Author: jrober27

Abstract of Argument

Recently, congressional redistricting has shifted from a decennial responsibility to a tool of mid-cycle partisan politics. Repeated redrawing undermines institutional productivity, creates electoral uncertainty, generates wasteful litigation, and fuels a self-perpetuating cycle of escalation. These consequences must be acknowledged and addressed.

This editorial critiques discretionary mid-cycle redistricting. It does not make normative claims about proportional representation, partisan fairness, or preferred substantive outcomes.

1. The Modern Landscape of Redistricting

Traditionally, state legislatures revise electoral districts following each decennial census to reflect updated population data. However, many states have recently pursued or considered redrawing congressional maps outside the normal post-census cycle. This unusually high level of mid-decade redistricting activity has not taken place since the 19th century.

Mid-decade, or “mid-cycle,” redistricting refers to a state legislature’s discretionary adoption of a new congressional district plan between decennial redistricting cycles. Court-ordered remedial maps designed to address constitutional or statutory violations are categorically different and should be excluded from this analysis.

Since the 2020 census, six states have implemented new congressional maps, and several others are considering mid-decade changes.¹ Recent developments in Texas, California, and Indiana illustrate how mid-cycle redistricting has emerged as a partisan strategy. In Texas, Republican lawmakers enacted a mid-decade congressional map aimed at strengthening the party’s position in the U.S. House. California’s political leadership responded with a similar effort in an effort to counter those gains.² Here in Indiana, lawmakers explored a similar mid-decade redraw, although it ultimately failed.³

These actions are emblematic of broader trends rather than isolated decisions. When one party redraws districts mid-cycle to secure a political advantage, the opposing party feels pressured to retaliate.The result is a cycle of strategic redistricting that departs from the traditional census-based process and increasingly resembles an interstate partisan arms race.⁴

2. Why Mid-Cycle Redistricting Occurs

The United States Constitution assigns primary responsibility for regulating congressional elections to individual states. In practice, state legislatures control congressional district lines, subjecting mapmaking authority to state-level partisan political strategy.⁵

First, in Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), the Supreme Court held that partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the scope of federal courts because no judicially manageable standards exist to resolve them.⁶ While the Court maintained jurisdiction over claims grounded in federal law, including the Fourteenth Amendment and the Voting Rights Act, Rucho substantially narrowed federal judicial review of redistricting undertaken for purely partisan advantage.⁷ The result is a legal environment in which mid-decade redistricting is largely insulated from federal challenges. 

This protection is further supported by the Court’s decision in LULAC v. Perry (2006). While the Court invalidated one district under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, it did not hold Texas’ 2003 mid-decade redistricting inherently unconstitutional.⁸ Importantly, while some may argue that mid-decade redistricting is not a contemporary problem because it occurred in 2006, the current concern is normalization rather than novelty.⁹

Some assert that Moore v. Harper (2023) meaningfully constrains strategic mid-decade redistricting because state courts may enforce state constitutional limits. However, because state standards vary and Moore does not provide a federal rule against partisan gerrymandering, state-court review does not eliminate the underlying incentive to redraw districts under partisan control.¹⁰

Finally, strategic redistricting is more common due to its predictable effects. Modern analytical tools can project likely outcomes with significant precision. As efforts like the Princeton Gerrymandering Project illustrate, parties can often assess whether a mid-decade redraw will yield a net electoral advantage.¹¹ Consequently, mid-cycle redistricting has become an increasingly calculated and incentivized competitive strategy.

3. Why Mid-Cycle Redistricting is Harmful

Mid-cycle redistricting demands considerable time for committee hearings, map drafting, intra-party negotiations, and compliance analysis. It also predictably leads to litigation, which siphons additional state funding. This process transforms an already resource-intensive decennial task into a recurring strain on institutional capacity. The opportunity cost is substantial: effort spent redrawing maps is time not devoted to meaningful governance.¹² Mid-cycle remapping also disrupts electoral accountability and administration by reshuffling constituencies between cycles and forcing rapid institutional changes amid legal uncertainty.¹³

Additionally, mid-cycle redistricting presents a classic strategic dilemma. If one party redraws districts to gain seats, the opposing party either faces a structural disadvantage or responds in kind. Due to the asymmetric cost of unilateral restraint, mutual restraint becomes unstable, resulting in a prisoner’s dilemma where both parties’ dominant strategy becomes redistricting. Even if both sides would prefer a stable equilibrium, they are incentivized to redraw mid-cycle, perpetuating frequent strategic interventions in the electoral map.¹⁴

4. Addressing Counterarguments

A common defense of mid-cycle redistricting is based on the principle of majority rule. Since legislatures are elected, they possess a democratic mandate accountable to voters.¹⁵ From this perspective, redistricting is merely an exercise of power by a duly elected majority. However, aggressive partisan redistricting can undermine the very mechanism that legitimizes that majority.¹⁶ If a mid-cycle redraw reduces electoral competition, it weakens the corrective function of elections and diminishes the accountability that the republican system aims to uphold.

The stronger counterargument is that some mid-cycle redistricting is legally compelled rather than driven by partisan motivations. Compliance with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act provides clear examples.¹⁷ Under Thornburg v. Gingles(1986), courts may require map changes when a districting plan unlawfully dilutes minority voters’ opportunities to elect their preferred candidates, and Allen v. Milligan (2023) reaffirmed that Section 2 vote-dilution framework in the context of redistricting.^18,19 Importantly, however, Section 2 merely authorizes remedies to address identified legal violations; it is not an open invitation to redraw lines whenever it is politically convenient.²⁰

This distinction leads to a crucial procedural point. Court-ordered remedial redistricting is often necessary, while discretionary mid-cycle redistricting is not. The key nuance is that compliance and strategic advantage can be pursued concurrently.²¹ A legislature can invoke the need to avoid legal exposure as justification for discretionary redistricting that maximizes partisan gain. Without constraints, “compliance” can become a permissive label for strategically timed consolidations of power.²²

