What Good Is Grand Strategy?

Hal Brands is Assistant Professor of Public Policy and History at Duke University. He is author of Latin America's Cold War and From Berlin to Baghdad: America's Search for Purpose in the Post–Cold War World.

For a young academic historian, Brands has an unusually subtle and accurate sense of the challenges that US policymakers face in implementing grand strategies.... Brands's masterful work also serves as a reminder that the legacies of the more recent and controversial presidential foreign policies will need to be evaluated by subsequent generations not emotionally attached to the events themselves.- Russel Crandall (Survival: Global Politics & Strategy) This is a solid piece of scholarship that should be of great value in modern American history classes, foreign policy surveys, and course work in international relations.- Brooks Flippen (H-Net Reviews) This remarkable book catapults Brands into the foremost ranks of a new generation of U.S. strategic thinkers. Brands brilliantly combines an analysis of the grand strategies of selected presidents (Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush) with an investigation into the nature and value of the very concept of grand strategy. Throughout, his analysis is evenhanded and insightful.... Future presidential administrations would do well to embrace this vision at a time when the United States faces limited resources and a bewildering array of challenges. On the evidence of this closely reasoned book, Brands will have much to contribute to the strategic debates that lie ahead.- Walter Russell Mead (Foreign Affairs)

• Introduction: The Meaning and Challenge of Grand Strategy1. The Golden Age Revisited: The Truman Administration and the Evolution of Containment2. Travails of the Heroic Statesmen: Grand Strategy in the Nixon-Kissinger Years3. Was There a Reagan Grand Strategy? American Statecraft in the Late Cold War4. The Dangers of Being Grand: George W. Bush and the Post-9/11 EraConclusion: Grappling with Grand Strategy