Does Trump Have a Grand Strategy?

Trapara, Vladimir (2017) Does Trump Have a Grand Strategy? The Review of International Affairs, LXVIII (1168). pp. 56-70. ISSN 0486-6096

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Abstract

In this paper, the author argues that Donald Trump so far failed to make expected radical changes in United States foreign policy, because he does not have a coherent grand strategy. This is an alternative argument to the one according to which he does have a grand strategy, but is too weak against the foreign-policy establishment to apply it. A definition of grand strategy as a “state’s theory how to produce security for itself ” is taken from Barry Posen. According to Posen, there are four criteria for classifying grand strategies (objectives, premises, means and positions), while a grand strategy serves four functions (priorities, coordination, communication and accountability). Trump’s predecessors in the post-Cold War period favored a liberal hegemony grand strategy, to which Posen opposes an alternative strategy of restraint. A theoretical framework of the paper is a neoclassical realist foreign policy model which considers a sound grand strategy necessary to produce a change in foreign policy when other factors (distribution of power in the international system, the state’s identity) favor the inertia in foreign policy. Since this is not the case with Trump, the United States is still waiting for a president with a grand strategy of restraint.

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