5. Reform

The primary reform concerning mid-cycle redistricting is clear: prohibit it unless required to remedy a constitutional or statutory violation.²³ To prevent evasion, these court-ordered remedies should typically be final, enforceable decisions rather than preliminary injunctions.²⁴ This rule would reduce incentives for strategic redrawing while allowing ordinary decennial redistricting to proceed. However, since electoral procedures are under the control of individual state legislatures, implementing such reforms would be procedurally difficult but ultimately administrable.²⁵ This approach does not guarantee nonpartisan maps, nor does it eliminate politics from redistricting. It simply reduces the incentive for frequent, discretionary, and strategic redistricting in order to preserve institutional stability and enable governments to actually govern.²⁶

1. National Conference of State Legislatures, “Changing the Maps: Tracking Mid-Decade Redistricting,” accessed February 22, 2026, https://www.ncsl.org/redistricting-and-census/changing-the-maps-tracking-mid-decade-redistricting. ↩︎
2. Reuters, “How the War over U.S. Congressional Redistricting Is Playing Out State by State,” Reuters, February 20, 2026, https://www.reuters.com/world/us/how-war-over-us-congressional-redistricting-is-playing-out-state-by-state-2026-02-20/. ↩︎
3. PBS NewsHour, “Indiana Republicans Block New Congressional Map in Rare Break with Trump,” PBS NewsHour, December 11, 2025, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/indiana-republicans-block-new-congressional-map-in-rare-break-with-trump. ↩︎
4. Reuters, “How the War over U.S. Congressional Redistricting Is Playing Out State by State,” Reuters, February 20, 2026, https://www.reuters.com/world/us/how-war-over-us-congressional-redistricting-is-playing-out-state-by-state-2026-02-20/. ↩︎
5. U.S. Const. art. I, § 4, cl. 1. ↩︎
6. U.S. Const. art. I, § 4, cl. 1. ↩︎
7. Rucho v. Common Cause, 588 U.S. ___ (2019). ↩︎
8. League of United Latin American Citizens v. Perry, 548 U.S. 399 (2006). ↩︎
9. National Conference of State Legislatures, “Changing the Maps: Tracking Mid-Decade Redistricting,” accessed February 22, 2026, https://www.ncsl.org/redistricting-and-census/changing-the-maps-tracking-mid-decade-redistricting. ↩︎
10. Moore v. Harper, 600 U.S. ___ (2023). ↩︎
11. Princeton Gerrymandering Project, “Redistricting Report Card Methodology,” accessed February 22, 2026, https://gerrymander.princeton.edu/redistricting-report-card-methodology. ↩︎
12. National Conference of State Legislatures, “Changing the Maps: Tracking Mid-Decade Redistricting,” accessed February 22, 2026, https://www.ncsl.org/redistricting-and-census/changing-the-maps-tracking-mid-decade-redistricting. ↩︎
13. Reuters, “How the War over U.S. Congressional Redistricting Is Playing Out State by State,” Reuters, February 20, 2026, https://www.reuters.com/world/us/how-war-over-us-congressional-redistricting-is-playing-out-state-by-state-2026-02-20/. ↩︎
14. Reuters, “How the War over U.S. Congressional Redistricting Is Playing Out State by State,” Reuters, February 20, 2026, https://www.reuters.com/world/us/how-war-over-us-congressional-redistricting-is-playing-out-state-by-state-2026-02-20/. ↩︎
15. U.S. Const. art. I, § 4, cl. 1. ↩︎
16. Rucho v. Common Cause, 588 U.S. ___ (2019). ↩︎
17. Voting Rights Act of 1965, § 2, 52 U.S.C. § 10301. ↩︎
18. Thornburg v. Gingles, 478 U.S. 30 (1986). ↩︎
19. Allen v. Milligan, 599 U.S. ___ (2023). ↩︎
20. Voting Rights Act of 1965, § 2, 52 U.S.C. § 10301. ↩︎
21. League of United Latin American Citizens v. Perry, 548 U.S. 399 (2006). ↩︎
22. Reuters, “How the War over U.S. Congressional Redistricting Is Playing Out State by State,” Reuters, February 20, 2026, https://www.reuters.com/world/us/how-war-over-us-congressional-redistricting-is-playing-out-state-by-state-2026-02-20/. ↩︎
23. U.S. Const. art. I, § 4, cl. 1. ↩︎
24. Moore v. Harper, 600 U.S. ___ (2023). ↩︎
25. U.S. Const. art. I, § 4, cl. 1. ↩︎
26. National Conference of State Legislatures, “Changing the Maps: Tracking Mid-Decade Redistricting,” accessed February 22, 2026, https://www.ncsl.org/redistricting-and-census/changing-the-maps-tracking-mid-decade-redistricting. ↩︎

“Before the war, it was said ‘the United States are’—grammatically it was spoken that way and thought of as a collection of independent states. And after the war it was always ‘the United States is,’ as we say today without being self-conscious at all. And that sums up what the war accomplished. It made us an ‘is.’”

The above quote, delivered by Shelby Foote as part of Ken Burns’ The Civil War miniseries, leapt from the stereo systems of homes across 1990’s America and perched itself on the bookshelf full of this nation’s canon. What Foote was getting at, outside of listing copulatives, was that the Civil War was a definitive point in time where Americans began conceiving of themselves as countrymen. No longer were men Ohioans who happened to be citizens of the United States. They were citizens of The United States who happened to live in Ohio. 

This change in the state-nation relationship was not limited to the American psyche. In the decades leading up to the Civil War, state defiance to the dictates of the federal government was overt and occasionally even violent.¹ The Civil War ushered in an era where Washington’s supremacy was settled, and, despite the failure of reconstruction and the post-1877 political and legal resistance to federal orders, politically armed organized opposition became illegitimate. 

The post-war diminution of state authority and autonomy was perpetuated and strengthened throughout the 20th century. From the 17th Amendment and the first world war, through the New Deal and World War II, and on to the Cold War nationalization of security and the Civil Rights era, the US federal government firmly established its preponderance over state politics, solidifying Americans’ conceptions of their participation in a national community, not just a state one.  

