new voices in michael j. zak lecture series Foreword by Richard Fontaine and Loren DeJonge Schulman Emma Ashford, Hal Brands, Jasen J. Castillo, Kate Kizer, Rebecca Friedman Lissner, Jeremy Shapiro, and Joshua R. Itzkowitz Shifrinson About the Authors EMMA ASHFORD is a Research Fellow in REBECCA FRIEDMAN LISSNER is an defense and foreign policy at the Cato Assistant Professor in the Strategic and Institute, with expertise in international Operational Research Department at the U.S. security and the politics of energy. She is Naval War College. She has held research currently writing a book on the politics and fellowships at the University of Pennsylvania’s foreign policies of petrostates, including Perry World House, the Council on Foreign Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Venezuela. Relations, and Yale University’s International Her recent research includes work on the Security Studies program. Dr. Lissner also has efcacy of U.S. sanctions on Russia, the future of U.S. Middle served as a special advisor to the Deputy Secretary at the U.S. East policy, U.S.-Saudi relations, and the increasing role of Department of Energy. Dr. Lissner’s research interests focus on Asian states in the politics and economics of the Persian Gulf. international security and American foreign policy, and she is Ashford is the co-host of Power Problems, a biweekly podcast working on a book project that examines lessons learned from that explores key questions in international security with guests U.S. military interventions. She received an AB in social studies from across the political spectrum. She holds a PhD in foreign from Harvard University and an MA and PhD in government from afairs from the University of Virginia and an MA from American Georgetown University. The views expressed here are exclusively University’s School of International Service. her own. HAL BRANDS is the Henry A. Kissinger JEREMY SHAPIRO is the research director of Distinguished Professor of Global Afairs the European Council on Foreign Relations. at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced His areas of focus include U.S foreign International Studies and a Senior Fellow policy and transatlantic relations. Shapiro at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary was previously a fellow with the Project on Assessments. He served as Special Assistant International Order and Strategy and the to the Secretary of Defense for Strategic Center on the United States and Europe Planning from 2016 to 2016, and has been at Brookings, where he edited the Foreign a Council on Foreign Relations International Afairs Fellow. Policy program’s blog Order from Chaos. Prior to Brookings, he He has also consulted with a range of government ofces and was a member of the U.S. State Department’s policy planning agencies in the intelligence and national security communities staf, where he advised the secretary of state on U.S. policy in and served as lead writer for the Commission on the National North Africa and the Levant. He was also the senior advisor to Defense Strategy for the United States. Brands received his BA Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Afairs from Stanford University and his PhD from Yale University. He Philip Gordon, providing strategic guidance on a wide variety previously worked at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public of U.S.-European foreign policy issues. Shapiro graduated from Policy and the Institute for Defense Analyses. Harvard University with a bachelor’s degree in computer science and received his master’s degree in international relations and international economics from the Johns Hopkins School JASEN J. CASTILLO is an Associate of Advanced International Studies. He is a PhD candidate in Professor and Evelyn and Ed F. Kruse political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ‘49 Faculty Fellow in the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. Prior to joining the Bush JOSHUA R. ITZKOWITZ SHIFRINSON is an School, Castillo worked in the Department Assistant Professor of International Relations, of Defense’s Policy Planning Ofce. Before Boston University. His teaching and research working in the Ofce of the Secretary of interests focus on the intersection of Defense, he was an analyst at the RAND Corporation, where international security and diplomatic history, his research focused on military strategy, nuclear deterrence, particularly the rise and fall of great powers and WMD terrorism. Prior to RAND, he was a consultant for and the origins of grand strategy. He has the Institute for Defense Analyses. Castillo earned his PhD in special expertise in great power politics since political science from the University of Chicago. His research 1945 and U.S. engagement in Europe and Asia. His next major interests include U.S. defense policy, military history, and nuclear project examines American foreign policy in the 1990s and early deterrence. Currently, he is working on a book project exploring 2000s to explain how great powers try to stop challengers from the military requirements of deterrence and U.S. nuclear emerging. Shifrinson earned