Isolationism, cooperative security, selective engagement or primacy ? American grand strategy after the Cold War

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Isolationism, cooperative security, selective engagement or primacy ? American grand strategy after the Cold War

The demise of the Soviet Union brought an end to the Cold War, the bipolar structure of the international system, and to America's grand strategy of containment. Over the past decade, America has struggled to define its role in the post- Cold War era. The purpose of this paper is to research America's alternative grand strategy choices.

Over the past decade, four model strategies have emerged. Those are : isolationism, selective engagement, cooperative security and primacy. The strategies differ in major objectives , assumptions and views on issues like NATO enlargement, nuclear weapon and others. Therefore they need different political and military instruments. Two of those strategies are committed to a leading role for the United States in world affairs- cooperative security and primacy. A third, selective engagement, is less ambitious in its vision of American's role in the world.

It focuses America's internationalism on regions of major power concentrations. Isolationism, a forth strategy, all but ends a leading role for America in world affairs.

First alternative strategy I would like to discuss is cooperative security. According to Posen and Rose; " The most important distinguishing feature of cooperative security is the proposition that peace is effectively indivisible" and therefore .... United States has a huge interest in world peace " ( p 22 ) The strategy of cooperative security envisions a world in which the United States' commitment to peace is manifested through American leaderships of international institutions. Cooperative security rejects the earlier notion of collective security in which states assume legal obligation to come to each other's defense in the event that one or several of them are attacked ( e.g. League of Nations ). It relies instead on global and regional...