Rethinking American Grand Strategy

By: Elizabeth Borgwardt - editor, Christopher McKnight Nichols - editor, Andrew Preston - editor

Narrated by: Steve Menasche, Teri Schnaubelt

What is grand strategy? What does it aim to achieve? And what differentiates it from normal strategic thought - what, in other words, makes it "grand"? In answering these questions, most scholars have focused on diplomacy and warfare, so much so that "grand strategy" has become almost an equivalent of "military history". The traditional attention paid to military affairs is understandable, but in today's world it leaves out much else that could be considered political, and therefore strategic. It is in fact possible to consider, and even reach, a more capacious understanding of grand strategy, one that still includes the battlefield and the negotiating table while expanding beyond them.

Rethinking American Grand Strategy assembles a roster of leading historians to examine America's place in the world. Its innovative chapters reexamine familiar figures, such as John Quincy Adams, George Kennan, and Henry Kissinger, while also revealing the forgotten episodes and hidden voices of American grand strategy. They expand the scope of diplomatic and military history by placing the grand strategies of public health, race, gender, humanitarianism, and the law alongside military and diplomatic affairs to reveal hidden strategists as well as strategies.

©2021 Oxford University Press (P)2021 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Fascinating

This is a very thoughtful collection of works. Each reflects on American Grand Strategy from a different perspective and how American Grand Strategy has and could (and sometimes should) incorporate domestic objectives and/or humanitarian ends; the origins of the theory; and whether American Grand Strategy can work or does exist at all!

Poorly organized, very disjointed uneven narration

Apparently the editors wanted to show that 'grand strategy' is a fool's gambit. Half the book presents at least a dozen conflicting definitions of grand strategy and the other half lists all the failures of those who have pursued such concepts. The narration switches from a male voice that is pompous and painstakingly slow to a female voice that is twice as speedy but sounding uninterested in the subject matter. The chapters do not appear to follow in any organized order, and at the end of the book, the author, or summarizer states that he has written much ado about nothing.