Skip to content
Member Login
Grand Strategy

America’s Quest for an Open World: A Grand Strategy Grounded in History

American grand strategy should draw inspiration from the principles of the post-war order. The United States should work to advance an open world. 

Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin together after negotiations at the Yalta Conference of 1945. Bettmann/Getty Images

By experts and staff

Published

By

  • Stewart M. Patrick
    James H. Binger Senior Fellow in Global Governance and Director of the International Institutions and Global Governance Program

In my weekly column for World Politics Review, I reflect on American grand strategy since World War II and discuss how the fundamental principles of the post-war order can serve as a basis for contemporary U.S. foreign policy.

In the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, Mira Rapp-Hooper and Rebecca Friedman Lissner make a compelling case for a more restrained U.S. foreign policy. The United States, they write, should abandon messianic liberal internationalism for the more realistic goal of an open world. Such a prudent policy has a lot to recommend it. It would also take America back to the future—to the grand strategy that President Franklin D. Roosevelt endorsed during World War II. 

Read the full World Politics Review article here.