Obama and Russia: A Foreign Policy Analysis in Terms of Grand Strategy

Abstract

The United States has applied several strategies in implementing its foreign policy, known as grand strategies. These strategies change with the ruling of transition and/or events in the international environment, as the outbreak of wars, revolutions and economic recessions. The globalized world presented new challenges for the United States, asking for a renewed grand strategy, which would consider these variables. For that, the evolution of the grand strategy theory is presented to perceive how it was conceived and what is its importance for the foreign policy of the United States. That being said, the main purpose of this paper is to identify the elements of grand strategy used by the Obama administration (2008-2016) and therefore investigate them more specifically. Finally, this paper analyzes in detail the grand strategy formulated by the United States toward Russia in the Obama’s administration to understand how the priorities were perceived, in what implications it failed, proving that despite the good intention in the rapprochement with said country, it lacked a greater mutual commitment to consolidate this bilateral relationship.