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 Realism.

With me to discuss whether and how the United States should adapt its foreign policy

to a changing international environment that includes the return of great power competition

is Charles Cupchin.

Charlie is a senior fellow at the council and a professor of international affairs

at Georgetown University. He has held several positions in the U.S. government, including from 2014

to 2017 when he served as special assistant to the president and senior director for European affairs on the

staff of the National Security Council under President Barack Obama. Charlie's most recent book is

Isolationism, A History of America's Efforts to Shield itself from the World. This episode of the

president's inbox is the third in my series on U.S. Grand Strategy.

Charlie, thank you for joining me. Jim, very glad to be with you. As I mentioned just moments ago,

ours is a discussion that is part of a series on different perspectives on what U.S. Grand Strategy should be. So perhaps we should

start out with a basic question. How do you define the term grand strategy? Grand Strategy for me is

the intellectual architecture that policymakers use or at least should use to guide statecraft.

You could also think about it as a blueprint. What does your map of the world look like as you go

about the task of trying to strike a balance between strategic ends and economic, military,

and political means. The grand strategy is really about the application of available means to desirable

ends, and you bring to the table as you try to keep ends and means in balance a set of conceptual

or guiding suppositions that inform how you think the world works, where the main fault lines are,

and what are the foundations, if you will, that should be guiding statecraft?

...