Welcome to the President's Inbox, a CFR podcast about the foreign policy challenges facing the United States.

I'm Jim Lindsay, Director of Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

This week's topic is The Case for Liberal Internationalism.

With me to discuss whether liberal internationalism is fit for purpose in the 21st century is John

Eikenberry. John is the Abergee Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs

at Princeton University. He is also co-director of Princeton's

Center for International Security Studies. John is the author of eight books, the most recent of which

is a world's safer democracy, liberal internationalism, and the crises of global order.

This episode is the second in my ongoing series on U.S. Grand Strategy

for the 21st Century. John, thank you for joining me on the President's inbox.

Great to be here, Jim. Thank you. As I mentioned in the introduction, this is part of a series of

episodes I'm taping about American grand strategy.

And I wonder, how would you define the term grand strategy?

Well, the term really emerged during World War I in Great Britain when strategic thinkers

were beginning to assess the lessons of the Great War. People like Basil, Littleheart, and others,

sometimes they used the term higher strategy, but they were making the point that was increasingly

obvious in their day that in this modern era, great powers to navigate times of war and peace need to take advantage

of their full repertoire of instrumentalities of national power, economic, military, of course,

political, ideological, technological, organizational. And so the term allows us to look at those full, comprehensive assets that

states might have or at least can develop to shape their environment. Barry Pozen, one of my

favorite definitions of grand strategy, uses the phrase that it's a theory that a state has about how to cause security for itself.

How does it do things to make it more secure?

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