Strategy – or grand strategy – is the task of setting out the principles and plans that underpin foreign policy over the long-term. Strategy provides an assessment of the international environment and describes how a state cultivates and mobilises which aspects of its power in pursuit of its goals. This chapter introduces strategic assessment and grand strategy – both in their public and classified forms – as crucial elements of effective statecraft. It considers the conceptual challenges involved in making aggregate measurements of power, and states’ practice of making assessments of the strategic environment they face and preparing and issuing national security documents. It highlights questions of self-identity in constructing national interests and identifying threats to them, and reflects on the most appropriate ways and means of conducting their foreign policy as a result. It concludes by emphasising the importance of long-term strategic thinking as a prerequisite for effective foreign policy.

This text examines the dynamics that shape foreign policy using international relations (IR) theory. Combining theories and case studies with actors, it explores the grand principles at work in foreign policy, both as a form of state behaviour and as an intellectual field. Chapters illustrate the complementarity between individual, state, and structural dynamics of IR, and levels of analysis found in foreign policy analysis. They discuss the relevance to foreign policy of the main IR theories: realism, liberalism, and constructivism, alongside the tool of discourse analysis. This introduction provides an overview of the contemporary relevance of the study of foreign policy; some of the definitional issues concerning the study of foreign policy; and the book’s updated organization.

Why do particular foreign policy strategies persist even when they fail to achieve their objectives? And how do such policies eventually come to change? Incorporating policy paradigms as a unifying unit-level intervening variable within a Type II neoclassical realist framework, we account for extended periods of foreign policy continuity despite ongoing policy failure, and theorise the structural conditions necessary to override intervening paradigmatic imperatives. The article illustrates the argument through an analysis of the 'Obama thaw', after 50 years of hostile policy towards Havana. Drawing on interviews with key officials, we show that emerging structural pressures in the Western hemisphere brought about the administration's decision to normalise relations with Cuba.

This forum presents a snapshot of the current state of neoclassical realist theorizing. Its contributors are self-identified neoclassical realists who delineate their version of neoclassical realism (NCR), its scope, object of analysis, and theoretical contribution. From the standpoint of NCR, they contribute to and reflect on the “end of IR theory” debate. NCR has come under criticism for its supposed lack of theoretical structure and alleged disregard for paradigmatic boundaries. This raises questions as to the nature of this (theoretical) beast. Is NCR a midrange, progressive research program? Can it formulate a grand theory informed by metatheoretical assumptions? Is it a reformulation of neorealism or classical realism or an eclectic mix of different paradigms? The forum contributors argue that NCR, in different variants, holds considerable promise to investigate foreign policy, grand strategy and international politics. They interrogate the interaction of international and domestic politics and consider normative implications as well as the sources and cases of NCR beyond the West. In so doing, they speak to theorizing and the utility of the theoretical enterprise in IR more generally.

From Clinton to Bush to Obama to Trump: the personalities, rhetoric, and policies of Presidents charged with defining US foreign policy in the post-Cold War era could hardly appear more different. Yet recent treatments of American grand strategy have sought to highlight a lack of debate about grand strategy, and to emphasize groupthink and “habit” within the US foreign policy establishment. This article argues that US grand strategy has changed, and suggests that those who prioritize continuities rely on an overly restrictive definition of grand strategy. Employing policy paradigms as an analytical framework, this paper finds significant variation in US grand strategy across the four post-Cold War presidencies. Where the variation between Clinton and George W. Bush’s presidencies can be explained by differing strategic ideas among American foreign policymaking elites, a trend towards less active hegemonic management running through the Obama and Trump presidencies is more structural in nature, reflecting both international constraints and generational change.

What does it mean for the United States to be powerful? The prospect of a decline in American power, especially relative to a rising China, has attracted considerable scholarly and political attention. Despite a wealth of data, disagreements persist regarding both the likely trajectory of the US-China balance and the most effective strategy for preserving America's advantage into the future. This article locates the source of these enduring disputes in fundamental conceptual differences over the meaning of power itself. We map the distinct tracks of argument within the decline debate, showing that competing positions are often rooted in differences of focus rather than disputes over fact. Most fundamental is a divide between analyses dedicated to national capabilities, and others that emphasise mechanisms of relational power. This divide underpins how strategists think about the goal of preserving or extending American power. We therefore construct a typology of competing understandings of what it means for America to be powerful, to show that a strategy suited to bolstering American power according to one definition of that goal may not support, and may even undermine, American power understood in other ways.

