Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Grand Strategy

Before you read this you have to know a definition, this definition is Grand Strategy.  it basically means the strategy that people have about the direction for the country globally. 
There are four main ones in use in America now.
Primacy, Cooperative security, selective engagement, and Neo Isolationism.
Primacy is the idea That America should be the super power it is today, but that it should go further and whenever anyone needs help we should help them.  This Ideal supports treaties and alliances like NATO (which requires us to help the member countries if they are attacked).  The main believers in this are die hard republicans and others like such.  So this takes to heart the idea of spreading democracy to the world.
Cooperative security is the next level "down" this group wishes to have alliances with all nations and be in a lot of places, but not be EVERYWHERE protecting everyone, many more people believe in this strategy than primacy.  In this we would protect people if we like them or have interests there.
Selective engagement is basically when we only go into a country with military if we have people there, (or other things like businesses or other interests) 
Neo Isolationism is the easiest to understand: Isolation. Stay in America, don't go anywhere, focus on US.
So with that short, badly worded summary, here's the essay. :D



Here is my grand strategy.  If you disagree (which I'm sure that in someway you will)  You should say so in the comments, since that would be cool!

What grand strategy do I believe in?  Well, this is complicated, I believe somewhat in Neo-Isolationism, but I don’t want to completely cut ourselves off from the world.  So maybe selective engagement?  Yes I do believe that we should have contact with other countries, but I don’t like alliances like NATO that hold us down.  Yet sometimes I believe that we have to go in and help someone, like a primacist. In a class we had we talked about this, and rather than me just saying, "Yeah, sounds good"  and going along with this ideal because it's easy to say that you agree with everything  I actually have thought this ever since we learned about grand strategy, and especially in the last month or two I’ve thought about it.  So something’s I believe are:  (this last part was in here because in the original essay it was to one person and I wanted them to know that I hadn't just taken this idea and written about it because I knew they believed it. )

I believe that we SHOULD try to make better relations with China since we’re kind of at a bad area with them and they don’t really like us at the moment.
  I think that we should also try to talk to North Korea to see if we can see why they are so aggressive towards us and see if we can turn down that flame before it burns us.
I also think that we should pull back many of our troops and perhaps cut down on the expense of having military abroad, but still have and train military at home, since we don’t want to be weak and disarmed.


We should focus a LOT on our debt and try our best to figure out a way, if not to lower, to at least halt the rise of our national debt.  We need to figure this out.  Some ways to do that are, like I said pull the military back home unless they’re in a position where leaving would prove more dangerous than staying, then we can leave them for now. Another idea would be to cut massive amounts of money off of welfare and Medicare and then run a campaign of advertising trying to get people to help the people who they know who are in need. Perhaps have the government set up a system in which people can donate to a fund which will help the people who need it.  And once we’ve done that we will be able to get rid of national government funded welfare.
Another thing I would do in the way of grand strategy is try to meet with rising nations to see what their goals are and while I wouldn’t give them an official alliance I would try to see if we could help them and vice versa.  With these and other changes I think that we could do pretty good in this increasingly global world.