Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
cooperative security pacts, and democratic security communities. That is, the United States
will need to return to the great tasks of liberal order building.
It is useful to distinguish between two types of grand strategy: positional and milieu orien-
ted. As noted in
chapter five
,
with a positional grand strategy, a great power seeks to diminish
the power or threat embodied in a specific challenger state or group of states. Examples are
Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, the Soviet bloc, and perhaps—in the future—Greater China.
With a milieu grand strategy, a great power does not target a specific state but seeks to struc-
ture its general international environment in ways that are congenial with its long-term secur-
ity. This might entail building the infrastructure of international cooperation, promoting trade
and democracy in various regions of the world, and establishing partnerships that might be
useful for various contingencies. My point is that under conditions of unipolarity, in a world
of diffuse threats, and with pervasive uncertainty over what the specific security challenges
will be in the future, this milieu-based approach to grand strategy is necessary.
Looking into the twentieth-first century, the United States faces a complex array of global
challenges. But it does not face the sort of singular geopolitical threat that it did with the fas-
cist and communist powers of the last century. Indeed, compared with the dark days of the
1930s or the Cold War, America lives in an extraordinarily benign security environment, and
it possesses an extraordinary opportunity to shape its international environment for the long
term. As we have seen, the United States is the dominant global power, unchecked by a co-
alition of balancing states or by a superpower wielding a rival universalistic ideology. Most
of the great powers are democracies and are tied to the United States through alliance part-
nership. State power is ultimately based on sustained economic growth, and no major state
today can modernize without integrating into the globalized capitalist system. What made the
fascist and communist threats of the twentieth century so profound was not only the danger
of territorial aggression but that these great-power challengers embodied rival political-eco-
nomic systems that could generate growth, attract global allies, and create counterbalancing
geopolitical blocs. America has no such global challengers today.
Rather than a single overriding threat, the United States and other countries face a host
of diffuse and evolving threats. Global warming, nuclear proliferation, jihadist terrorism,
energy security, health pandemics—these and other dangers loom on the horizon. Any of
these threats could endanger Americans' lives and way of life either directly or indirectly by
destabilizing the global system upon which American security and prosperity depends. Pan-
demics and global warming are not threats wielded by human hands, but their consequences
could be equally devastating. Highly infectious disease has the potential to kill millions of
people. Global warming threatens to trigger waves of environmental migration and food
shortages and may further destabilize weak and poor states around the world. The world is
also on the cusp of a new round of nuclear proliferation, putting mankind's deadliest weapons
in the hands of unstable and hostile states. Terrorist networks offer a new specter of nonstate
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