Thought Papers

Hon Sec Michael Chertoff

Fmr Sec U.S. Homeland Security

Decline of the Grand Strategy

We talk of a grand strategy that motivates nations, but those days are gone. The single grand strategy has been replaced by several little strategies. This doesn’t mean that the problems are little, it just means that there are a lot of them, and they’re not necessarily connected. 

The world isn’t dangerous because we have replicated the Cold War, but because there are currently so many widely distributed threats with the potential to do a great deal of damage. There are sometimes connections among these threats, either direct or indirect, but at the same time they cannot be subsumed within a single vision of what’s actually going on.