Comparative Grand Strategy: A Framework and Cases

The concept of a grand strategy, a blueprint that links a country’s values to its ‘ways, means, and ends’ is rarely applied to countries other than the United States.That is because participants in debates about American grand strategy predominantly believe that few countries have the resources to create and implement one. Only countries like the US can shape world politics. But the evidence suggests otherwise. In a complex new post Cold war security environment, many countries combine their diplomatic, economic, and military resources to generate what looks like a grand strategy - even if they are only trying to adapt to threats rather than shape the world. In this book we provide a framework for analyzing national grand strategies comparatively, and look at how that process works - and the results they generate - in ten countries spanning the globe.