Strategy, considered occasionally to deserve the appellation ‘Grand’, is complex and contested. Often criticised for being elitist and anachronistic, debates highlight issues of relevance and form, desirability and attainability. What is more, for some, a glimpse of Grand Strategy is perhaps most clearly perceived in a presidentially monikered doctrine – a conceptual construction attached to an administration and considered emblematic of its principal foreign policy inclination(s).

This chapter subscribes to the view that Grand Strategy is a general theory about how states theorise and create security for themselves. It may be deemed Grand when it serves as ‘conceptual architecture’ or a ‘lodestar’ seeking to guide other foreign policy goals and decisions. As Kahn and Brands observed:

Fundamentally, and for the purposes of this discussion, it involves an ineluctable combination of ends (objectives or goals), ways and means. Defined thus, the challenge arguably lies not in explicating what George H. W. Bush termed ‘the vision thing’. Goals of national prosperity and protection, accomplished through an assertion of primacy, have long underpinned and driven US foreign policies, whether articulated as the Monroe Doctrine, Isolationism, Containment, the ‘New World Order’, or the neoconservative agenda of the early twenty-first century. ‘America First’ – the ‘vision’ advanced by President Donald J. Trump – has an historical pedigree. Indeed, and contrary to what the President has asserted, no US administration would be described, accurately, as having embraced or promulgated an ‘American Second’ platform. Simply put, these are truisms and tropes of US foreign policy. It is axiomatic to assert that these macro ‘ends’ – broadly conceived and with a heavy emphasis on stability – motivate and inform US calculations and machinations around the world, including the Middle East. Whether conceived as a vision of global primacy and liberal hegemony, or as an older ‘default’ paradigm marked by strong isolationist or balancing impulses, at the heart of Grand Strategy is the security of the US, its people and its way of life.