Over the past twelve months, this understanding of a continent-wide society has begun to unravel. President Trump’s return to the White House was interpreted by top Republican figures such as Stephen Miller, Susie Wiles, and JD Vance as a sweeping mandate to aggressively install a new conservative agenda, one that would be fully detached from the neoconservative holdovers who hampered Trump’s governance during his first term.^2,3 The breadth and intensity of this new agenda has even surprised veteran party loyalists.⁴ The initiation of trade wars against friends and foes alike, the use of military force against Iran and Venezuela, the bellicose deployment of ICE to major US cities, and the attempts to coerce Jerome Powell into submission have signaled to Americans that the Trump Administration seeks to fundamentally alter the relationship between the State, its citizens, and the international community.⁵

The Democratic establishment appeared to be wholly unprepared to counter this Republican policy rollout. Having placed their political capital behind a candidate with deteriorating mental faculties,⁶ switched him out for his Vice President 107 days before the election, and then lost the House, Senate, and the White House, the DNC had neither the momentum, cohesion, or support necessary to deploy an effective opposition to Trump II’s early governance decisions. 

In the wake of this political turmoil, the Democratic political apparatus has shifted its messaging strategy. Leaders and operatives within the DNC have realized that focusing on the policy failures, shortcomings, and missteps of President Trump and the MAGA generation of conservatives simply does not move the needle on American public opinion.⁷ Impeachments, felony convictions, attempts to disrupt the peaceful transition of power, and worrisome conflicts of interest were not enough to sideline President Trump’s third attempt at the White House. In fact, between 2016 and 2024, President Trump gained 14 million more voters. Democrats have come to understand that pointing to the faults in President Trump’s behavior, record, and ideology is not enough to win elections. They have come to terms with the fact that expending resources and bandwidth debating principles and norms does not resonate with voters overwhelmed with feelings of frustration and ostracization. 

As a result, the Democratic political elite and media apparatus have turned away from promoting their ideology via criticizing Republican ideology. Instead, they have shifted their attention towards highlighting the physical, real-world disparities in outcomes between areas governed by Democrats and areas governed by Republicans. This was an impressive move by an establishment long marred by stubborn, antiquated leadership hesitant to change their approach to President Trump.⁸  With few opportunities to display good governance in a Republican-controlled Congress and Presidency, Democrats have simply pivoted to areas they do control: Cities, states, and regions.

This new strategy has long been floating at the periphery of Democratic messaging. Gavin Newsom, for example, has always appreciated the benefit of framing California as a semi-autonomous outcrop on the leading edge of American progressivism.⁹ However, over the past year, instances of Democrats using examples of high-performing political subdivisions as a way to demonstrate the superiority of Democratic governance over Republicanism has surged. One of the first areas where this campaign was rolled out was in discussions regarding which states contribute most to federal revenues.¹⁰

Unsurprisingly, Governor Newsom had some of the most high-profile commentary regarding this topic. The investment in this narrative from the left has been extensive. Saturating the media space with content highlighting the vast disparity between tax revenues from Democratic and Republican states achieves a variety of goals, the first of which being a discreditation of President Trump’s electoral base. 

To the median, uninterested voter, learning that the core electorate propelling Trump to a second presidency resides in states consuming more federal resources than they contribute taints the supposed mandate received by the Republican party. The endgame of such efforts is to encourage dining room conversations such as this: “So you’re telling me the people who contribute less than everybody else get to dictate the future of this country, but those actually paying into the system have no say?” Various buzzwords have been thrown into the discussion as well, most notably the conceptions of “donor states” and “welfare states”, terms meant to further drive home that idea that it is Democrat-led states that are the most productive and prosperous within the Union.

Related to this last point, a second goal of this media strategy is to get voters to associate Democratic governance with economic success. For decades, Republicans have prided themselves on being the party of prosperity. Supporting tax cuts, limited social safety nets, and deregulation, Republicans have marketed themselves to American voters as the party that puts cash back into your pockets.¹¹ By tying the political leadership of states to their “donor state” or “welfare state” status, DNC organizers are banking on voters seeing the Democratic platform as the key to unlocking economic growth and expansion.

Another area pounced on by this state-focused messaging strategy has been education. Much like with federal tax contributions, Democratic organizers have formed a unified approach to create a narrative that forges a causal link between educational outcomes and political governance.

The message here is simple: when Democrats govern, your children receive better educations. This phase of the new DNC media strategy is more confrontational than the federal tax contributions angle. Where the former campaign claims that blue state economic success is a result of Democratic policies creating more favorable economic conditions that Republican ones, the latter campaign directly accuses Republican-led states of legislative malpractice. 

Again, much like the messaging on “donor states” and “welfare states”, there is a clear attempt here to further discredit President Trump’s legitimacy as an executive. The above tweet, along with many similar ones, latch state electoral results to state educational attainment. The anticipated effect of media content like this is to encourage voters to interpret Trump’s presidency as a triumph of the uninformed red states over the educated blue states.

One of the most clever ways Democrat-affiliated media has utilized state-level politics to market the efficacy of Democratic policy has been in the comparison of crime statistics between blue and red states. Starting during the 1960s, and certainly solidifying after the Willie Horton Case,¹² the Democratic Party has dealt with the perception of being soft on crime. Republicans have taken full advantage of this in recent years. Countless campaign ads, tweets, Facebook posts, and TV segments have hammered home the idea that while Democrats let their states and cities devolve into warzones, Republican-led states fight tooth and nail to preserve law and order.

The DNC mediasphere has made significant strides in countering this narrative recently. Using the same strategies Republicans have implemented for years, Democrat-affiliated media have begun disseminating statistics and messaging showing Americans that Republicans are the real hypocrites. That, while grandstanding about law, order, and rule of law, they have sat idly by while their constituents suffer from crime at rates higher than their counterparts governed by Democratic state legislatures. 

As with the strategy behind the messaging on education and federal tax contributions, the goal here is to manufacture causation. With President Trump in the White House criticizing blue states like Minnesota and California about their failure to enforce the law day after day, DNC organizers have tried to flip the narrative regarding leftist governance and crime enforcement. They have sought to reframe the discussion regarding the Democrat Party and crime to drill into voters that in the absence of Democratic pragmatism, Republican incompetence leads crime flourishing.

