Ronald Reagan's Subtle Grand Strategy

The National Interest ^ | March 5, 2014 | Hal Brands

[shepardspie33]

We are fast approaching grand-strategy season in Washington. Within the next few weeks, the Obama administration will release both its Quadrennial Defense Review and new updated National Security Strategy. These documents often contain the essential strategic ideas—about goals and priorities, threats and opportunities, resources and constraints—that guide an administration’s statecraft. And because they do, they inevitably provoke debate about that administration’s grand strategy—whether it actually has one, what its major tenets are and what prospects for success it has.

They will also invariably provoke comparisons to the grand strategies of administrations past—to the origins and evolution of containment under Harry Truman, to the strategic retrenchment pursued by Nixon and Kissinger, to many, many others. And given that 2014 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the ending of the Cold War, there will almost certainly be comparisons to the grand strategy of the president who arguably did as much as any American leader to end that conflict: Ronald Reagan.

A quarter-century after he left office, Reagan remains a polarizing figure. Admirers have celebrated him as a master grand strategist who used geopolitical pressure and moral clarity to bring the Soviet Union to its knees. Detractors have argued that there was no Reagan grand strategy to speak of, and that the fortieth president was more fortunate in his timing than prescient or visionary in his statecraft. In recent years, the declassification of reams of U.S. documents from this period has made it possible to better assess Reagan’s legacy, and to more effectively understand what insights his presidency offers for today’s grand strategists.

[Jim Robinson]

Someone posted a summary of Obama’s Grand Strategy the other day. Speak loudly and carry a limp stick.

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