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 U.S. retrenchment.

With me to discuss whether and where the United States should do less in the world is Stephen Wertheim. Stephen is a senior fellow in the American Statecraft program at the Carnegie

Endowment for International Peace. He is a historian of U.S. foreign policy and analyzes

contemporary problems in American strategy and diplomacy.

Stephen is also a visiting lecturer at the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton

University. Prospect magazine has named him as one of the world's 50 top thinkers of the COVID-19 age

for his writings. He is the author of Tomorrow the World,

the birth of U.S. global supremacy, and he recently wrote why America can't have it all.

Washington must choose between primacy and prioritizing for foreign affairs. This episode is the first

in a series I will be doing periodically between

now and the presidential election in November on U.S. Grand Strategy. With all of that behind us,

thank you, Stephen, for coming on the president's inbox. My pleasure, and as they say,

I am a longtime listener, first-time caller. Much appreciate. So as I said,

Stephen, I want to do this as part of his series on grand strategy. So perhaps we could begin

with how you would define the term and whether you think it's useful at all. So I think the term

is useful. I have to say I once wrote a piece suggesting that maybe it

wasn't. So I've come around to this view. My own definition, I kind of like two definitions

that I've heard. One is a state's theory of how to create security and prosperity for itself.

That comes from scholar Barry Pozen.

Another is a state's overall aims in the world.

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