STRATEGIC

CHAPTER ONE
Introduction
What is America’s role in the world of the 21st century? And is there
a strategic concept—a “grand strategy”—that would give direction to
our diplomacy, defense, and economic engagement with the world?
These are the orienting questions of the RAND Strategic
Rethink project, which has assessed the diverse challenges—and
opportunities—for the United States abroad in this time of transformation
and turbulence.
For more than seven decades, the United States has assumed
leadership in building a liberal international order. 1 From 1947 until
the end of the Cold War in 1991, the United States confronted threats
from the totalitarian, nuclear-armed Soviet Union and from other
authoritarian states. After the Cold War, the United States organized
collective responses to challenges to the international order posed
by less-powerful aggressors, including tyrants who committed grave
violations against their neighbors or their own populations. Americans
united after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 (9/11),
and have invested trillions of dollars in war and nation-building in
Afghanistan and Iraq, in countering al Qaeda and then ISIS, 2 and
in caring for returning veterans. Today, after 15 years of war, wide-
1 See G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the
American World Order, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011; and Robert Kagan,
The World America Made, New York: Knopf, 2012.
2 The organization’s name transliterates from Arabic as al-Dawlah al-Islamiyah fi al-’Iraq wa
al-Sham (abbreviated as Da’ish or DAESH). In the West, it is commonly referred to as the
Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, the Islamic State
1