These discussions around conservatism and crime are a significant divergence from liberal strategies around education and “donor vs welfare state” debates. While even card-carrying Republicans would admit that economic productivity in California outpaces that of Mississippi and that a rural Alabama elementary school may have lower testing scores than a peer in Massachusetts, it is a much tougher proposition to convince voters that Democratic rule leads to lower crime. The aggressive attempts to flip this debate on its head is a sign that the Democrat Party is no longer satisfied with winning the middle ground – they want to beat Republicans on their home court.

The Democratic media apparatus has emerged guns a-blazing during the first year of this second Trump administration. Having started the year reeling from a disastrous presidential election and facing polls showing a disturbing trend among young voters,¹³ the DNC has turned to state-level politics to demonstrate to voters the virtues of their ideology. As midterms approach, legislatures and governor’s mansions have emerged as a battleground in the competition for Congress. States are now framed as if they in a vacuum, with their various goods and evils serving to encapsulate the projected result of either party’s federal governance. 

Make no mistake though, Democrats are not the only ones who have dumped immense amounts of attention into state governments. Republicans have fully mobilized their mediasphere to counter these messaging campaigns from the Left. Just as liberal media sources have manipulated statistics and data to serve their interests, conservative voices have done their own gymnastics to raise their ideology on a pedestal.

Whether it be crime, taxation, education, or whatever else, GOP-affiliated media has gained a foothold in these debates raging around state politics. If a Democrat says blue states do better in education than red states, there are plentiful, equally convincing retorts from Republicans to discredit such claims.

In the end, this competition to link an individual state’s performance in a random category to whatever party has control leads to a media environment filled with low quality information. For every virtue, there is a vice. For every pro, there is a con. For every fact, there is a fact-check. 

The Return

The point of this extensive delve into the world of Twitter messaging and influencing campaigns is that they are significantly altering how we view ourselves, our neighbors, and our nation. When Democrats and Republicans spew infographics about how blue states or red states edge out each other in certain categories, they aren’t just gaining political brownie points, they are promoting a perception of a fragmented Union. This media environment, paired with the efforts of states like California,¹⁴ Minnesota,¹⁵ Texas,¹⁶ and Florida¹⁷ to assert their autonomy, erode the conception of a cohesive American identity and suggest that there exists two separate, fundamentally opposed political systems under the mask of the federal umbrella. 

These messaging campaigns are in no way executed in good faith either. Liberal and conservative agitants don’t concern themselves with the fact that state governments are dynamic, not static. A significant portion of the laws that govern affairs in red states like Ohio and West Virginia were codified by Democratic general assemblies of the past. California, a state that has had a Republican governor as recently as 2011,¹⁸ had six million of its residents vote for Donald Trump in 2024. Do those individuals not contribute to the behemoth that is California’s economy? Can the left-leaning tech gurus of Austin not share credit with Governor Abbott for Texas’ economic prosperity?

No matter how hard you try, you cannot rip causation from the mouth of correlation. You cannot attribute gun violence in a particular state to the fact that Republicans happen to have a majority in the legislature. You cannot establish a causal link between Democratic mayors and rampant violent crime rates within cities. The architects of these media campaigns know this, they just don’t care. They know their sensationalism won’t alter the opinions of the informed voter. They are targeting the disinterested, low-information, median voter to try to morph their perceptions of politics. 

Despite aiming at only a specific portion of the voter population, these media strategies affect the entire American political arena. States have turned into conflict zones in demonstrating which political ideology is superior. They are increasingly viewed not as political subdivisions within a greater system, but as sovereign areas whose environments are a direct result of which party is heading the state.

Fracture, fissure, and divide can only spell bad things for unions. A uniform, consistent identity is essential for maintaining the unity of a political unit encompassing 350 million people settled across an entire continent. The newly-found hyperfixation on state politics encourages behavior and thinking that can unwind the very same fabric Shelby Foote commented on 40 years ago. We are more than a collection of 50 states. We are an interconnected people, all sharing an identity linking us with our past, present, and future. 

1. Goldstein, Leslie. (1997). State Resistance to Authority in Federal Unions: The Early United States (1790–1860) and the European Community (1958–94). Studies in American Political Development. 11. 149 – 189. 10.1017/S0898588X00001620. ↩︎
2. https://observer.co.uk/news/international/article/in-a-single-eccentric-autocratic-year-trump-has-already-remade-the-world. ↩︎
3. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-criticizes-mccain-health-care-bill. ↩︎
4. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/oct/19/marjorie-taylor-greene-breaks-republican-ranks. ↩︎
5. https://time.com/collections/davos-2026/7345543/trump-foreign-policy-second-term/. ↩︎
6. https://www.npr.org/2025/05/19/nx-s1-5309451/biden-health-decline-original-sin. ↩︎
7. https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/5059796-trump-political-comeback-greatest/. ↩︎
8. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/14/us/politics/government-shutdown-spending-bill-schumer-democrats.html. ↩︎
9. https://www.gov.ca.gov/2023/10/30/what-governor-newsoms-trip-to-china-accomplished/. ↩︎
10. https://x.com/GavinNewsom/status/1944827167990538371. ↩︎
11. https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/address-nation-federal-budget-and-deficit-reduction. ↩︎
12. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna53339293. ↩︎
13. https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty-research/policy-topics/politics/young-voters-shifted-right-2024-election-ash-center. ↩︎
14. https://www.gov.ca.gov/2026/01/23/governor-newsom-meets-with-world-health-organization-director-general-announces-california-becomes-first-state-to-join-who-coordinated-international-network/. ↩︎
15. https://www.house.mn.gov/hrd/pubs/pap_overview.pdf. ↩︎
16. https://www.ercot.com/. ↩︎
17. https://www.thinkglobalhealth.org/article/did-florida-get-it-right-against-covid-19. ↩︎
18. https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000216/. ↩︎

Abstract of Argument

  This editorial evaluates competing United States grand strategies against established criteria for protecting state interests. It argues that a strategy of “selective engagement,” which focuses American resources on maintaining favorable regional balances through alliances, limited military force, and economic statecraft, is the only strategy that aligns with current structural and domestic constraints.

