The Western Hemisphere and American Grand Strategy

Lee Smith discusses with Hillsdale College Professor Paul Rahe the significance of grand strategy and its influence on American foreign policy. Rahe describes grand strategy as seeing the larger picture: understanding what the country needs and coordinating military power, economic policies, diplomacy, and geography to ensure America’s safety and prosperity for many years. Their discussion reflects on the Cold War, when the U.S. had a clear grand strategy, and then shifts focus to current foreign policy. With China rising and the Western Hemisphere gaining importance, Smith and Rahe explore how powerful nations make decisions, defend what they value, and whether the U.S. still possesses the strong sense of purpose needed as the global balance of power grows more competitive.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

From the brave roots of our founding to the unstoppable force of American ingenuity, to the sacred inheritance of freedom we must protect. This is our legacy. Join investigative journalist Lee Smith on Roots, Rights, and Reason, powered by America's future.

SPEAKER_00 0:21

Hi, I'm Lee Smith. Welcome, and thanks for joining us for this week's episode of Roots, Rights, and Reason. Today we'll be talking about Grand Strategy, or the U.S. government's comprehensive planning designed to protect our peace and advance our prosperity. Grand Strategy is the long-term coordination of all a state's tools: military power, economic influence, diplomacy, alliances, and ideas to secure fundamental national goals. It is not a list of policies, but a framework that gives those policies direction. When the Cold War ended, the United States was the world's dominant military and economic power. Our grand strategy was organized around containment of the Soviet Union and anchored in alliances like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, known as NATO. That changed with the end of the Cold War. In the 1990s, U.S. grand strategy focused on preserving and expanding the post-World War II liberal order. The U.S. promoted democracy, free markets, and international institutions, assuming that economic integration and political liberalization would reduce conflict over time. In Europe, this meant supporting the expansion of NATO and the European Union, with the goal of locking in stability after decades of division. In Asia, the United States maintained its alliance-based strategy. Long-standing partnerships with Japan and South Korea remained central, while economic engagement with the People's Republic of China was encouraged in the hope that integration would moderate Beijing's behavior. The Middle East remained important for energy security and regional stability. However, the 9-11 attacks marked a major turning point. Under George W. Bush, U.S. Grant's strategy shifted toward counterterrorism and preemption. The central goal became preventing future attacks, even if that meant acting unilaterally. Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were not just military campaigns. They reflected an ambitious, some would say over-ambitious attempt to reshape parts of the Middle East politically. From a grand strategic perspective, this period exposed serious tensions. While the United States still possessed unmatched power, prolonged wars, strained alliances, consumed resources, and distracted from long-term competition elsewhere. The experience highlighted a key lesson of grand strategy. Tactical success does not guarantee strategic victory if long-term costs outweigh gains. During the Obama years, the United States sought to reduce large-scale military commitments in the Middle East, even as Middle Eastern conflicts persisted. Under Donald Trump, the United States openly questioned long-standing assumptions about alliances, free trade, and international institutions. Perhaps most crucially, China was identified more clearly than ever as America's central strategic challenge. Today we're speaking with Paul Ray, a professor of history at Hillsdale College, and author of many books, including Republicans Ancient and Modern, Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution and the Foundations of the Modern Republic. He's also author of five recent volumes on the grand strategy of classical Sparta. Professor Paul Ray, thank you. Welcome and thanks for joining us for our episode this week of Roots, Rights, and Reason, where we're talking about grand strategy. So you've written uh, I believe it's five books now on the grand strategy of classical Sparta. If you can just give us a general idea of what grand strategy means, and then we'll pull it up to the present.

SPEAKER_02 4:19

All right. Uh the difference between strategy and grand strategy is strategy is generalship. It's about how to win battles, even how to win wars. Grand strategy uh looks at questions of foreign policy from the perspective of the larger needs of the polity. Um for example, uh grand strategy would include economic concerns. Uh they might even in our day be more central than they were in ancient Greece. Um, furthermore, grand strategy takes into account the cultural character of one's own country and the cultural character of the rivals or the other countries that uh one is involved with, say, in alliances. So it is tectonic, that is to say, uh, it is all inclusive and it guides the other arts. Um, grand strategy would guide economic policy, it would guide tariffs, it would guide uh diplomacy, it would guide um wartime activities, all in light of the needs of one's own country.