Over the past twenty years, debates surrounding American power have oscillated between celebrations of empire and laments of decline. What explains such wild fluctuations? This article argues that the power shifts debate rests on an underpinning concept of power based around relative capabilities that is theoretically not fit for purpose. We propose instead an approach to power shifts that locates power primarily in structural power. In doing so we show that developments in the character of the international system render structural advantage more significant to questions of international leadership than the balance of national capabilities. These developments also mitigate against systemic changes that might bring relative strength and structural position into greater alignment.

Policy makers around the world are increasingly concerned with the challenge of cultivating and capitalizing on soft power. Yet government efforts to increase others' feelings of attraction toward their countries face conceptual and practical challenges. This article examines Australia's attempt to operationalize soft power in Asia through its international education strategy. Drawing on interviews with key officials, we show how the design of Australia's international education policy was consciously informed by multiple dimensions of soft power. Yet the nature of soft power means that whether the policy will achieve its soft power objectives is up to Asia, not Australia.

The events of the Arab Spring were an inevitable surprise. In a region where political oppression and economic under-development were most keenly felt among a demographic bubble of well-educated youth, the classic conditions for revolution were met. However, few could have predicted the spark that would ignite a wave of protest across the region, the self-immolation of a Tunisian street vendor who felt humiliated by his treatment at the hands of petty local officials. The final outcome of the protests across the region is still uncertain, but more than a year on, events have settled into patterns sufficiently to allow an interim assessment of their success. Toby Dodge concludes this report by noting that ‘successful revolutions are very rare indeed’. Behind the headlines, this report’s conclusions are pessimistic. The authors here find little evidence to suggest that future historians will rank the events of 2011 with those of 1848, or 1989. Simply too few of the fundamentals of social, economic and political organisation in the Arab world have been successfully contested by the protests. As 2011’s Spring turns into 2012’s summer, the answer to the question of whether there has been a power shift in the Middle East, is a decisive ‘not yet’.

may not have created US approaches to the post-war world, but they sharpened them and helped make basic antagonism into a Cold War. Maybe to the surprise of some, I also largely agreewithRomero’s approach to theCold War in Europe. There is little doubt that Europe (and to a lesser extent Japan) was the starting point for the conflict – if there had been no clash over positions in Europe after thewar, then theColdWar aswe know itwould not have come into being.Until the early 1960s, it remained the main focus of the conflict, although wars on the periphery were becoming increasingly significant. And Romero recognizes that in the last two decades of the ColdWar it was the ThirdWorld that drove the development of the ColdWar and it was there, through the processes of capitalist globalisation, that the United States ‘wore down and eventually defeated a weaker adversary’ (p. 10). Romero’s argument is first and foremost about causation and chronology, and is hard to contradict as such. After all, the Cold War would not be the first international order that started in one geographical zone and then spread to others, usually with increasingly violent results. Is there tension between these two arguments? Some reviewers have thought so. Could it be argued that there would have been some form of Cold War somewhere anyway, because of US ideology, even if there had not been a set of specific conflicts with the Soviets over Europe? Or was it US ideology that required conflicts over Europe (and by extension almost anywhere else), whatever the Soviets had done? These are issues that are of essence to the continuing debates on the Cold War as a signal part of 20th century international history. Federico Romero has done us a favour by opening these issues up and by producing an excellent text that combines the best in narrative and in historical analysis.

This chapter explains the leadership strategies of the post-Cold War American presidents. Bush had little conception of American leadership in that he envisaged that American engagement with the institutions, norms and structures of the post-Cold War would be minimal; candidate Bush's America would seek invulnerability through major weapons systems including missile defence, and freedom of action to designate and counter threat. The flurry of activity in Obama's first hundred days began within minutes by suspending last-minute federal regulations pushed through by the outgoing administration and the theme has continued throughout the Presidents first year in office. Franklin Roosevelt defined leadership as the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it. Robert Gilpin has been prominent in making this hegemonic stability argument. Yet much of the literature on the quality of leadership has focused on human virtues, emotional intelligence, communication skills, the ability to bully and bargain and to effectively manage coalitions.