America's Unsettled Grand Strategy

America’s grand strategy is changing, whether policymakers recognize it or not. For those who operate within its constraints, allies, adversaries, and U.S. agencies alike, adapting to that shift is not optional. Strategies, policies, and institutions built for the last era will struggle to gain the support of the American people and will ultimately fail if they do not adjust to the logic of the one now emerging.

It has also become increasingly selective in how it interprets and defends international law, raising questions about whether it remains the system’s principal steward or merely one powerful participant within it. These tensions are often attributed to polarization, poor leadership, or partisan swings from one administration to the next. But such explanations miss the deeper source of the disorder.

Most discussions about U.S. grand strategy focus on the use of national instruments, espoused doctrines, or presidential rhetoric. Grand strategy can be thought of as broader than this, more as an enduring pattern by which a state builds and deploys power in pursuit of its fundamental interests over time. It is affected by the will, beliefs, and capabilities of the nation. By that measure, American grand strategy has changed only a handful of times since the nation’s founding. When it does change, the effects are systemic, long-lasting, and deeply disruptive. This current moment of change is not unique in U.S. history, but it is rare and profoundly destabilizing.

Grand strategy, therefore, is not primarily about what a country wants to do in the world. It is about how it pursues its interests – economically, militarily, and politically – over prolonged periods. It is more than a policy doctrine; it is a national mood that spans decades, shapes institutions, and becomes embedded in culture. It also becomes embedded in legal commitments and interpretive habits. Treaty obligations, customary law positions, and longstanding understandings of executive authority reflect not just legal reasoning but strategic assumptions about America’s role in the world. This is why grand strategies endure across administrations and why they change only when underlying conditions force them to, and only with great friction. Americans internalized the “Allied Century” so deeply that even after the Cold War ended, they continued to see global leadership through alliances as natural. The unraveling of that belief today explains the turbulence and uncertainty of the present moment.
Grand strategies don’t change overnight. They erode gradually as assumptions that once structured policies lose their hold. Ideas that initially appear marginal – industrial policy, alliance burden-sharing, geographic retrenchment, skepticism toward globalization – circulate at the edges of debate before moving steadily toward the center. What changes first is not policy, but the strategic zeitgeist: what feels reasonable, defensible, or necessary. By the time these ideas dominate official documents and budgets, the underlying shift has already occurred.
We tend to think of grand strategy as something imposed on domestic politics only from above. In practice, the relationship isn’t so one-directional. The capacity to sustain a grand strategy depends on domestic economic strength, political consent, and social cohesion. When those foundations weaken, strategy does not simply fail; it changes. Industrial decline, inequality, and political polarization are not distractions from foreign policy; they are signals that the existing strategic model is no longer aligned with domestic realities. Over time, these pressures reshape what a state is willing and able to do abroad.
Domestic pressure, however, does not translate automatically into strategic change. Political and policy elites play a decisive mediating role. They can often interpret, amplify, or resist shifts in the national mood; they choose whether to accelerate adaptation or to defend inherited arrangements. Grand-strategic transitions, therefore, reflect an interaction between structural pressures and elite choice. Popular discontent creates the demand for change, but elites’ voices influence how – and how quickly – that demand is translated into policy.

The Great Recession was not merely an economic shock; it exposed the fragility of the material and political foundations on which postwar strategy rested. For some time, globalization was seen as delivering uneven gains, and industrial capacity was hollowed out. Public confidence in elite stewardship eroded. Meanwhile, China’s rise accelerated, and its ambitions became more overt. Internationally, the costs of system-wide stewardship became harder to justify and its success questionable.

Yet U.S. strategy did not immediately change. Instead, Washington entered a prolonged period of transition. This transition was marked by partial retrenchment, occasional rhetorical pivots, and growing domestic unease. The Obama administration sought to wind down wars in the Middle East and announced a “pivot to Asia,” even as it struggled to reconcile new priorities with old commitments. Successive administrations questioned alliance burdens and debated the costs of trade. President Trump championed change under “America First,” and although President Biden claimed, “America was back,” many of his policies echoed those of his predecessor. None fully acknowledged that the postwar strategic model itself was under strain.

This was not drift so much as denial. The inherited strategy continued to shape institutions and expectations even as its underlying conditions eroded. That inheritance included a dense web of treaty commitments, trade rules, and multilateral obligations that were designed for a period of relative American primacy and domestic consensus. As capacity and consent narrowed, friction with those commitments became more visible. The result was mounting friction between the United States and its allies, between the foreign policy elites and the public, and between global ambitions and domestic tolerance for the costs. This produced a growing mismatch between commitments and capacity, ambition, and consent.

Over the past decade, a different strategic logic has gradually taken hold. It remains incomplete, but its direction is increasingly clear.

The question of this period is no longer:

How does this advance the liberal international order?

It is now:

How does this advance American power, resilience, and long-term advantage?

That is a fundamental shift.

