Global Nationalism: Grand Strategy Analysis and the Trump Administration

• In Event: Nationalism, Public Opinion, and Foreign Policy

Abstract

This paper uses Grand Strategy Analysis (GSA) as a novel, integrative framework to generate two insights. The first is a categorization of US grand strategy during the Trump administration, and the second is an empirical claim about the president’s specific influence upon that strategy. First, applying “grand strategy analysis” (based upon the foreign policy analysis tradition), it uses three dimensions—scope, substance, assertiveness—to identity the parameters of what it calls “global nationalism.” The administration, sometimes uneasily, combined a relatively parochial reading of US strategic goals with a global purview. Second, applying a set of assessment questions, Trump’s influence was real but contained. The study shows moderate correlations between the president’s individual statements and positions, on the one side, and government policies and foreign policy principals’ on the other. He shaped but failed to revolutionize grand strategy. Such findings demonstrate the promise of GSA, which emphasizes individuals and groups as the locus of actual behavior to observe grand strategy. It helps divide and observe a complex strategic decision-making environment with a systematic focus on individuals in the context of both ideas and systems. Here, it reveals that Trump’s grand strategy was distinct and potent during his first two years in office. It also, counterintuitively, reveals that Trump’s personal impact was constrained.

Author

• Jacob W. Shively, University of West Florida