SPEAKER_00 5:38

Lots of people would say that the United States is not particularly good at forward thinking and some of it structural, given the nature of our political systems that we change uh we change White Houses every eight years, sometimes every four years. And yet, if you look at post-World War II, our post-World War II grand strategy with everything from NATO, everything from uh Europe as a major trade partner, it seems like the United States was actually very good at this. What's your assessment of how good Americans, how good our leaders are at grand strategy?

SPEAKER_02 6:12

Well, if you go back to post-World War I, uh, we weren't so very good in the 1920s and in the 1930s. Um, and it didn't matter whether it was Republicans in power or Democrats in power. The most extreme isolationists was Franklin Delano Roosevelt up until about 1938. Uh, after World War II, we were terrific. And the reason is we had been schooled in grand strategy, we'd been schooled in um the fact that we really weren't isolated, uh, that our situation was not uh what it had been in the time of George Washington, distant and detached, uh, by Adolf Hitler. And he taught us a lesson. The consequence is when we confronted Joe Stalin at the end of World War II, we were very quick in realizing what we were up against, how serious it was, and what we needed to do. Uh, and it didn't matter whether uh the Republicans were in power or the Democrats were in power, it didn't matter when you shifted from one president to another. We followed pretty much the same policy uh all the way from Truman through Reagan. Uh and uh you know, some presidents were more skillful than others, of course. But if you're thinking about the overall understanding of the needs of our country and the connection uh between our needs and the rest of the world, uh we were terrific. In the post-Cold War world, it was disastrous.

SPEAKER_00 7:52

All right. Fascinating. I I I want to stay one second um with the uh post-World War II world, where you said that really the example what we learned from is we learned uh the negative example from Hitler. We were caught unawares. Uh this was catastrophic for the United States, also, also for Europe. Did we learn from any positive examples too? Did had Great Britain before us had a sense of grand strategy, did we pick up from their positive example?

SPEAKER_02 8:20

Well, in the 19th century, and in fact in the 18th century, even really in the 17th century, uh the British had a very strong sense of what was required for them to be prosperous and independent. Um, and control of the sea was the major thing. Uh they they did extremely well. I mean, eventually they were bypassed, but that's not exactly surprising. Uh, what happened is various countries caught up with them economically. The United States did, uh, Germany did. In a sense, that was inevitable that it happened sooner or later. Uh, but their handling of affairs is breathtakingly good for a very long period of time. And their situation uh in this period was something like what our situation became after the steamship uh turned the Atlantic into less of an obstacle than um a highway. Um look, in the time of George Washington, it took about three months to get from Europe to the United States. In the time of Teddy Roosevelt, it took a week. So circumstances had changed, and we were suddenly involved in that larger world in a major way. And what we did is we stepped in and took over where the British left off.

SPEAKER_00 9:49

But we understood it fundamentally in the same way in terms of a navy, in terms of control of the ocean's waters as as as the Brits had. Yeah, and freedom of trade.

SPEAKER_02 10:00

I mean, we had a we had uh look, we had an interest in freedom of trade from the very beginning. Uh people forget that, you know, the isolationists forget that Thomas Jefferson uh sent a military force to North Africa, to Tripoli, uh, to deal with the Barbary pirates. So from the beginning, we had an understanding that we were a commercial power involved in the larger world. But we weren't too closely entangled because we had huge moats on either side of our country, and those moats were an obstacle. Uh, they ceased to be an obstacle in the 1890s. You know, if you if you if you look at um uh Washington, D.C. in 1890 and look at Washington, D.C. in 1900, it was transformed. Uh in 1890, there was not a single ambassador in Washington, resident ambassador. And there wasn't a single resident American ambassador anywhere abroad. By 1900, every major power had uh a resident ambassador in Washington, and we had resident ambassadors uh in all of the major capitals. Uh and the reason is the technology had changed, which meant that our geopolitical situation had changed, which meant that our grand strategy had to adapt uh to the new circumstances.

SPEAKER_00 11:23

This is fascinating. So the the people who who now argue for isolationism or varieties of it, however they'd put it there, they're not only ignoring the advances in modern technology over the over the last quarter of a century, but you have to go back to before the advent of the steamboat to get to that period, to to to fulfill Washington's charge to stay unin to to to to keep out of other people's affairs and to mind our own business. The fact is we can't do it anymore.