I. Introduction

The United States currently faces slowing economic growth, rising debt, and polarized politics. These circumstances have prompted a reevaluation of U.S. grand strategy to sustainably pursue critical interests within contemporary economic and political constraints. Competing proposals for a new grand strategy range from strict isolationism to a renewed version of primacy, but these ideas rest on assumptions misaligned with current political conditions and cost-benefit principles. This piece argues that, despite calls for a new doctrine, the United States should maintain the status quo of selective engagement.

II. Theoretical Groundwork

  Grand strategy links political objectives to the military, economic, and diplomatic tools used to secure them. Objectives must be clearly defined and efficiently pursued. For example, Barry Posen characterizes grand strategy as a political–military means–ends chain through which a state achieves security.¹ The pursuit of “security” through military force must recognize that war is a means to political ends rather than an end in itself.² These ends must be realized through what theorist Nina Silove describes as plans, principles, and durable patterns of behavior.³

  These formulations imply four evaluation criteria: a strategy must identify vital interests, specify the mechanisms required to defend them, align ends with available means, and avoid commitments that cannot be sustained over time. To satisfy these criteria, theorists and policymakers have proposed four competing grand strategies: Restraint, Liberal Internationalism, Primacy, and Selective Engagement.

  Each of these grand strategies reflects assumptions derived from major paradigms in international relations theory. Restraint draws from “defensive realism,” arguing that the United States should protect its homeland through limited threats and avoid extensive foreign engagement.⁴ Liberal Internationalism reflects “institutional liberalism,” treating international rules and economic interdependence as stabilizing forces.⁵ Primacy incorporates elements of “offensive realism” and “hegemonic stability theory,” which assert that sustained military preponderance is necessary to suppress competition to U.S. power.⁶ Selective Engagement embodies “structural realism,” identifying where power shifts matter most and concentrating commitments accordingly while avoiding peripheral obligations.⁷ These paradigmatic assumptions generate different expectations about whether power, institutions, or norms generate stable security outcomes. The core test of any grand strategy is whether these expectations withstand theoretical and empirical scrutiny.

III. Evaluation of the Four Grand Strategies

A. Restraint

  Restraint assumes that geography and nuclear deterrence sufficiently insulate the United States from major threats. It suggests that alliances and forward deployments introduce unnecessary liabilities.⁸ Its causal logic posits that reducing commitments lowers exposure to conflict without compromising homeland security. However, this reasoning misidentifies how regional balances shape global economic and security outcomes relevant to U.S. interests. Regional hegemons can reshape technological standards, production networks, and financial channels in ways that weaken U.S. leverage and limit economic autonomy.⁹ Rising powers also exploit institutional positions to gain advantages in trade, innovation, and coercive diplomacy.¹⁰ Historical evidence indicates that withdrawal accelerates renationalized defense, sharpens nationalism, and intensifies security dilemmas.¹¹ These conditions can lead to arms racing, coercive bargaining, and nuclear proliferation.¹² Because these mechanisms undermine essential U.S. interests and cannot be mitigated by geography alone, restraint fails to meet the grand strategic criteria of aligning available means with accurately identified national interests.

B. Liberal Internationalism

  Liberal internationalism posits that supranational institutions and economic interdependence can stabilize international politics and reduce conflict.¹³ Its causal logic suggests that sustained U.S. engagement embeds states in predictable rules and encourages cooperative behavior. However, this mechanism relies on the acceptance of institutional constraints by rising powers and stable domestic support for broad commitments. Neither condition holds today. Major powers increasingly view institutions as tools rather than constraints, complying selectively when rules align with their interests.¹⁴ Domestic polarization and economic inequality further weaken support for ambitious international order-building.¹⁵ Institutions function reliably only when backed by capable and consistent power, meaning that less domestic support undermines U.S. capacity to sustain institutional commitments.¹⁶ Consequently, liberal internationalism fails the tests of feasibility and sustainability, as it depends on political and structural conditions that no longer exist.

C. Primacy

  Primacy asserts that sustained U.S. preponderance is essential to deter adversaries and stabilize key regions.¹⁷ Its causal logic maintains that forward presence and active regional management prevent the emergence of peer competitors. This approach requires overwhelming material advantage and a stable domestic consensus. These two foundations have eroded as fiscal pressures rise and political support for intervention declines.¹⁸ Evidence from attempts at forced democracy promotion, covert regime change, and counterinsurgency indicates that large-scale interventions often fail to produce desired outcomes, instead generating spirals of overextension, coercive backlash, and threat inflation.¹⁹ Because primacy demands resources and political cohesion that the United States no longer possesses, it fails the sustainability criterion, even if its strategic aims were desirable.

D. Selective Engagement

  Selective engagement posits that only a few regions materially affect the global balance of power.²⁰ Its causal logic holds that outcomes in Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East determine access to technology, industrial capacity, capital, and strategic geography, which underpin U.S. national power.²¹ Europe and East Asia possess the industrial and technological weight to produce hostile hegemons, while the Middle East influences global markets and chokepoints that, if dominated, could raise costs and reduce maneuverability for the United States. Because dominance in these regions would reshape global economic and security structures, selective engagement concentrates commitments where stakes are highest.

  Alliances distribute burdens, deter aggression, and reduce the need for unilateral intervention; many exist by “invitation,” reflecting partner incentives to internalize U.S. leadership.²² Military force is reserved for contingencies where hegemonic outcomes are plausible and justified by clear cost–benefit logic.²³ Economic engagement reinforces technological and industrial competitiveness rather than presuming unlimited primacy.²⁴ Avoiding discretionary interventions preserves domestic consensus and prevents strategic drift.²⁵ Selective engagement meets all four evaluation criteria: it accurately identifies vital interests, relies on mechanisms supported by empirical evidence, aligns tools with constraints, and limits commitments to what can be sustained.

