Domestic Political Change And Grand Strategy

Based upon work supported by the Department of Energy (National Nuclear Security Administration) under Award Number DE-FG52-03SF22724.

This book explores the idea of grand strategy and offers a full-blown critique--both theoretical and empirical--of the gaps and inconsistencies that weaken modern realist theory. Grand strategy, the authors maintain, is determined as much by domestic politics as by international pressures.

A clearly articulated, well-defined, and relatively stable grand strategy is supposed to allow the ship of state to steer a steady course through the roiling seas of global politics. However, the obstacles to formulating and implementing grand strategy are, by all accounts, imposing. The Oxford Handbook of Grand Strategy addresses the conceptual and historical foundations, production, evolution, and future of grand strategy from a wide range of standpoints. The seven constituent sections present and critically examine the history of grand strategy, including beyond the West; six distinct theoretical approaches to the subject; the sources of grand strategy, ranging from geography and technology to domestic politics to individual psychology and culture; the instruments of grand strategy's implementation, from military to economic to covert action; political actors', including non-state actors', grand strategic choices; the debatable merits of grand strategy, relative to alternatives; and the future of grand strategy, in light of challenges ranging from political polarization to technological change to aging populations. The result is a field-defining, interdisciplinary, and comparative text that will be a key resource for years to come.

The 2013-14 Strategic Asia volume examines the role of nuclear weapons in the grand strategies of key Asian states and assesses the impact of these capabilities—both established and latent—on regional and international stability. In each chapter, a leading expert explores the historical, strategic, and political factors that drive a country's calculations vis-a-vis nuclear weapons and draws implications for American interests.

A nation's grand strategy rarely serves the best interests of all its citizens. Instead, every strategic choice benefits some domestic groups at the expense of others. When groups with different interests separate into opposing coalitions, societal debates over foreign policy become polarized along party lines. Parties then select leaders who share the priorities of their principal electoral and financial backers. As a result, the overarching goals and guiding principles of grand strategy, as formulated at the highest levels of government, derive from domestic coalitional interests. In The Political Economy of Grand Strategy, Kevin Narizny develops these insights into a comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding the dynamics of security policy.The focus of this analysis is the puzzle of partisanship. The conventional view of grand strategy, in which state leaders act as neutral arbiters of the "national interest," cannot explain why political turnover in the executive office often leads to dramatic shifts in state behavior. Narizny, in contrast, shows how domestic politics structured foreign policymaking in the United States and Great Britain from 1865 to 1941. In so doing, he sheds light on long-standing debates over the revival of British imperialism, the rise of American expansionism, the creation of the League of Nations, American isolationism in the interwar period, British appeasement in the 1930s, and both countries' decisions to enter World War I and World War II.

This book explains the grand strategic behavior of the United States from the Founding of the Republic to the Trump administration. To do so, it employs a neoclassical realist framework to argue that, while systemic change explains the broad evolution of US grand strategy, the precise shape and content of the grand strategies pursued has been conditioned by domestic political culture and interests. The book argues that distinct political cultures of statecraft (Hamiltonian, Jeffersonian, Jacksonian, and Wilsonian) have acted as permissive filters through which policy-makers have interpreted and responded to systemic stimuli, making some grand strategy choices more likely than others in the pursuit of national security. In particular, this book demonstrates that the American pursuit of primacy was facilitated by the predominance from the mid-19th century onward of the extroverted and vindicationist Hamiltonian and Wilsonian forms of statecraft, which reached a peak of influence at the end of the Cold War. The grand strategic overreach of the George W. Bush administration, however, stimulated the resurgence of the long dormant, introverted, and exemplarist Jeffersonian and Jacksonian forms of statecraft under the Obama and Trump administrations, respectively resulting in grand strategies of "decline management" and decline "denial." Ultimately, the return of exemplarist sentiment suggests a breakdown in elite consensus about the nature and purpose of American power in the 21st century. Dr. Michael Clarke is Senior Fellow at the Centre for Defence Research, Australian Defence College, and Visiting Fellow at the Australia-China Relations Institute, University of Technology Sydney, Australia.

A nation's grand strategy rarely serves the best interests of all its citizens. Instead, every strategic choice benefits some domestic groups at the expense of others. When groups with different interests separate into opposing coalitions, societal debates over foreign policy become polarized along party lines. Parties then select leaders who share the priorities of their principal electoral and financial backers. As a result, the overarching goals and guiding principles of grand strategy, as formulated at the highest levels of government, derive from domestic coalitional interests. In The Political Economy of Grand Strategy, Kevin Narizny develops these insights into a comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding the dynamics of security policy.The focus of this analysis is the puzzle of partisanship. The conventional view of grand strategy, in which state leaders act as neutral arbiters of the "national interest," cannot explain why political turnover in the executive office often leads to dramatic shifts in state behavior. Narizny, in contrast, shows how domestic politics structured foreign policymaking in the United States and Great Britain from 1865 to 1941. In so doing, he sheds light on long-standing debates over the revival of British imperialism, the rise of American expansionism, the creation of the League of Nations, American isolationism in the interwar period, British appeasement in the 1930s, and both countries' decisions to enter World War I and World War II.

This book examines traditional balance of power theory from a political-economic perspective, using historical examples, to draw out distinctions between the liberal and realist approach and how this affects grand strategy. The realist view of the balance of power theory includes implicit assumptions that economic assets can be turned quickly into power, and that states always respond to threats quickly and only with a view to the 'short-run'. These assumptions drive many of the expectations generated from traditional balance-of-power theory, discouraging realists from looking at domestic sources of power, which in turn undermined their ability to frame strategic decisions properly. By thinking about how power must be managed over time, however, we can model the choices policy-makers confront when determining expenditures on defense, while keeping an eye on the impact of those costs on the economy. By emphasizing the role of the state, identifying different causal patterns in domestic politics, and demonstrating the importance of systemic competition, this book aims to establish why a neo-classical realist approach is not only different from a liberal approach, but also superior when addressing questions on grand strategy. This book will be of much interest to students of security studies, international political economy, grand strategy and IR theory in general. Mark R. Brawley is Professor of Political Science at McGill University, Montreal, Canada. He is author of several books on International Relations, specialising in the connections between political economic issues and security.