Peter Feaver noted in a recent Foreign Policy blog post, Competing perspectives on American grand strategy, that a recent report by the Center for New American Security (CNAS) on the future of American grand strategy displayed a remarkable amount of agreement between competing perspectives. In his words:
Dick Betts calls for the greatest amount of change from the status quo grand strategy, but I wonder if that isn’t because he pegs the status quo to somewhere around January 2003, at the high-water mark of what he would consider to be wrong-headed American military interventionist impulses. I call for the least amount of change to the status quo strategy, but that is because I consider the second-term Bush grand strategy, which Obama has largely tried to implement (whilst rhetorically repudiating), to be a reasonable exemplar of a post-Cold War approach that has been more successful than not. Bob Art has his own take, which I consider to be fairly compatible with what I call the “legacy grand strategy.” And Anne-Marie Slaughter emphasizes the prevalence of networks, which, she argues, requires a fundamental rethink of grand strategy. I think she is right about the importance of networks, and I am all for a rethink of grand strategy. After doing that rethink, I end up more comfortable with the strategy that has hitherto guided us than she is, but I think the differences are a matter of nuance.