IV. Counterarguments and Rebuttals

  Common criticisms of selective engagement often misstate its scope or misunderstand its mechanisms. Claims that the strategy lacks clarity overlook the fact that defining vital interests through the risk of hostile regional dominance leads to a narrow and operational set of commitments. Warnings of entrapment in unnecessary affairs ignore the United States’ ability to impose explicit limits on allied commitments and partner behavior.²⁶ Concerns regarding cost-benefit principles fail to consider that stabilizing key regions is less expensive than the long-term consequences of adversarial control over technological standards, supply chains, or financial rules. Assertions that selective engagement weakens deterrence disregard the reality that concentrated commitments produce clearer signals and more credible resolve than diffuse global activism. Therefore, these criticisms do not undermine the strategy’s feasibility or logic.

V. Strategy and Policy Prescription 

Selective engagement remains the only viable grand strategy for the United States because it clearly identifies critical interests, aligns available instruments with those interests, and limits commitments to what contemporary economic and political conditions can support. Maintaining this strategy requires four policy choices. The United States must sustain alliances in Europe and East Asia, where power shifts most significantly affect the global balance. It must invest in technological and industrial capacity to ensure long-term competitiveness. It must maintain a military posture focused on deterrence rather than indefinite forward operations, with clear thresholds for the use of force. Finally, it must avoid discretionary interventions that do not impact the global distribution of power. Restraint underestimates the consequences of regional power shifts, while liberal internationalism and primacy overestimate the resources and domestic support available for expansive commitments. Selective engagement alone aligns U.S. objectives with the structural and domestic constraints that define grand strategy today.

1. Barry R. Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984).
2. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 87–89.
3. Nina Silove, “Beyond the Buzzword: The Three Meanings of ‘Grand Strategy,’” Security Studies 27, no. 1 (2018): 27–57.
4. Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979).
5. Robert Keohane, After Hegemony (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).
6. John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: Norton, 2001).
7. Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth, “American Primacy in Perspective,” Foreign Affairs 81, no. 4 (2002): 20–33.
8. Barry Posen, “The Case for a Less Activist Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs 92, no. 1 (2013): 116–28.
9. Robert Wade, “The Invisible Hand of the American Empire,” Ethics & International Affairs 17, no. 2 (2003): 77–88; Carla Norrlof, America’s Global Advantage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
10. Thomas Christensen, The China Challenge (New York: Norton, 2015).
11. A.J.P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977); James Joll, The Origins of the First World War, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, 1992); Sebastian Rosato, Europe United (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012).
12. Vipin Narang, Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014); Mark Bell, Nuclear Reactions (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021).
13. G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).
14. Christensen, China Challenge.
15. Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics,” Perspectives on Politics 12, no. 3 (2014): 564–81; Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, The Triumph of Injustice (New York: Norton, 2019).
16. John Mearsheimer, “The False Promise of International Institutions,” International Security 19, no. 3 (1994): 5–49; Norrlof, America’s Global Advantage.
17. Stephen Brooks, G. John Ikenberry, and William Wohlforth, “Lean Forward,” Foreign Affairs 92, no. 1 (2013): 130–42.
18. Benjamin Fordham, “Paying for Global Power,” in The Long War, ed. Andrew Bacevich (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 371–404.
19. Lindsay O’Rourke, Covert Regime Change (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018); Douglas Porch, Counterinsurgency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Benjamin Valentino, “The True Costs of Humanitarian Intervention,” Foreign Affairs 90, no. 6 (2011): 60–73; Robert Jervis, American Foreign Policy in a New Era (New York: Routledge, 2005).
20. Posen, “Less Activist Foreign Policy.”
21. Michael Beckley, Unrivaled (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018); Brooks and Wohlforth, “American Primacy.”
22. Geir Lundestad, “Empire by Invitation,” in The United States and Western Europe Since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan.
23. Thomas Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966); Russell Weigley, The American Way of War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973).
24. Diana Mutz, Winners and Losers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021); Angus Deaton, The Great Escape (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013); Robert Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).
25. Valentino, “True Costs”; Porch, Counterinsurgency.
26. Daryl Press, Calculating Credibility (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005).

Conventionally defined as, “collaborative efforts on shared open spaces where participants share in the maintenance and products of the garden, including healthful and affordable fresh fruits and vegetables,” community gardens offer an integrated approach to building community, combating hunger, and fostering ecological protection in an urban environment. They solve complex problems and bond diverse peoples together. More localities ought to create and sustain beautiful community gardens to promote their residents’ flourishing.

Community gardens foster community. 

Humans are fundamentally social beings with obligations to family, neighborhood, and nation. Alienation, boredom, and loneliness increasingly plague Americans of all backgrounds despite constant technological interconnectedness. Today, over half of Americans experience loneliness or consider themselves lonely.  The American Time Use Survey underscores a drastic decline for in-person interactions as youths in 2025 meet with peers 35% less than their counterparts two decades ago. Thus, a need exists for spaces outside of work, school, and home to provide connection, belonging and purpose. Community gardens operate as such a “third place,” or a public place that hosts “the regular, voluntary, informal, and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home and work.” Gardeners of all stripes can help grow fresh produce and enjoy the fruits of their labor. Community gardens can fortify bonds of social trust and awaken obligations between the wealthy and common folk, allowing for class intermingling. Class mixing permits encounters with “superior persons,” who “encourage us to make something of ourselves, to impose difficult demands on ourselves, and to appreciate the satisfactions conferred by devoted service to an ideal.” Third places such as community gardens act as a kind of social leveler in that participation and enjoyment are accessible to the general public and not predicated upon socio-economic status. Reliant on the generosity of private donations from individuals and local businesses and corporations, community gardens motivate an embrace of noblesse oblige so that one may become “the mere trustee and agent for his poorer brethren.”  Therefore, community gardens can bridge the growing social gap and renew reciprocal obligations between the elites and the masses by serving as a space for charity, connection, and community.

Community gardens cultivate civic friendship. 

