The Cato Institute has long been unique in Washington, D.C.’s foreign policy debate. For years, our scholars have argued that there is essentially no debate over grand strategy here in the nation’s capital. Vigorous political battles about U.S. foreign policy tend to happen only within a very narrow range of opinion, usually centering on tactics rather than competing strategic visions. These surface level disagreements mask a bipartisan consensus in favor of a grand strategy of primacy (alternatively termed “liberal hegemony” or “deep engagement”), which is further buttressed by an extensive network of foreign policy professionals within the national security bureaucracies. The consensus sees the United States as the indispensable nation - the policeman of the world - that must maintain military preponderance and extensive security commitments in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia in the name of upholding the international order.
The election of Donald Trump to the presidency has, in an odd way, created incentives for a debate about grand strategy. The president’s erratic and often contradictory utterances on alliances, free trade, and interventionism - what the Brookings Institution’s Thomas Wright describes as Trump’s Jekyll and Hyde foreign policy - has occasionally questioned the core foundations of U.S. grand strategy in the post-WWII era. Unfortunately, Trump is just about the worst vessel for ushering in such a debate, for reasons that are too numerous to count but include his economic protectionism, chauvinistic nationalism, habitual threat inflation, and worrying illiberal tendencies. Nevertheless, the shock to the status quo that is Trump’s rise has elicited a number of well-publicized defenses of primacy by people in the Washington foreign policy community.
And that’s what makes an upcoming Cato Institute event so timely and important. The debate over grand strategy in academia has always been comparatively robust, and two leading scholars who advocate the continuation of America’s deep engagement, Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, both professors at Dartmouth College, will be here on March 21 to discuss their newest book, America Abroad: The United States’ Global Role in the 21st Century. Our two discussants are at the other end of the spectrum on grand strategy: Cato’s own Benjamin H. Friedman and Eugene Gholz, professor at the University of Texas at Austin and Cato adjunct scholar.
Please join us for this vital discussion of America’s role in the world. Register to attend the event here.