a BA from Brandeis University weapons policy. and a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The recipient of fellowships from the Dickey Center, the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies, and the Belfer Center, Shifrinson KATE KIZER is the Policy Director at Win was an Assistant Professor Government at Texas A&M University Without War. She has nearly a decade prior to joining Pardee. At Boston University, he teaches classes of experience working on human rights, on international relations theory, U.S. grand strategy, alliance democratization, and U.S. foreign policy in politics, and security studies. the Middle East. Kizer previously served as the Director of Policy and Advocacy at the Yemen Peace Project and as U.S. Advocacy Ofcer for Americans for Democracy and Human Rights in Bahrain. She has held leadership roles in the private sector and on political campaigns. Kizer received a BA in Middle Eastern & North African Studies from UCLA and an MA in democracy and governance from Georgetown University. About the Michael J. Zak Grand Strategy Lecture In March 2018, the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) launched the Michael J. Zak Grand Strategy Lecture Series, a new annual event developed to feature original thinking on American grand strategy. For the 2019 event, CNAS commissioned seven essays on American grand strategy unbound by the intellectual and strategic strictures of the past. In New Voices in Grand Strategy, CNAS brings together strategists, academics, and policymakers to ofer a vision for a grand strategy that defines national power and purpose on the world stage. 01 Foreword Richard Fontaine and Loren DeJonge Schulman 03 Power and Pragmatism: Reforming American Foreign Policy for the 21st Century Emma Ashford 13 Grand Strategy for a New Twilight Struggle Hal Brands 23 Passing the Torch: Criteria for Implementing a Grand Strategy of Ofshore Balancing Jasen J. Castillo 37 A U.S. Grand Strategy for a Values-Driven Foreign Policy Kate Kizer 49 Military Intervention and the Future of American Grand Strategy Rebecca Friedman Lissner 61 Does America Need a Foreign Policy? Jeremy Shapiro 71 Requiem for a Dream: American Grand Strategy, 1991–2018 Joshua R. Itzkowitz Shifrinson POWER AND PRAGMATISM: REFORMING AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY FOR THE 21ST CENTURY Foreword Richard Fontaine and Loren DeJonge Schulman 1 @CNASDC n June 2008, the Center for a New American Security published a compendium of essays to grapple with the central questions of American grand strategy.1 The volume compiled I the views of leading senior strategists from across the political spectrum and from both academia and the policy community. Four years later, CNAS embarked on a similar venture, presenting the views of four more expert thinkers.2 Today, the debate over America’s proper role in the world is perhaps wider than at any time in decades. The 2016 presidential election illuminated deep divides in the American public about the scope of the country’s interests, the nature of existing threats, the financial and military burdens the United States should shoulder, the degree to which values as well as interests should motivate national action, and the methods for attaining national objec- tives, however defined. The debate among national security experts on such matters should be just as wide and searching. With the very vision for U.S. global leadership up for grabs, CNAS now seeks to broaden the existing debate by bringing new voices to the conversation. We have commissioned a series of essays on American grand strategy from a new generation of thinkers, strategists, academics, and policymakers. As will immediately become apparent, their contributions are not bound by the intellectual and strategic strictures of the past. Our goal was to question the assumptions and decisions that have guided U.S. foreign policy in the post–Cold War era, to assess how ongoing changes in the world should reshape U.S. grand strategy, and ulti- mately to propose recommendations and alternatives for the way forward. The essays in this volume are fresh, rigorously analytical, and provocative – deliberately so. They also elucidate and deepen the range of grand-strategic options, identifying diferent and distinct approaches. These seven distinct, thoughtful contributions from rising leaders in the field serve as starting points for policymakers seeking to define America’s role in a changing world. We hope that they will also serve as a resource for all those wishing to thoughtfully consider the right grand strategy for the United States today. 1. “Finding Our Way: Debating American Grand Strategy,” edited by Michele A. Flournoy and Shawn Brimley, Center for a New American Security, June 2008, https://s3.amazonaws. com/files.cnas.org/documents/FlournoyBrimley_Finding-Our-Way_June08.pdf?m- time=20160906082323. 2. “America’s Path: Grand Strategy for the Next Administration,” edited by Richard Fontaine and Kristin Lord, Center for a New American Security, May 2012, https://www.cnas.org/publica- tions/reports/americas-path-grand-strategy-for-the-next-administration.