The last module introduced the concept of grand strategy,
and talked about it as a way of categorizing clumps of national interests
and foreign policies that the US government might pursue.
Grand strategies clump foreign policies together in the same way that
partisanship, or the democratic and republican party labels, clump together
various domestic policy positions.
For example, in domestic politics, When you hear a proposal for tax cuts,
you tend to identify that with the republican party.
In grand strategy debates, when you hear policies designed to strengthen
multilateral international organizations,
like the United Nations, as we saw in Obama's West Point speech,
we tend to think of liberal internationalism.
A grand strategy we will be discussing in this module.
We also examined the Obama doctrine as a means to illustrate
some of the dimensions of grand strategy.
And then we introduced one variant of this larger debate about grand strategy.
That of isolationism.
In this group of lecture segments, we're going to continue our discussion
of the varieties of US grand strategy,
by examining selective engagement, offshore balancing,
liberal internationalism, and primacy.
There are eight additional lecture segments in this module, the first
defines selective engagement.
The second discusses the presidencies of Eisenhower and George H.W. Bush
as historical examples of selective engagement.
The third examines offshore balancing through the Mireshimer and Walt reading.
The fourth segment defines liberal internationalism, and points to the
policies of Woodrow Wilson as reflecting this grand strategy.
The fifth defines the grand strategy of primacy,
and briefly introduces the policies of George H.W. Bush
as an example of it.
It also examines the relationship between neoconservatism and primacy.
The sixth segment summarizes the relationships and differences among
the entire array of grand strategies, discussed in this module
and the prior one.
And the last two segments examine how we might define the grand strategy of
the Trump administration.