Grand strategy is an elusive beast. Everybody wants some. We all agree it’s important but nobody can agree exactly what it is. And everybody wants to teach about the topic. A BETTER PEACE welcomes Christopher McKnight Nichols and Andrew Preston to the virtual studio, who along with Elizabeth Borgwardt, have edited a fascinating new essay collection Rethinking American Grand Strategy from Oxford University Press. The two join podcast editor Ron Granieri to discuss the how the book came about, and their contributions to the grand strategy conversation.
We want to provide a kind of usable history that is spot on in terms of the factual basis, which is why we brought these great historians to the topic and then kind of plant the seeds for practitioners and other folks and just general readers.
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Christopher McKnight Nichols is an American historian. He is the Director, Center for the Humanities, Sandy and Elva Sanders Eminent Professor in the Honors College, Associate Professor of History, Oregon State University. He is the author of Promise and Peril: America at the Dawn of a Global Age.
Andrew Preston is Professor of American History at Cambridge University, where he is also a Fellow at Clare College. His most recent book is American Foreign Relations: A Very Short Introduction.
Ron Granieri is an Associate Professor of History at the U.S. Army War College and the Editor of A BETTER PEACE.
The views expressed in this presentation are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Army War College, U.S. Army, or Department of Defense.
Photo Description: Written in 1946 by George Kennan (r), the American charge d’affaires in Moscow, the Long Telegram (c) was an 8,000 word document outlining his views on the Soviet Union and was a foundational document of the U.S. Cold War policy of containment.
Photo Credit: Images courtesy of the National Archives Catalog, and the Library of Congress, photographer Warren K. Leffler.