Alternative U.S. Grand Strategies: Past, Present, Future

The Hoover Institution’s Global Policy and Strategy Initiative hosted a webinar to discuss Alternative U.S. Grand Strategies: Past, Present, Future on Tuesday, February 10, 2026.  In a new report for the Council on Foreign Relations, America Revived, Ambassador Blackwill argues that the United States faces the most dangerous international environment since World War II. He defines U.S. vital national interests, summarizes the history of American grand strategy, outlines and critiques five grand strategy schools (primacy, liberal internationalism, restraint, American nationalism, and Trumpism), and advances a new grand strategy—resolute global leadership. This approach merges the military power and global presence of primacy with the alliance networks, institutional engagement, and focus on legitimacy emphasized by liberal internationalism. ABOUT THE SPEAKERS Ambassador Robert Blackwill is a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and Senior Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School. He served as deputy national security advisor, presidential envoy to Iraq, and ambassador to India under President George W. Bush. Blackwill’s latest book, coauthored with Richard Fontaine, is Lost Decade: The U.S. Pivot to Asia and the Rise of Chinese Power (Oxford University Press, 2024). Admiral James O. Ellis Jr. is Annenberg Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he oversees both the Global Policy and Strategy Initiative and the George P. Shultz Energy Policy Working Group. He retired from a 39-year career with the US Navy in 2004. He has also served in the private and nonprofit sectors in areas of energy and nuclear security. Philip Zelikow is the Botha-Chan Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. For 25 years he held a chaired professorship in history at the University of Virginia, where he also directed the nation's leading research center on the American presidency. For seven years before that, he was an associate professor at Harvard University.