president produce one.  But though the National Security Strategy (NSS) is many things (press release, public relations statement, laundry list of laudable aspirations), Grand Strategy it ain’t. The unclassified version alone clocks in at some sixty pages, which is hardly petite, but “long” isn’t the same as “grand.” When it comes to Grand Strategy, less is more: if it can’t be expressed in a few paragraphs, it’s something other than Grand Strategy.

Grand Strategy is “the big idea” of foreign and national security policy. Grand strategy is the overarching concept that links ends, ways and means, the organizing principle that allows states to purposively plan and prioritize the use of diplomatic, economic and military power. A list of aspirations is a list of wishes, which is not a substitute for a strategy. And a list of “priorities” is worth nothing at all, if there are 47 priorities.

Of necessity, Grand Strategy has to be pretty simple: after all, to be a guiding principle, it has to be readily understood by many actors and easily translated into action. A 60-page document, produced by consensus amongst bureaucrats? Not so much.

It’s awfully hard to discern the contours of a Grand Strategy from the last three years (take the administration's confused, inconsistent reaction to the Arab Spring). President Obama makes wonderful speeches, and rhetorically, he’s awfully persuasive. But judged impartially, US foreign and national security over the last three years looks ad hoc, reactive and inconsistent.

It’s true that Grand Strategy isn’t everything.  It’s not a script or a playbook, for instance. But without any notion of Grand Strategy – without any broad vision of a desired end state -- there’s no basis on which to make the day-to-day decisions. Yes, most of the work of foreign policy is about small, incremental changes, not sweeping, fancy stuff.  It’s about whether to meet with the Saudis for half an hour or for two hours at the UN General Assembly, whether we need ten aircraft carriers or eleven, and whether to release two Yemenis or three Yemenis from Guantanamo. But without some notion of where you want to go, there’s no principled or consistent basis for making even the most incremental decisions—so you end up with a foreign policy that looks almost random, and that may be internally inconsistent. As they say, “If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there.” This isn’t a recipe for a sound foreign policy.

Rosa Brooks is a Senior Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation and a professor at Georgetown University Law Center. Ms. Brooks recently served as Counselor to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy and as Special Coordinator for Rule of Law and Humanitarian Policy in the Pentagon. She studies and writes on the changing nature of warfare and changing role of the U.S. military.

Video of the January 11 event is available below:

The event, presented by the New America Foundation's American Strategy Program, in association with Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, featured the following speakers:

Charles Kupchan
Professor of International Affairs, Georgetown University
Whitney Shepardson Senior Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations

Rosa Brooks
Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center
Bernard Schwartz Senior Fellow, New America Foundation

The Hon. Tom Perriello
Former Member, U.S. House of Representatives
CEO, Center for American Progress Action Fund

Bruce W. Jentleson
Professor, Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University
Co-Author, The End of Arrogance: America in the Global Competition of Ideas

Moderator
Michael Tomasky
Editor, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas
Special Correspondent, Newsweek/The Daily Beast

Opening Comments
Steve Clemons
Washington Editor-at-Large, The Atlantic
Senior Fellow & Founder, American Strategy Program, New America Foundation