This change does not have to reflect isolationism or abdication, but it does reflect a return to first principles. What is emerging is a grand strategy of national reconstitution and selective engagement. The United States is re-centering its grand strategy on rebuilding and protecting the sources of national power – economic, technological, political, and military – while engaging internationally where doing so clearly advances core U.S. interests. That reorientation is understandably disconcerting to allies and partners, but it does not have to mean the end of those relationships. What matters most is how U.S. leaders manage the transition, because the way it is framed, explained, and executed will shape whether it produces renewal or unnecessary fracture.

Several patterns define this transition.

First, geostrategic priorities are being reordered around the defense of the homeland and the protection of core national interests, rather than inherited obligations. The Western Hemisphere has regained strategic salience as the United States places greater emphasis on securing its immediate neighborhood and reducing vulnerabilities that directly affect domestic stability. Beyond that immediate perimeter, the Indo-Pacific has emerged as the most consequential external theater - not because the United States seeks to defend Asia for its own sake, but because developments there bear directly on American economic vitality, technological leadership, and maritime access. Europe remains important, but no longer singular; the Middle East has receded from the center of U.S. strategy as attention shifts toward safeguarding the homeland and the foundations of national power.

Second, markets are no longer treated as self-justifying. The revival of industrial policy reflects the judgment that unconstrained globalization weakened U.S. strategic capacity. Washington is now willing to shape markets, accept inefficiency, and absorb costs in exchange for resilience and autonomy.

Third, economic security has become national security. Supply chains are treated as strategic terrain that have to be managed and possibly defended. Efforts to de-risk from China are not primarily punitive. They are defensive – aimed at reducing vulnerability and preserving freedom of action.

Fourth, alliances are increasingly treated as instruments rather than moral commitments. New arrangements such as AUKUS, the Quad, and a proliferation of trilateral partnerships reflect a more selective, capability-driven approach. Burden-sharing is no longer rhetorical. Contributions matter. As alliances become more capability-driven, debates over what treaty commitments require in practice are likely to intensify. Formal guarantees will endure, but expectations of automaticity may weaken.
Fifth, international law and norms are increasingly treated as instruments of strategy rather than ends in themselves. In the postwar era, the United States often framed its leadership as synonymous with the defense and expansion of a rules-based order. Washington will continue to support legal regimes that protect freedom of navigation, access to markets, and constrain its adversaries. But it will be more selective in defending or underwriting legal architectures that impose asymmetric costs or limit strategic flexibility. This does not signal the United States' abandonment of international law, but it does signal a shift from custodial stewardship of the system to conditional participation in it.

Finally, domestic political stability has become a first-order strategic constraint. In the postwar era, domestic politics were assumed to be background conditions. Today, they are central variables. Populism is not an aberration; it is strategic feedback guiding future decisions. Grand strategy that cannot command domestic consent cannot endure.

Much of the unease surrounding U.S. foreign policy flows directly from this transition.

A second-order effect helps explain why the turbulence is now so visible. In earlier eras, policymakers could pursue strategies that stretched beyond domestic tolerance so long as results appeared to justify the effort. That margin is narrowing. Today, for a foreign policy to be seen as effective, it must align with the underlying logic and limits of the emerging grand strategy. Policies that run against that logic, however well intentioned, will increasingly be judged as failures, not because they are poorly designed in isolation, but because they are misaligned with what the country is willing and able to sustain.

This is not simply a question of political messaging. It reflects a deeper reality: public support is no longer elastic. Strategies that assume open-ended commitments, diffuse benefits, or costs that are difficult to explain in terms of direct national advantage will face growing resistance. In this environment, success is not just about achieving external objectives. It is about doing so in a way that fits within the boundaries of national reconstitution and selective engagement. If a policy cannot be reconciled with those boundaries, it will not endure, regardless of its merits on paper.

At home, Americans are reacting to the collapse of a long-standing system. For decades, they were told that open markets, global leadership, and sustained commitments abroad would deliver shared prosperity and security. When those benefits failed to materialize evenly, support eroded. They are having to reorient to a shift in narrative and investment.

Abroad, allied anxiety runs even deeper. For generations, many U.S. allies structured their own grand strategies around American leadership. Defense postures, economic models, and political assumptions were built on the expectation that Washington would continue to underwrite the international system it helped create and enforce the laws and norms that were the foundation of that system. That expectation included not just military protection, but consistent American defense of trade regimes, dispute-settlement mechanisms, and the binding character of international commitments. As U.S. strategy becomes more conditional, allied confidence in those legal guarantees inevitably comes under strain. As the United States re-centers its strategy around national resilience and selective engagement, allies are not merely adjusting to new policies; they are confronting the erosion of the strategic foundation on which they relied. For many allies, that foundation was not just U.S. protection but a U.S.-run system that allowed them to invest in other priorities than their own defense. This dependence was rational when U.S. power was abundant and its leadership relatively cost-insensitive. It is destabilizing when American strategy becomes more conditional and interest driven. What feels like abandonment to allies is, in many cases, a delayed reckoning with long-standing asymmetries in responsibility.

