From rhetoric about putting "America First" to arguments about the founding of NATO, global concerns are playing a prominent role in this year’s presidential elections. Polls show that Americans rank foreign relations just behind the economy and terrorism as an important factor in their voting preferences. While public opinion shifts from year to year, the U.S. position in the world has provided fodder for debates since the beginning of the republic. To historians, the concept of a grand strategy — an ambitious organizing principle for the exercise of global power — provides one way to understand how such issues affect our political discourse. A grand strategy is about big ideas, says Christopher McKnight Nichols, OSU historian and member of the Council on Foreign Relations. It’s about connecting means and ends. “A grand strategy,” he explains, “is long-term intellectual framework that structures a big, capacious foreign policy world view.”

Originally recorded on 10-10-16