Request for input: readings for a course on American Grand Strategy

5 June 2007, 1503 EDT

I’m teaching a summer course on “American Grand Strategy” in about a month. I have a pretty good idea what the course is about:

The terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, the Bush administration’s National Security Strategy, and the American-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq have triggered a major debate about American grand strategy. Many scholars and pundits now propose alternative grand strategies under a variety of names: “National Security Strategy 2.0,” “Ethical Realism,” “Progressive Realism,” and so forth. This course seeks to provide students with the historical and theoretical grounding to assess the debate over grand strategy. Important topics include: the nature of grand strategies; the dynamics of unipolar, hegemonic, and imperial systems; alliance behavior and the balance of power; terrorism and weapons of mass destruction; and economic competition. We look at a variety of different threats to American strategic interests and possible future trends in global politics. And, of course, we debate the merits of various proposals for American grand strategy.

I pretty much know what the course syllabus is supposed to look like… I’ve been wanting to do a class like this for some time. A lot of the class will focus on scholarly and semi-scholarly articles, but it occurs to me that I should assign one or two books on the subject as well. There’s so much out there, though, that I remain unsure about what to have them read. And the course starts in about a month.

I’m currently thinking about some combination of three books: Ikenberry’s After Victory, Lieber’s The American Era, and Legro’s Rethinking the World. But, as I mentioned, there’s a lot of literature out there, so I thought I’d ask the readers of the Duck to weigh in.

Dan Nexon

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.