SPEAKER_02 11:53

No, there there is no case for isolationism. Uh, there may be a case for a more prudent use of force abroad. Um and uh you know, another thing has changed in the last 30 years. In say 1995, we were pretty much economically dominant in the world. Uh the the the effect of our policy, the effect of free trade, uh, the effect of lower tariffs, uh transformed that situation. Uh and uh the rest of the world became more wealthy, and we became less industrial. Uh so we we cannot single-handedly do the sorts of things we used to be able to do single-handedly. Um so, you know, for example, uh the Trump administration has been hammering away at Europe. American presidents have been pressing the Europeans to spend uh a reasonable amount on their own defense for a very long time. Uh, they have promised under the bushes, under uh uh Obama that they would do so, and they have never followed through. Uh and you know, we now have a president who thinks, well, if they won't listen to people who speak politely to them, maybe they'll listen to us if we speak to them in a rude fashion. And I don't blame him for trying that. I don't know whether it will work, but we can't do everything uh to the degree that we were able to do so in the past. So we have to pick our fights and we have to ask ourselves what is the greatest danger? Uh and we need to concentrate on what is the greatest danger without ignoring other matters. But but still, the question is allocation of resources. Where do we put our resources?

SPEAKER_00 13:46

Well, then let me ask you, then, what are right now? Um, I mean, you explained there, you explained why why our grand strategy changed after the Cold War because our economic position was no longer the same. Uh, other other powers, especially China, were getting stronger uh especially economically and militarily. So, what are the greatest threats? What should a reasonable American grand strategy prioritize? The foreign threats seem to be for this administration, seem to be China, Russia, and Iran. Uh, also, there's a lot of talk about our Western hemisphere, though I think that uh I mean, I think that you would argue that just to focus on the Western hemisphere, that's pulling in the pulling in the borders a little more tightly than they should be. But so what what are our threats? What are the threats facing our country right now?

SPEAKER_02 14:38

The major threat is China. Iran is not in and of itself a threat, a grave threat anyway, uh, but it's a problem, and its connection with China makes it an even greater problem. Uh, the Chinese, the Iranians, and the Russians would like to overthrow the post-Cold War world order, uh, and they cooperate with one another in that regard. Uh, I don't mean that they are natural friends. I mean, there was a war between the Soviet Union and China in 1969 uh over a chunk of Siberia, and I think that could very easily someday happen again. Uh, because the Chinese are against what they call the unequal treaties, um, many of them from the 19th century. One of those treaties set the Chinese-Russian border in a place that the Chinese are very unhappy about. Uh, but for the moment, they're cooperating with one another. So it is in our if you want to weaken China, one thing you can do is uh transform things in Iran. It will weaken China because the Chinese are dependent on Iranian oil. Uh similarly, you want to weaken China. Uh, it it would certainly help if uh the Russians were defeated in Ukraine. Now, you got to be careful not to squander resources on a very grand scale on this. Uh and one of the things that is striking about Trump is he is very wary of quagmires. That is to say, we got ourselves into Afghanistan and we were there for a very long time and accomplished next to nothing. Um, I was very much against our getting involved in Afghanistan all along. Uh, we got involved in Iraq and discovered we didn't have the staying power to do what needed doing. Um, so what is Trump up to? Let me take the Maduro case because it's an interesting one. Uh we snatched the guy. Uh and then we told the people who were sort of left in power uh after him, do our betting or else. Uh it's not a bad policy in that particular case, because uh Venezuela, despite all the leftist rhetoric, is a kleptocracy. And the good thing about kleptocracies is you can negotiate with those people. If you put pressure on them, uh they will make a deal because what they care about is the money that they're stealing. Um, so we can rein them in pretty easily. That's much harder to do with something like Iran. Uh uh one of the things wrong with our previous foreign policy and with our State Department generally, is they don't take religion seriously. I mean, you you talk about the religion as a source of trouble, and they want to turn change the conversation to one on poverty as if poverty is the cause of the problem.

