Oct 1, 2026 · 59 min · 13 segments
In this episode, Tufts Professor Taliaferro hosts Christopher Preble of the Stimson Center and Andrew Peek of the Atlantic Council at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy to discuss the future of…
Jeffrey TaliaferroHost
Andrew PeekGuest
Christopher PrebleGuest
Joshua PaulHostBecause that is an academic term that certainly has a lot of definitions in the international relations literature, some of which I've written.
I'll use a definition that MIT political science professor Barry Posen gave more than 40 years ago.
A grand strategy is basically a state theory, or more properly a state's leader's theory, about how best to cause security for themselves.
It is a way of... a discipline of assessing likely threats to a state's security interests.
It rank orders the threats, and then it identifies different ways of redressing them and the resources necessary to carry out those different ways of redressing them.
And a grand strategy, as I said earlier, is this overarching framework into which different foreign policies and different military strategies and different economic policies that are enacted by the government of the day ought to flow from.
During the Cold War, of course, the United States pursued a grand strategy of containment for close to 50 years.
The overriding objective of U.S. grand strategy was to prevent the Soviet Union from gaining control over other major centers of industrial power.
and gradually to beat back the Soviet Union's power and influence to cause the Soviet system to collapse in on itself.
And it was a successful grand strategy, although it was controversial at times.
One analogy which I use in my classes is between a grand strategy and, say, the operating system of a laptop or a desktop computer or even our smartphones and comparing that to the different apps that they run.
Just like an operating system provides the basic infrastructure that enables those different apps to function, to interact with hardware in order to do the things they're supposed to do, that is ideally what a grand strategy should do.
for a particular state's specific foreign diplomatic, economic, military, technological initiatives.
And do you think under this administration, it's completely changed what previous administrations or theories have been in place?
There's been a great deal of consternation and a great deal of arguments in academic journals as well as in places like foreign policy and in foreign affairs about what is the Trump administration's grand strategy and does the Trump administration even know that it has a grand strategy.
And I would argue that there are different factions within this administration that have particular ideas.
The president has his own ideas that are quite idiosyncratic about what role the United States ought to play, and they are actually at variance with with different elements of what U.S. grand strategy had been under previous administrations going back, you know, 30, 40 years to the beginning of the post-Cold War era in the early 1990s.
So it's a little difficult for me to say, and I'm not going to say that there is a coherent Trump grand strategy because there isn't one.
Because that is an academic term that certainly has a lot of definitions in the international relations literature, some of which I've written.
I'll use a definition that MIT political science professor Barry Posen gave more than 40 years ago.
A grand strategy is basically a state theory, or more properly a state's leader's theory, about how best to cause security for themselves.
It is a way of... a discipline of assessing likely threats to a state's security interests.
It rank orders the threats, and then it identifies different ways of redressing them and the resources necessary to carry out those different ways of redressing them.
And a grand strategy, as I said earlier, is this overarching framework into which different foreign policies and different military strategies and different economic policies that are enacted by the government of the day ought to flow from.
During the Cold War, of course, the United States pursued a grand strategy of containment for close to 50 years.
The overriding objective of U.S. grand strategy was to prevent the Soviet Union from gaining control over other major centers of industrial power.
and gradually to beat back the Soviet Union's power and influence to cause the Soviet system to collapse in on itself.
And it was a successful grand strategy, although it was controversial at times.
One analogy which I use in my classes is between a grand strategy and, say, the operating system of a laptop or a desktop computer or even our smartphones and comparing that to the different apps that they run.
Just like an operating system provides the basic infrastructure that enables those different apps to function, to interact with hardware in order to do the things they're supposed to do, that is ideally what a grand strategy should do.
for a particular state's specific foreign diplomatic, economic, military, technological initiatives.
And do you think under this administration, it's completely changed what previous administrations or theories have been in place?
There's been a great deal of consternation and a great deal of arguments in academic journals as well as in places like foreign policy and in foreign affairs about what is the Trump administration's grand strategy and does the Trump administration even know that it has a grand strategy.
And I would argue that there are different factions within this administration that have particular ideas.
The president has his own ideas that are quite idiosyncratic about what role the United States ought to play, and they are actually at variance with with different elements of what U.S. grand strategy had been under previous administrations going back, you know, 30, 40 years to the beginning of the post-Cold War era in the early 1990s.
So it's a little difficult for me to say, and I'm not going to say that there is a coherent Trump grand strategy because there isn't one.
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