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Today, the United States doesn’t need a grand strategy. Instead, U.S. leaders need to identify their priorities and craft strategies for each of them. The foreign-policy issues that matter to the lives of Americans—from climate change to pandemic diseases to cyberattacks—increasingly require global responses. And leaders need to convince the American people that these challenges affect them directly and that tackling them requires robust U.S. engagement in the world.

The notion of U.S. grand strategy today revolves around America’s Cold War foreign policy of containment—the brainchild of the diplomat George Kennan—which sought to prevent the expansion of Moscow’s influence, bolstering the strength of the noncommunist world and squeezing the Soviet Union until it changed. The objective of containment drove U.S. policy until the Soviet Union collapsed. This victory—assumed to be the result of the containment policy—created a Cold War legacy that subsequent policymakers have looked on as a heyday for Washington’s global strategy.
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In 1993, Anthony Lake, President Bill Clinton’s national security advisor, reportedly established what he called the “Kennan sweepstakes” to encourage his staff to develop a new grand strategy. Over the years, Washington has jumped from Clinton’s democratic enlargement to George W. Bush’s global war on terrorism to Donald Trump’s America First approach. Some strategies had more success than others, but none has captured the totality of the United States’ interests. Indeed, some grand strategies are little more than messaging exercises, providing a unifying justification for a broad range of disparate policies; others elevate one or two goals above all else.
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Syria was the most devastating of the policy dilemmas. While Obama made clear his interest in getting the United States out of conflicts in the Middle East, the Syrian catastrophe could not be ignored. The United States publicly supported the aspirations of the Syrian people, financed humanitarian assistance, and attempted to end the war through diplomacy. As part of these goals, Obama included a “red line”—the public threat that a chemical weapons attack would change his calculus about intervening—but his decision not to respond militarily to a chemical attack in 2013 fed a perception that the United States lacked credibility.
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The South China Sea is another example of the conundrum that policymakers face in applying principles to thorny real-world situations. When it comes to the maritime disputes between China and its neighbors, the United States prioritizes norms like the freedom of navigation and maintaining peace. But in upholding freedom of navigation in the South China Sea, the United States must consider its risk tolerance for a broader conflict with China: Should the United States be willing to use force to deter China from threatening its neighbors?Should the United States be willing to use force to deter China from threatening its neighbors? If the United States is not willing to use force while China is, can the United States effectively uphold norms in the region?
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During two periods since World War II, the United States has adopted grand strategies that garnered widespread domestic support and that served as lodestars for U.S. policy—containment and the global war on terrorism. But both of those grand strategies were often counterproductive. ...