These three rules of thumb provide the basis for determining new principles to guide American grand strategy moving forward.

Three Guiding Principles for American Grand Strategy

If we are to stipulate that the United States has failed to develop a coherent and modern grand strategy, the first step in righting this problem is to reapply and reassert the three critical organizing principles that provide the foundations for a positive strategy to guide American foreign policy.

The First Principle: Rebuilding Domestic Foundations of Power

First, the United States can no longer postpone the moment when it must devote greater time, attention, and resources to rebuilding the domestic foundations of its national power. Beginning with World War II, the United States used its national power to engage globally on an unprecedented scale. Completing work begun in the 1930s, we built our world-class infrastructure—industry, roads, bridges, schools, energy, and so forth—during the decades after World War II.

Many observers, unfortunately, believe wrongly that grand strategy is largely about foreign and defense policy. But a cardinal principle of grand strategy is to rebuild the domestic foundations of America’s national power. This practice dating back to the administration of George Washington has been central to the deliberations that have governed the decisions of virtually every administration since then. Grand strategy rests on much more than foreign policy because its influence derives directly from the free market economic foundations of the nation’s power.

In determining if this principle is given due regard, one indicator is the state of the nation’s infrastructure. To be a global player, the United States must have world-class roads, bridges, electric power grids, national broadband, and mass transit systems, among other elements of domestic power. To compete economically, these will be as important instruments of national power as armies, navies, and air forces are for defending our interests. Nor can we forget the importance of education, healthcare, and retirement systems as instruments for ensuring broad opportunities for every American. Our grand strategy cannot be effective until we restore the infrastructure and social safety nets that assure all Americans of their opportunity to compete and succeed. All of this is as central to the successful conduct of foreign policy as anything the nation does.

Another indicator for determining if this principle is best served concerns the state and pace of innovation. The hallmarks of the U.S. economy’s strength are not only its size and growth rate but for future prosperity the level of innovation. If the United States is not leading in venture capital per person or number of NASDAQ corporations, for example, then its grand strategy will fail and its standing in the world will decline. Finally, growing numbers of jobs and a strong middle class are enduring indicators of the strength of the domestic foundations of American power.[18]

Just as U.S. grand strategy needs to look outward, it also must look inward to address the problems facing American society. For too long, scholars and policymakers preoccupied themselves with the foreign policy and national security elements of grand strategy. Sadly, most current thinking about foreign policy operates almost exclusively through the lens of security and military affairs. However, at this moment the “grand strategy imperative” calls for policymakers to define America’s roles and responsibilities in a less hegemonic and, perhaps more humble, demeanor. To reinforce American leadership abroad, the United States must demonstrate that its grand strategy is as much about devoting attention and resources to reinforcing the domestic foundations of power as it is to conducting foreign policy. Unfortunately, modern policymakers often forget this most basic of principles.

Policymakers and scholars must remember that grand strategy embraces vastly more than foreign policy. American influence derives precisely from the free-market economic underpinnings that give the nation such immense influence—often permitting it to marshal tremendous power when it is necessary to do so. If America is to remain a global leader, as many Americans and others globally believe it should, then it must recommit itself first to reinforcing the domestic foundations of America’s national power. To express this another way: When the nation ignores the domestic foundations of power, it will court disasters, often unfolding in slow motion, as the will of American society lags behind its commitments.

With global powers standing in ruins after World War II, the United States used its national power as the leading actor on an unprecedented scale to rebuild many of its closest allies today. Throughout the 20th century, America also built its own world-class infrastructure—a national network of industries, roads, bridges, schools, electric power grids, and energy infrastructure. Without that investment and the national consensus it symbolized, the United States could not have been such an effective force on the world stage.

Nor can policymakers and scholars forget the critical role of education, healthcare, and social safety systems for ensuring broad opportunities for all Americans. U.S. grand strategy cannot be effective until we restore the infrastructure and social safety nets that assure all Americans of the opportunity to compete and succeed. America's global role derives from the strength of its people, its ability to be innovative, and the entrepreneurial spirit that Americans harness to solve the most daunting challenges. This, however, is not a prescription for throwing “more money than god” at problems. Simply spending money is unlikely to reinforce the foundations of the nation’s power. For that, the nation needs a political consensus, largely absent from the national debate, and resources. To restore the nation’s grand strategy, it is time to rebuild the American spirit of innovation, hard work, ingenuity, and collective action.

Such considerations, while often subordinated or ignored altogether in the national debate, often fall by the wayside as debates about foreign policy and national security compete for policymakers’ time and attention. For the public, the daily onslaught of media reports—problems with Iran, Syria, Egypt, North Korea, Russia, China, European Union, energy, or the crisis of the moment—shift vital attention away from the domestic sources of power that define American influence and are central to its grand strategy. Rebuilding the national foundations of American power, on which grand strategy rests, is essential to dealing with a world whose innumerable risks and opportunities demand American leadership.

To be direct, emphasizing the domestic foundations of power is not a veiled call for the United States to withdraw from the world or see its leadership decline. On the contrary, it is a call for realigning the nation’s grand strategy to meet the challenges of the world as it is. With this realignment, American policymakers and the public once again can, strategically and effectively, rebalance how the nation allocates resources and attention to meet the demands imposed by foreign and domestic challenges and opportunities. This is the right time, as friends and allies urge the United States to maintain an active leadership role, for the American people and their policymakers to realign the nation’s policies with its interests and priorities.

The Second Principle: Exercising American leadership to restrain sources of disorder that present direct threats to U.S. vital interests

The palpable sense of drift in American foreign policy, which relates directly to the failure to define a grand strategy to guide the nation, is occurring at precisely the moment when the world faces increasingly dangerous sources of disorder. The rise of great powers, middle powers, authoritarianism, and unexpected sources of disorder undermine the peaceful and secure world that the United States historically seeks to build. These sources of disorder pose a direct challenge to American leadership.

Second, the United States must define its grand strategy to actively restrain the sources of disorder that contribute to insecurity and chaos in a world, which remains more dangerous and unstable than many observers anticipated.[19] Despite being mired in a painfully slow recovery from the "Great Recession," the time has come for the United States to exercise world leadership in contrast with the options of retrenching and withdrawing from the international arena. The problems generated by China, Russia, Iran, and Syria, among others in the highly unstable Middle East, call for more active and assertive leadership from Washington. As discussed, with no evident shortage of serious risks and problems, the United States can no longer afford the luxury of defining its foreign policy in terms of containment. This “old think,” as we have discovered, is worse than ineffectual. In this climate, the central imperative for Washington is to define its strategy not in terms of containing problems, but of restraining the forces that contribute to instability, chaos, and war.

One question that arises from the review of the evolution of American grand strategy is ‘How Can We Distinguish a Hitler from a Saddam?’ The Axis Powers were a threat that required American leadership as well as its military and economic power. It was worth a debt-to-GDP ratio that reached 118 percent by 1945. Hitler in Europe and Japan in Asia were sources of disorder that required making them the highest priority and using military force on a global scale. Saddam Hussein in 2003 was likened to Hitler, but he did not reach the same level of threat because he lacked the capability to invade and occupy other countries. His military was weak by comparison to the militaries of Germany and Japan, and his economy was in shambles.