Overview
- Presents a historically informed and conceptually rigorous account of the evolution of American grand strategy since 1945
- Provides an explanation for the apparent disjuncture between the continued enduring material and strategic primacy of the United States and domestic and international perceptions of its decline through the application of neoclassical realist perspective
- Offers particular insights into, and alternative explanations for, the grand strategy approaches of the Obama and Trump administrations
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Table of contents (13 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This book is focused on explaining the grand strategic behavior of the United States from the Founding of the Republic to the Trump administration. To do so it employs a neoclassical realist framework to argue that while systemic change explains the broad evolution of US grand strategy, the precise shape and content of the grand strategies pursued has been conditioned by domestic political culture and interests. The book argues that distinct political cultures of statecraft (Hamiltonian, Jeffersonian, Jacksonian and Wilsonian) have acted as permissive filters through which policy-makers have interpreted and responded to systemic stimuli making some grand strategy choices more likely than others in the pursuit of national security. The book demonstrates that while primacist grand strategies were facilitated by the predominance from the mid-19th century to the early 21st century of the vindicationist Hamiltonian and Wilsonian forms of statecraft, the costs of primacy have now stimulated the resurgence of the long dormant, exemplarist Jeffersonian and Jacksonian forms of statecraft under the Obama and Trump administrations, resulting in grand strategies that seek to either manage or stave off decline in America’s relative power position.
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Dr. Michael Clarke is Senior Fellow at the Centre for Defence Research, Australian Defence College, and Visiting Fellow at the Australia-China Relations Institute, University of Technology Sydney, Australia.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: American Grand Strategy and National Security
Book Subtitle: The Dilemmas of Primacy and Decline from the Founding to Trump
Authors: Michael Clarke
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30175-0
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Political Science and International Studies, Political Science and International Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-30174-3Published: 25 August 2021
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-30177-4Due: 25 September 2021
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-30175-0Published: 24 August 2021
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XII, 570
Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations
Topics: Political Science, Foreign Policy, International Security Studies