From the realist point of view, it would have made sense for the United States to declare victory after the Cold War, disengage from permanent global entanglements, and “come home.” American foreign-policy elites nevertheless opted for the historically unprecedented model of unipolar global hegemony. This paradigm, detached from any notion of territory or nationhood, has simultaneously produced the tendency in Washington to equate every ideological obsession du jour, or any transient political objective in some faraway land, with America’s vital interests.

So it transpired, for example, that in December 2011, President Obama issued a directive elevating the rights and treatment of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people abroad as “a priority in U.S. foreign policy.” In that same year, the Hudson Institute declared that “the situation in Kyrgyzstan has a critical bearing on American national security.” Kyrgyzstan! A few months earlier, Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana argued that the U.S. should be resolutely committed to Moldova’s territorial integrity to  “ensure that we do not cede influence in a region of paramount importance to U.S. foreign policy.”

Such statements were light years away from prioritizing issues and localities that tangibly affect the security, sovereignty, territorial integrity, and power position of the United States. The list of such incongruities over the past quarter-century is long, and the problem persists. America fights foreign wars, in part, because it has the ability to do so, but a problem arises if the decision makers in Washington define U.S. interests too broadly—or if they identify them too closely with the interests and security concerns of another country.

This is not intended as a critique of the war in Iran, at least not directly. It is about the chronic failure of the policy-making community in Washington to develop a coherent American grand strategy for the 21^st century. I was inclined to believe that a giant step in the right direction was made with President Donald Trump’s December 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS), that America was finally on the way to being, once again, a regular nation in its foreign affairs: powerful, secure, and focused on its pragmatically defined interests (see my January 2026 column “The Trump Doctrine”). Whether Iran fits in with the NSS stated grand strategic objectives is by no means certain. It is the operation’s finale and its aftermath that may provide the answer.

A great power may have specific strategies for dealing with specific challenges and localities,  America’s current approach in Iran being one example, but its grand strategy is an overall blueprint for action that matches a state’s resources to its vital interests. A sound grand strategy enables a state to deploy its political, military, economic, and moral resources in a balanced and proportionate manner to protect and enhance its security and promote its well-being. It is the brains behind diplomacy and military power. It enables decision-makers to rank issues by importance and avoid considering them ad hoc, in isolation from each other, or outside the broader picture.

Great Britain successfully pursued a geopolitically sound thalassocratic (maritime-based) grand strategy over the two centuries separating the War of the Spanish Succession from the Treaty of Versailles. That strategy had two pillars: maintaining a continental balance of power in Europe and developing a maritime trading empire. Britain’s crisis-response strategies correlated with its grand strategy that, consciously or often instinctively, relied on an understanding of geopolitical realities and the grand-strategic imperatives of a global trading power. Disputes over policy details could be contentious at times; on the fundamentals of higher strategy, however, the British political class maintained a consensus until the crisis over the Suez Canal in 1956.

By contrast, the Third Reich and the Soviet Union after Stalin were great powers devoid of any grand strategy. Until the attack on the Soviet Union, Hitler was a successful opportunist; thereafter, he turned into a doomed dilettante. The Nazis used geopolitical terminology without understanding geopolitics, much as Karl Marx used economic terminology without understanding economics.

Having lost its ideological appeal abroad and its economic and social dynamism at home during its final years, the Soviet Union could not win the Cold War. Its piecemeal strategies of keeping the “socialist camp” under coercive control, attempting to subvert the West, and promoting Marxist insurgencies in the Third World reflected an approach that denied the validity of the geopolitical paradigm. Staging ad hoc, proactive crises (Cuba 1962) and reactive interventions (Budapest 1956, Prague 1968, Afghanistan 1979) did not substitute for a grand strategy. From a realist perspective, the Soviet grand strategy needed to be defensive to prolong the state’s life.

In its infancy, the American Republic was a self-sufficient continental power pursuing a grand strategy of limited objectives. Its geopolitical rationale was summed up by George Washington when he warned America to preserve its fortunate distance from the affairs of other countries and not to enter into lasting pacts with them: “Why forego the advantages of so peculiar a situation? Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground?” The same vision was echoed by John Quincy Adams, who noted approvingly that America “has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings … But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.”

These were rational statements by geopolitical realists. They were free from the 20^th-century delusion that America herself is the deterritorialized embodiment of universally applicable “values” and “principles.”

The conquest of the American West and the concurrent growth of industrial capitalism created the conditions for a paradigm shift. It was articulated in Adm. Alfred Thayer Mahan’s strategic vision at the end of the 19^th century. Mahan’s emphasis on sea power signaled a reinvention of Manifest Destiny as a kind of imperialism. After the victory over Spain in 1898, America emerged as the third-greatest naval power in the world, with overseas possessions and protectorates outside the Western Hemisphere (in the Philippines), and with a network of bases and coaling stations. Her leaders’ geopolitical vision—again, emphasizing sea power—came to resemble that of Great Britain. The parallel expansion of America’s political, financial, and economic power—primarily in Latin America—fortified and extended her traditional hemispheric sphere of influence.

The United States’s power grew, but America entered the 20^th century without a mature grand strategy. Theodore Roosevelt changed that, making her a great power. In the process, he also sowed the seeds of two costly heresies that persist to this day: the notion that the exportation of American values would have a redeeming effect on the rest of the world, and the tendency of the chief executive to bypass Congress while aggressively pursuing his foreign schemes.

World War II transformed America from a great power into one of two global superpowers. The objective was not balancing powers, but worldwide containment. The alliances were fixed; the paradigm was a zero-sum game. In the end, the grand strategy based on George Kennan’s 1946 “Long Telegram” was successful, but America was fundamentally transformed during that half-century. With the rise of the military-industrial-congressional complex and the imperial presidency, the Republic morphed into the national-security state.

An excessive level of executive control over the use of the military persists to this day. It is high time to heed the warnings of George Kennan, Kenneth Waltz, and John Mearsheimer—three wise Americans who understood that geopolitical realism, not just as a tool of foreign policy analysis but also as a distinct paradigm in diplomatic and military decision making, is necessary in order to articulate and pursue strategically sound U.S. policies.

At a time of domestic political divisions and cultural decline, American interests require prudence, restraint, and a rational link between ends and means. Abroad, it demands disengagement from distant countries of which we know little; at home, a sane immigration policy. It is at least arguable that the whole of the Middle East is not worth the bones of a single healthy Alabama grenadier.