Nascent forms of technological distraction and the sanctification of individual autonomy have eroded concern for the prosperity of the extended American family, enabling self-interest to reign. But communal efforts can reverse romantic individualism and advance social communion. By the elementary reality of physical proximity, informal associations and communal gatherings unite American citizens as equals in a robust exchange of ideas and opinions that polish political habits and virtues. Informal rendezvous inspire practices of civility and compromise between diverse peoples, drawing together the community as equal parts of a whole working toward a common goal. Engagement in efforts to grow and sustain fresh produce takes patience, hard work, and consensus. The practices of mutual aid, problem-solving, and open conversation involved with communal gardening train participants for democratic governance and active citizenship, learning how to rule and be ruled. Political participation is imperative for a functioning democracy and citizens who engage in civic associations are more likely to be politically active. Thus, community gardens strengthen democracy by instilling volunteers with democratic skills and civic virtue, prompting them to partake in politics.

Community gardens improve health outcomes, especially for the poor.

Community gardens increase consumption of fruits and vegetables. Roughly 53.6 million Americans dwell in “food deserts,” areas in which access to affordable and nutritious foods is significantly limited due to economic or transportation barriers.  Nutritional gaps persist for those struggling with food insecurity. A poor diet is a prominent contributor to chronic disease. Higher intakes of fruits and vegetables have been associated with a reduced risk for cardiovascular disease, cancer, and ischemic stroke, three leading causes of death in the United States. A study of urban adults in Flint, Michigan revealed that gardeners consumed roughly 1.5 times the amount of fruits and vegetables than non-gardeners and were 3.5 times more likely to meet the daily recommended intake amount. Community gardens offer an inexpensive solution to help close nutritional gaps among the poor and reduce the scale of food deserts as free produce within close proximity to one’s home eliminates limitations of cost and availability. 

Community gardens promote environmental stewardship.

Americans suffer from what Richard Louv has coined, “nature deficit disorder,” an unnatural and accelerated disconnect from the physical world. A lack of access to green spaces in urban areas and the allure of a screen has left people disinterested and disenchanted with the environment. Scientific evidence illustrates that those who are withdrawn from nature experience higher levels of physical and emotional illness and exhibit a reduced use of the senses. Detachment from nature contradicts fundamental anthropology as the late Pope Francis remarked, “We are a part of nature, included in it and thus in constant interaction with it.” A lack of involvement in nature contributes to a failure to see the earth as our common home. A society that cherishes instant gratification and convenience will likely view nature as a utilitarian good to be exploited for maximal human satisfaction rather than a gift to be respected and taken care of for generations to come. We are called to be responsible stewards of the earth, to preserve it and make it fruitful. Community gardens offer a chance to establish an active connection to and respect for nature and promote a sense of awe and wonder of its complexity and beauty.

Unity Gardens in South Bend, Indiana, is a model for community gardens across the nation. Funded by donations from individuals, local businesses, and even large corporations such as Kohls and AEP, the organization operates over 40 satellite gardens in northern Indiana. In addition to offering free produce for locals, Unity Gardens hosts social events as well as gardening courses, gathering diverse members of the area together and teaching volunteers the value of working in and respecting nature. 

Some critics of community gardens suggest that the responsibility of caretaking often falls on a few committed volunteers or that lots of precious land in urban areas could be better used in solving shortages of affordable housing units. While the housing crisis is a pressing matter, community gardens can and should be built alongside housing developments to beautify the area and provide a space for neighbors to meet. To avoid the labor falling on a few, gardens can partner with local schools to ensure a steady supply of volunteers and inspire the next generation to care for the environment.

Communities should follow the example of Unity Gardens and heed Frederick Douglass’ call “to make us the most perfect national illustration of the unity and dignity of the human family that the world has ever seen.” “Feverish consumerism and new forms of egotistic self-preservation” cause Americans to grapple with a growing wealth divide and isolation. A shared aim to construct local spaces of belonging and solidarity with the most vulnerable can combat grotesque economic and social inequalities that contradict a democratic conception of equality and dignity and thwart the ills of self-interest and materialism.. Sharing time, talents, and food within the space of a community garden establishes bonds of mutual trust and civic friendship that are essential for a thriving democratic republic. Efforts to ethically use the earth’s fruits to foster community and promote human flourishing therefore ought to become a priority of America’s future.

René Descartes asserts that “je pense donc je suis,” and Plato claims that the “soul is a helpless prisoner [of the body].” These thoughts, while philosophically interesting, are characteristic of the metaphysical error plaguing modern society. The “real” you is your mind/soul and we are being led to reject the necessity and goodness of our physical bodies. Oftentimes, it isn’t that people are actively seeking out this ideology, but rather it’s that our culture, steeped in technology and digital entertainment, is driving a revival of the new-gnostic – disembodied – philosophical worldview that has been accepted by most without giving it a second thought. 

This is most acutely seen in Gen Z and the sheer amount of time spent in the digital realm rather than physical reality. Kids have phones in their hands as young as ten or eleven. Adults in the United States spend an average of over six hours per day online, and their average attention span is no longer than fifty seconds. Whether it is through scrolling on Instagram for hours at a time or being absorbed by video games, people live in their minds more than in reality. This online, technological realm has even become the new “reality” for some. 

This phenomenon is not without its negative ripple effect. Almost 30% of Generation Z self-reports having poor mental health. The percentage of the adult population who reports having zero close friends has risen to 12% in 2021 (up from 3% in 1990). Our youth can’t read. We have lost the ability to exist in silence and lack the vocabulary and aptitude to describe beautiful things. Living outside of the physical world has undermined humanity. Most distressing, however, is the reliance our society has on technology on every level from the individual all the way up to government. 

How could we have possibly ended up in this conundrum? Technology, after all, was meant to improve our lives, increase our efficiency, and provide a convenient, easy-to-access source of information and entertainment. Our society’s current disillusioned state is far from this idealistic vision. We can attempt to pin all of society’s problems on technology, but we must also recognize that technology is merely a tool that we humans, as moral agents, can use in a virtuous manner, supportive of our flourishing, or in a disordered way, something that drives us into the social, cultural, and mental crisis characteristic of far too many of our modern youth in the West. But is it really just those “dang phones” corrupting the youth, or is there something deeper, even spiritually corrupted, that is contributing to our increasingly dismal outlook?

