Donald Trump doesn’t seem to have much interest in spreading American values abroad. His administration has publicly denigrated the importance of promoting human rights and democracy, and Trump himself has repeatedly shown greater personal affection for dictators than democrats. The Wilsonian tradition in American statecraft –- the practice, most closely associated with America’s 28th president, of using American power to disseminate U.S. ideals and institutions overseas – has been rudely shunted aside.

America is suffering from a strategy deficit in the South China Sea. For nearly a decade—and at accelerated speed since 2014—Beijing has been salami slicing its way to a position of primacy in that critical international waterway, while eroding the norms and interests Washington long has sought to defend. To date, however, Washington has struggled to articulate an effective response. The Obama administration opposed Chinese maritime expansion rhetorically and worked to improve the overall American military and geopolitical posture in the Asia-Pacific. Yet the administration only occasionally mustered the leverage necessary to check China’s quest for dominance of the South China Sea, and often it was unable even to impose substantial long-term costs on Beijing for its short-term assertiveness. For its part, the Trump administration has yet to formulate or implement a coherent South China Sea strategy, and it has swung from suggesting that America might deny Chinese access to islands in the South China Sea physically—something approaching an act of war—to appearing subsequently to deprioritize the issue.

President Donald Trump’s continuing courtship of Russian leader Vladimir Putin is casting darkness over U.S. foreign policy. But there is a ray of light where Russia is concerned. The Pentagon is now reportedly beginning preliminary research on a ground-launched cruise missile that would be prohibited under the terms of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty. This is an overdue step toward making Russia pay for its violations of that accord, and perhaps even positioning America for strategic advantage in a post-INF world.

Prediction is a perilous endeavour in international politics; world events often make fools of those who claim to foresee them.1 It seems certain, though, that historians will someday view Donald Trump’s presidency as an inflection point in the trajectory of American grand strategy and the US-led international system. To be sure, ‘grand strategic’ may not be the first phrase that comes to mind regarding Trump, whose indiscipline and outbursts, unfamiliarity with key issues and unexpected changes of course have led many observers to conclude that his foreign policy lacks any structure whatsoever.2 Just under a year after Trump’s inauguration, however, it has already become clear that Trump’s presidency is freighted with grand-strategic significance.

Liberal advocates of a multilateralist, rules-based, post-sovereign foreign policy have recently been having their noses ground in the grim fact of great power rivalry. Robert Kagan first called attention to renascent great-power politics a decade ago in "End of Dreams, Return of History," with its blunt opening line, "The world has become normal again." In the last few years, the realists - including Henry Kissinger in his 2014 book, "World Order," Hal Brands, and Foreign Policy's own Stephen M. Walt - have had a field day at the expense of idealists who, they said, had persuaded themselves that the end of history had arrived.

“Grand strategy” is not a term that appears in the United Kingdom’s foreign policy lexicon often. The last Labour government and both Conservative-led administrations have preferred instead to outline “national security strategies.” In some quarters, grand strategy is seen as “hubristic” and “associated with empire.” It certainly does not have to be so and the latter claim rests, to some extent, on a misreading of history. All states conduct grand strategy – whether they choose to acknowledge it or not – and to varying degrees of success. Channelling Trotsky, Hal Brands wryly observed, “You may not be interested in grand strategy but grand strategy is interested in you.”