Grand strategy
The term of the overall strategy (English: grand strategy, French: stratégie générale ) referred in International Relations " the vision and the inner logic that connects the overarching goal of a country with foreign policy, security and military strategies " and includes the targeted use of "all [ ... ] the available means of power ". They must be distinguished from the strategy, whose task is the conversion of specific political objectives into military actions. Overall strategic power means comprise, besides classical instruments such as the military, diplomacy, or trade policy, instruments of soft power, such as the foreign cultural policy and diplomatic outreach.
The deliberate planning and explicit implementation of an overall strategy is mainly attributed to political systems with hegemonic and imperial characteristics and requirements, and a certain consistency in the interests of their elites, such as the Roman Empire, the Chinese Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the British Empire and the United States. So writes Stephen M. Walt, the American containment policy with which the United States wanted to avoid both a war with the Soviet Union, while its territorial expansion, the status of a grand strategy to.
Term
In addition to an explicit practical component of the concept of total strategy also referred to an analytical process, as Edward Luttwak, according to every politically constituted community has such, regardless of whether its elites of this overall strategy are aware of it or not. Due to the often described subordination or subordination of economic, moral and cultural under the geopolitical and security interests of a political system, the concept of grand strategy is close to the realism.