A useful category of analysis? Grand strategy and US foreign relations from the civil war through world war I

This chapter examines the transformation of US foreign relations in the period from 1865 to 1918. Some historians have explicitly analyzed this transformation in terms of “grand strategy.” Others who have not used the concept as an analytical tool have nevertheless offered interpretations that can be easily assimilated by the concept’s enthusiasts and, if so desired, given a different ideological edge. Whether the emergence of the United States as a great power is to be welcomed or lamented, both celebrants and critics can agree that it happened, and that it happened largely as a result of the deliberate peacetime melding of industrial and naval power. Although the concept of grand strategy cannot be blamed for creating the problems with the existing literature on US foreign relations from the Civil War through World War I, it tends to worsen them, in two related ways. First, the concept of grand strategy privileges the nation-state as the unit of analysis, when no less important units in this case are the sub-national and the global. Second, the “grandness” of grand strategy encourages scholars to neglect critically important details of US economic and naval power. These details are more than isolated anomalies: taken together, they compel a new explanatory paradigm.