SPEAKER_00 17:53

Interesting. Is this an American prejudice? Because you said before, very interestingly, because I agree with you, uh that you were saying that the grand strategy has to incorporate not only a sense of your own society, but the other societies you're dealing with, whether these are allies or adversaries. So do you think that this is just a function of how would we call it post-religious, uh post-modern thinking, in which religion, uh serious ideology plays no part? I guess they do the same thing with communism too. Very often they disregard, we've disregarded, for instance, the fact that the China is led by a communist party. But talking about Iran, the State Department, and by free uh previous uh administrations, I suspect you may be referring to uh to Barack Obama and as as well as Joe Biden. So they they they bracket religion. This is not important to them.

SPEAKER_02 18:47

Right. And and they don't they don't recognize people's motives. Look, every uh political community, the members of every political community have a tendency to project their own attitudes on foreign countries, to presume they're just like us, uh, and we can deal with them just as we deal with one another. Now, sometimes that's true, but in the case of, say, the Soviet Union or communist China, it simply is not true, and it's certainly not true with Iran. Uh it's a theocratic regime, and the people at the top of that regime they're serious. They're real believers. Um what could be done with Iran, I think, but you know, it's a crapshoot. A lot of these things are uh you try something to see whether it will work, uh, is the following. Uh the Iranian regime depends upon the Revolutionary Guard. Uh it's well disciplined, well organized, and uh it has not broken ranks with the regime, which means uh they can they they will kill a great many people, but they will remain in power. But the revolutionary guard controls 40% of the economy, and it's the Middle East, and there's sort of two priorities in that world. One is uh religion, and second is one's own family. Okay, wherever one's own family is a very, very high uh cultural priority, you're gonna have massive corruption. Um, if the Revolutionary Guard people discover that uh their sources of income have been cut off, they may chuck the mullahs, they may chuck the theocratic regime, because to some extent Iran is a kleptocracy. I recently learned that the son of Kamene owns a great deal of real estate in London. Now, where did that money come from? Um uh so if you can get the Revolutionary Guard or a chunk of it to turn on the regime, because their own well-being and the well-being of the members of their family are at stake, then you might be able to shake this regime. Now, how would you do that? Carga Island. Just have to look at a map. All of the oil, or virtually all of the oil of Iran, goes out through the Persian Gulf from Carg Island. We shut Carg Island down once under the Reagan administration, we can do it again. And it's just the sort of thing that Donald Trump likes doing. He likes lightning strikes. Uh, and he does not want to send uh soldiers ashore in large numbers. Um, he doesn't want to get us to get involved in a war that's gonna go on and on. Uh And that we really don't have the patience for. And that is peripheral. Um so we we've got a buildup in the Persian Gulf. There are obviously threats being issued. Uh we're not fully informed about those threats, but something's going on along those lines. And it may take an act, and that act might have a tremendous impact on the Revolutionary Guard. If the Revolutionary Guard sticks to the regime, that regime will remain in power until and unless we send in masses of troops. And we're not going to do that, and we probably shouldn't do that. Um, because we have other fish to fry uh in the Pacific Ocean.

SPEAKER_00 22:46

What do you think the administration? I mean, the administration recently released two different documents about grand strategy. Uh, one of them was the national security strategy, which I believe was released last year and last month, the national defense strategy came out. So, reading through these documents, do these suggest to you that they're seeing Iran and China the way that we're talking, especially Iran, since that's really, you know, a lot of people are thinking about that right now. Do you think the White House um and Trump's national security team, do you think that they see it the way that we're talking about right here?

SPEAKER_02 23:21

Something like that, yes. Um, and look, even the Maduro involvement, uh, that's tied up with China. That was a base for the Chinese in the New World. And if you notice, uh Panama kicked the Chinese out of the uh uh out of the canal area uh in the wake of what we did in Venezuela.

SPEAKER_00 23:43

So what's your what does this mean? What does Venezuela mean for Cuba?

SPEAKER_02 23:49

Well, Cuba is an economic basket case, and it depends on its relationship with Venezuela for the oil that it needs to run electricity on the island. And what is that relationship? Well, Cuba provides the soldiers that are absolutely loyal to the Venezuelan regime. So there are large numbers of Cubans in Venezuela, uh, and uh they are they are not patriotic Venezuelans, and they're not going to toss out the regime there. Uh in taking out Maduro, we have cut off Cuba from Venezuelan oil, which was sold to them at uh under the world price. And so economically, there may well be a complete collapse in Cuba. I don't think they can feed their people. They can't provide um electricity, they can't provide uh water. Uh the the pressures on Cuba are going to be very great very soon. Uh so the whole Cuban thing may soon be over. And keep in mind the Chinese have got a spy base in Cuba that's very important to them.