The disembodiment of modern man from the rest of creation is this fundamental error. And our metaphysical principles influence every other belief we hold, including our politics. 

We need not look far to see this made manifest – even one of the most powerful men in the world, Tim Cook, builds towards a world where people are conquered by technology on their couches. The Apple Vision Pro ad shows just this – rather than living a life of adventure, community, and purpose, technology has found a way to be ever-present, blurring the line between digital reality and the physical world. 

Life is not meant for this. Man is not meant for this. Rather, man is meant to be a steward of creation on his journey towards union with the Divine. Being lulled into complacency in a make-believe technical realm is one of the furthest things from the virtue we are called to. The acceptance, even if passive, of a disembodied framework for viewing the person and world is driving the belief that this is an acceptable way to live our one, precious life. The only way to escape this toxic ideology is to combat it with the truth that we are not solely our bodies nor our minds. We are a soul embodied, living in the physical world while being connected to a higher spiritual realm. While we are called to an end beyond this world, it remains that we have an obligation to live in the world and do it well. We are ultimately stewards of a gift freely given. In the words of Pope Benedict XVI, the world offers us comfort, but we “were not made for comfort, [we] were made for greatness.” Our lives and the world are destined for magis. 

In accepting disembodiment and allowing ourselves to be conditioned to an over-reliance on technology, we leave society vulnerable to a plethora of problems. We have hijacked our society’s understanding of leisure and turned us into hedonistic dopamine seekers. We have opened the floodgates for globalizing forces to infiltrate our conception of democratic politics we hold in the West. We are allowing a worldview in which it is justifiable for people to care less for their own bodies and for the environment. Most importantly, it solidifies the destruction of civil society, which in turn fuels polarization and political violence. 

Despite some members of our society beginning to rise to reject and change our current predicament, the modern world makes it increasingly more difficult to escape disembodiment. There is an obsession with making every aspect of our lives “less real.” We have eliminated TSA physical ID checks and passport stamps in favor of biometric data scans. Stores take your biometric data and film you shopping to link your bill to your accounts without ever having you check out at a counter. The world has shifted away from owning and towards a subscription and renting model for everything from music to movies to homes. The United Kingdom has gone so far as to announce the introduction of the mandatory “BritCard,” a digital ID based on biometric data, for all UK citizens by August 2029. 

The BritCard is being promoted to the public as “a new streamlined digital system… [that] will simplify … process[es], drive up compliance, crack down on forged documents and create intelligence data on businesses that are conducting checks.” The brief goes on to detail the efficiency of the “state-of-the-art encryption and authentication technology… providing better security than traditional physical documents.” The mandatory ID would be used in every realm, from education and employment to healthcare and shopping. 

While some may view this move as progress and a use of technology for the benefit of a society, those with a belief in civil rights, personal liberties, and/or a Divine Being beyond the limits of the temporal Earth ought to hesitate in giving their assent so quickly.  

A future with the BritCard as a reality can easily devolve into a theoretical dystopia if the state forgets its obligation to the people it serves. If a government decides to violate the God given rights of a citizen, such as one who decides to criticize the government in speech or media, if every aspect of your life is connected to a digital ID which the government has the power to control, it is easy to conceive of a slippery slope towards a security state in which noncompliance would equal functional nonexistence. Without the power to access your bank account or obtain employment, opposition political movements fighting for the principles the modern West was built upon could be easily quashed. This is not to say this is the BritCards’ aim, but it is an exercise in what could occur if said government were internally hijacked and had this sort of power over its citizenry that is meant to be politically free in a democratic system. 

Patrick Deneen, in his book Why Liberalism Failed, conceived of the skepticism we ought to maintain in order to preserve our rights aptly in writing that “the ‘limited government’ of liberalism today would provoke jealousy and amazement from tyrants of old.” George Orwell speaks even more poignantly when he reminds us in 1984 that “Big Brother is watching you.” The question we face now is, should we invite him in? For the sake of convenience, efficiency, and a feeling of contentment, we will accept the foundation of a security state. The security being promised to us is not synonymous with either privacy or liberty. Rather than resisting these efforts in the name of protecting freedom, comfort, not flourishing and a life steeped in transcendent meaning, will become the ultimate pacifier. 

This is not a left versus right debate. Rather, it is a question of what kind of existence we want to maintain on a societal level. It is bipartisan to reject the rejection of reality that is growing in influence. Looking beyond our political and party predispositions, we ought to ask ourselves what the ultimate end of implementing these overreaching technocratic measures is. Perhaps it is merely for convenience. But we could rationally find belief that it is not. Is the prospect of increased convenience worth potentially conceding your civil liberties beyond recovery? The disembodiment that has dominated every other aspect of our lives is finally creeping into a direct political application – a unified government ID system. The way forward is to realize the disenchantment we have with “progress” and realize that progress is not always good. 

Our current ways have not made us happier nor more confident in the meaning of our lives. Disembodiment has caused the ultimate disillusionment and evoked a sense of feckless existence in the populace. We can only begin to remedy this by recognizing our embedded reality. We are born to families and communities. We have a responsibility to take care of our own bodies and souls, connect with others, and leave the world a better place for the generations to follow us. Returning to our local communities is the first step in fighting disembodiment. Put away your phone, engage with friends in person and not online, join a club, coach a sport, walk your dog with friends and family. The moment we stop talking to our neighbors of both like and unalike opinions and experiences is the day our democracy begins to die. 

We have a civilization worth protecting. Even if it is far from perfect, we are called to improve upon it and order it to its proper end. It is through conversations, despite political differences, that we remind each other of the common ground and principles that we share. We are all aiming at creating a just society – we want flourishing for ourselves, our families, and our society. While we may differ in how we achieve this and which issues are the most critical to be addressed in pursuit of this end, we have far more in common with each other than polarization leads us to believe. In order to enter into these conversations, we must remind ourselves of our embodiedness. This connection is the way out of disembodiment and towards bridging our partisan divide. The fate of Western civilization depends on you talking to and loving your neighbor. Embrace reality and go forth with charity and truth to converse!