Adversaries, meanwhile, risk miscalculation if they mistake strategic re-centering for decline. The United States is not withdrawing from the world; it is redefining how and why it engages.

A plausible counterargument is that this interpretation overstates change. In this view, the United States is not undergoing a grand-strategic transition at all, but merely an aberration from the grand strategy it followed since World War II. This argument holds that this is a temporary change driven by politics and not reality. In the end, it will be an adaptation of the post–Cold War model to harsher conditions. Alliances will remain central, forward presence will remain extensive, and Washington will continue to frame its objectives in systemic terms rather than narrowly national ones. Industrial policy, supply-chain security, and sharper competition with China can be read not as a break with the postwar order, but as overdue repairs to it. In this telling, today’s turbulence reflects policy correction and partisan noise, not the emergence of a new strategic era.

This argument has surface plausibility because many of the institutions, commitments, and rhetorical forms of the old strategy remain in place. The United States still leads alliances, still deploys its forces globally, and continues to speak the language of order and stability. Bureaucracies are sticky and avoid change. If one looks only at force posture or alliance communiqués, it is easy to conclude that continuity outweighs change and that what we are witnessing is adjustment within the same basic framework.

But this interpretation mistakes institutional inertia for strategic continuity. The organizing logic is already shifting, even if the architecture lags. The decisive change is not in where the United States is present, but in how it now justifies that presence and what it is no longer willing to underwrite. The core strategic question has moved from how to sustain a system to how to preserve American power within it.

The United States is no longer organizing its grand strategy around the maintenance of a global order for its own sake. It is organizing around the preservation and renewal of national power within an increasingly competitive international system. Leadership remains possible, but it is no longer assumed, universal, or cost blind. It is increasingly selective and anchored more explicitly to American capacity and consent.

This transition is incomplete, and the risk of incoherence remains real. A changing grand strategy is disruptive precisely because institutions, allies, and publics adjust slowly. Expectations built over decades do not dissolve on a specific schedule. Allies continue to plan against inherited assumptions, bureaucracies default to familiar commitments, and domestic coalitions fragment as costs become more visible. In such moments, the temptation is either to deny the change and cling to the old strategy or to overcorrect through abrupt retrenchment. Both paths are dangerous.

The central strategic challenge facing the United States today is not whether its grand strategy is changing, but whether that change will be managed deliberately or allowed to unfold through improvisation and backlash. Managing this transition requires patience, discipline, and understanding the change. Policymakers must communicate clearly internally and externally and align commitments with capacity and consent. They must also ensure that strategic adaptation remains anchored in domestic law. As the United States recalibrates its external commitments, debates over war powers, trade authorities, emergency powers, and sanctions regimes will intensify. Managing transition through improvisation or expansive unilateral authority would deepen domestic polarization and erode the very legitimacy that national reconstitution seeks to restore. That means resisting nostalgic efforts to restore a form of global leadership the United States can no longer sustain, as well as impulsive retrenchment that confuses strategic re-centering with withdrawal. Failing to align resources, commitments, and expectations – at home, where authority and funding reside, and abroad, where credibility is tested – only deepens confusion and magnifies the costs of straddling two incompatible strategic logics.

Above all, American leaders must be honest, at home and abroad, about what the United States can and will do. Allies can adapt to conditional leadership, but they cannot adapt to ambiguity. Adversaries can be deterred by a reconstituted America, but they are emboldened by incoherence and fracture. The greatest risk today is not that the United States is stepping back from the world, but that it will attempt to straddle two grand strategies at once. History suggests that such periods do not end quietly, but when reality forces a reckoning.
America’s grand strategy is changing. Policymakers who fail to recognize that shift, and deliberately shape it, will find their policies increasingly ineffective and unpopular, regardless of how well they are designed. A strategy of national reconstitution paired with selective engagement is already taking hold. Pretending the United States can simply revert to its prior global posture is not a successful strategy.
CAPT Jason S. Smith (U.S. Coast Guard, ret.) is a professor of national security strategy at the National War College and with the Naval War College’s Fleet Seminar Program. He previously served on the National Security Council, as a senior advisor in the U.S. Senate, and as a strategic advisor to multiple U.S. Coast Guard Commandants. He also serves on the congressionally mandated National Commission on the Future of the Navy. A retired U.S. Coast Guard and Army officer, he has extensive operational and strategic experience in aviation, maritime, and joint assignments.

Jason Smith is a professor of national security strategy at the National War College and with the Naval War College’s Fleet Seminar Program. He previously served on the National Security Council, as a senior advisor in the U.S. Senate, and as a strategic advisor to multiple U.S. Coast Guard Commandants. He also serves on the congressionally mandated National Commission on the Future of the Navy. A retired U.S. Coast Guard and Army officer, he has extensive operational and strategic experience in aviation, maritime, and joint assignments.

Disclaimer: The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position or policy of the National Defense University, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.