Grand Strategy

... president when he says we can have all these good things without paying for it," said Michael Lind, a political analyst at the New America Foundation. ...

Two major public statements, coming less than a week apart, nicely capture the confusion besetting U.S. foreign policy these days.The first is the report of the Iraq Study Group, released on Dec. 6. In good old-fashioned "realist" style, the report offers nothing about how to promote democracy and human rights in the Middle East, focusing instead on the single-minded, amoral pursuit of the U.S. national interest.Just five days later, outgoing U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan delivered… more

No new, compelling vision of America’s role in the world has emerged to replace the obsolete bipartisan Cold War consensus. Neither the Clinton administration’s market-driven approach to foreign policy nor the militant unilateralism of George W. Bush’s administration is an appropriate or sustainable strategy for the United States.

The most promising alternative would combine tough-minded realism with pragmatic idealism in a new grand strategy joining U.S. support for great-power military and diplomatic cooperation in managing regional crises with an American… more

Each era in American history is defined by a couple of big ideas: the Homestead Act, the GI Bill, Social Security, the Marshall Plan or the race to space. Such major social or economic innovations are usually advanced by our political leaders in response to national turning points. Few would disagree that the United States has reached another historical juncture. Where, then, have all the big -- and good -- ideas gone?

The paucity of… more

Copies of the Fall 2003 World Policy Journal will be distributed to attendees.

Out of the national trauma of September 11 has emerged a new grand strategy for American foreign policy, comparable in scale and ambition to the strategy of containment that guided American foreign policy for much of the Cold War. Championed by neo-conservatives in and around the Bush administration, this grand strategy -- which I call muscular dominance -- has won the acceptance of neo-liberal hawks associated with the Democratic Party as well. The troubled occupation of Iraq, together with the… more

After World War II, both native and emigre intellectuals had a profound impact on U.S. foreign policy. In our new Globalist Paper, Michael Lind explores the old guard of Central European Realists -- and the new crop of British Commonwealth Imperialists. He proposes that it is high time to rediscover the "American School" of foreign policy.

From the Napoleonic Era until World War I, the United States had its own distinctive mainstream foreign policy tradition. Call it the… more

A group of Americans dreamed of creating a U.S. empire. Their opening came with the mass death of Americans in a shocking event. Media sensationalism whipped public outrage into a war frenzy. The resulting war was a success, but the subsequent occupation was a failure. Michael Lind asks: Does this describe the invasion of Iraq in 2003 -- or the Spanish-American War of 1898?

A century ago, under President McKinley, the camp of prominent American imperialists included Vice President… more

The United States will soon be at war with Iraq. It would seem, on the face of it, a justifiable use of military force. Saddam Hussein runs one of the most tyrannical regimes in modern history.

For more than 25 years he has sought to acquire chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, and has, in several documented cases, succeeded. He gassed 60,000 of his own people in 1986 in Halabja. He has launched two catastrophic wars, sacrificing nearly a million Iraqis and… more

Twenty years ago this Saturday, President Ronald Reagan used the "e" word, ushering in a new era of American foreign policy making.

Reagan's strong rhetoric worked well enough in his time, but today, as President George W. Bush tries the same 200-proof talk in totally different circumstances, it's boomeranging. And that's a lesson for all time: The strategy that succeeds in one era can fail in the next.

Speaking to the National Association of Evangelicals on March 8, 1983, the 40th… more