Analyzing grand strategy as empirical phenomenon during the Trump administration

Shively, Jacob (author)

International Security Studies Section-International Security and Arms Control (ISSS-ISAC) Joint Annual Conference. Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN

2018

This paper argues that scholarship on grand strategy is evolving, and it proposes a framework to capture that evolution: Grand Strategy Analysis (GSA). It sets out the ways in which grand strategy has been studied in recent decades, and it shows that across different research traditions and scholarly fields, grand strategy is treated as a distinct, empirical phenomenon. Unfortunately, these traditions rarely communicate with one another. Further, in the larger academic and policy communities, grand strategy is typically assumed to be a vague organizing concept rather than a specific term of art. In part, these shortcomings flow from our lack of a shared analytical framework. The paper argues that foreign policy analysis offers a useful guide for the interdisciplinary and cumulative study of grand strategy. It then concludes with a proposal to study the first two years of the Trump administration’s grand strategy using this GSA framework.

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