SPEAKER_00 25:03

Well, that's the that that's where I want to end it. Last question. Uh let's let's talk about Cuba. When we identified this as the major problem, and this is what our grand strategy now is written around, written around the problem of China. What what do you think, uh, what do you think the future of US-China relations are, more particularly, what do you think the Trump administration and its successors will do to uh how would we say it, rein in China or to tame China?

SPEAKER_02 25:32

Well, the economic relationship is very considerable. And there's a kind of mutual dependence between the United States and China. And one of the failures of the 30-year period from, say, 1990 to 2020, as we got into a situation where our weapons systems, our uh our medicines, uh, we were dependent on a rival for uh at least some of the parts. The Trump administration is moving to eliminate that situation, to give us a certain independence from China. Uh, and there's a kind of leverage that we have over China, which is to say they import oil and they have to import oil, and they can't get all of what they need from Russia. So controlling the sea is very, very important. And one of the reasons that Taiwan, uh that China wants Taiwan, is it provides a way to get out past the first island chain. Uh, and the other thing is the Chinese are building up a great navy. Uh if we succeed in containing them for a few more years because the price is too high, if they uh attack Taiwan, uh then there's going to be a different situation in China because their population is dropping. It's already dropping now. And this is going to be uh uh an increasing problem for them economically. They're gonna have too many old people retired and not enough young people to do the work. And so they may um they may stall economically, and in fact, it may have already begun during the coronavirus. Uh the lockdowns in the United States and in Europe did untold damage to our economies in the United States and Europe. The lockdowns in China did even more damage to the Chinese economy. Uh so if we can get through the current window, which they see, or at least some of them see, Xi Jinping in particular, as a window of opportunity, uh the situation of China vis-a-vis the larger world, uh, they're not going to be a poor country, but they're not going to be the dominant country that they would like to be.

SPEAKER_00 27:59

There are some people, uh some writers who, analysts, uh geopolitical analysts who believe that the China that you're describing, the one that's facing demographic threats, might be even more reckless. And perhaps this is one of the reasons why Xi is making threats to take Taiwan within the next couple of years. Do you think that's a possibility as well?

SPEAKER_02 28:21

I think it's I think it's a serious possibility. And look, something is going on in China. Uh, I would guess an internal debate about foreign policy. Uh, there's something called the uh Military Control Commission. It includes six people, Xi Jinping and five generals. Four of those generals have been removed in the last couple of years. Uh, and the the highest ranking general they have publicly charged with being an American spy, which I think is absurd. Um, so there's some uh maybe reluctance on the part of the military to get into an adventure that they think they might lose. Uh uh that might be part of it, or maybe they're more aggressive and Xi Jinping wants to reign them in. Uh, but you you you you've had repeated military purges, and the excuse is always corruption. And China is a country where family is the single most important thing. So China is a country with with a history of corruption, uh a very serious history of corruption. So it simply might be corruption. But my guess is um policy is something that's being disputed in the party, and that Xi Jinping is asserting himself.

SPEAKER_00 29:39

Uh I've seen these purges as a as a function of instability. Whatever, as you described it very well, we don't know what's happening. Where Xi is on this or or or where the uh military is on this, but the purge is one thing that we can see from afar is that it's a sign of instability in one regard or another.

SPEAKER_02 30:00

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 30:02

Professor Paul Ray, thank you so much for being here with us today on Roots, Rights, uh, and Reason. Thank you for your insight. And we really covered a lot with grand strategy. And uh, I want to recommend to viewers that they especially check out your your books on grand strategy and classical Sparta, which are fantastic, the fantastic stories telling a story about the ancient world and about how uh about how countries pursue their own interests. Just terrific. Thank you so much again, Professor.

SPEAKER_02 30:30

It's a pleasure being with you again.

SPEAKER_00 30:31

Thank you so much, and we'll see all of you next week on Roots, Rights, and Reason.

SPEAKER_01 30:39

From the brave roots of our founding to the unstoppable force of American ingenuity, to the sacred inheritance of freedom we must protect. This is our legacy. Join investigative journalist Lee Smith on Roots, Rights, and Reason, powered by America's future.