The late American diplomat and grand strategist Henry Kissinger once said, “The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.” However, at a time when American leadership on the international stage is evolving and the future trajectory of global politics is uncertain, geopolitical questions that once had widely accepted answers in the West are now up for debate. What leadership role should the United States, Russia, and China play globally? Can, and should, these countries pursue assertive strategies in global affairs to the exclusion, or at the expense, of others? 

We may not have all the answers to these questions. Still, we can lean on a wealth of transdisciplinary research—from dignity neuroscience and the neuroscience of privation to developmental and evolutionary psychology—which demonstrates that human predispositions profoundly shape national strategic culture and, by extension, the seemingly elusive concept of ‘Grand Strategy.’ Using a transdisciplinary lens to explore how historical, cultural, ideological, neuroscientific, and neuro-social forces shape states’ grand strategies will help us get to grips with the state of global geopolitical realities today and potential future geostrategic imperatives. It can also provide valuable insights regarding which paths the three global powers might take in the years ahead.  

How Grand Strategy and Strategic Culture Interact

The concept of grand strategy emerged in the early twentieth century as theorists such as naval strategist Sir Julian Stafford Corbett, the military theorist J.F.C. Fuller, and the military historian Sir Liddell Hart expanded the previous focus on battlefield maneuvers to encompass non-military dimensions of warfare. After World War II, the grand strategy evolved to integrate political, social, economic, and military elements—a framework that historians have found especially useful for analyzing politico-military conduct throughout history.

The term regained traction after the Cold War amid debates over America’s evolving global role, although disagreements persist over how best to define the concept. While some critics view the concept as overly ambitious or the purview of major powers, grand strategy has nonetheless become a vital tool for governments, strategists, and policy institutes in shaping long-term national objectives. Today, it is broadly understood as the comprehensive methods a state uses for mobilizing all available resources to achieve sustainable goals. By evaluating a country’s actions through a grand strategy lens, patterns emerge that might otherwise go unnoticed when individual policies are viewed in isolation. This perspective helps predict how a given state might respond to future crises, form alliances, or escalate conflicts.

Grand strategy is best understood as a direct outgrowth of strategic culture. Each generation of policymakers inherits an array of historically embedded, sometimes emotionally-laden, values, attitudes, biases, assumptions, perceptions (and misperceptions), as well as rational and irrational modes of behavior that inform threat perception and delineate acceptable security practices. Research across history, political science, and strategic studies demonstrates that grand strategy is grounded in a state’s strategic culture, influencing how strategists perceive material conditions.

Despite its fluid nature, strategic culture remains central to understanding a state’s grand strategy. If strategic culture supplies the core values and worldview, grand strategy provides the long-term vision or roadmap derived from those cultural underpinnings as well as rational national ambitions. For practitioners, understanding a nation’s strategic culture can significantly enhance diplomacy and security cooperation.

Navigating Geopolitical Realities and Geostrategic Imperatives on Earth and in Outer Space

While strategic culture plays a crucial role in shaping grand strategy, it is not the sole determinant. In a rapidly evolving geopolitical environment, states must continually adapt their strategies, anticipate shifts, and balance cooperation with competition in their relationships. Transformations in global power structures also require the recalibration of alliances, deterrence postures, and diplomatic approaches while preserving strategic autonomy. In this era of heightened volatility, grand strategy must be adaptive, integrative, and forward-looking. States that fail to adjust risk stagnation, vulnerability, or decline. In contrast, those that effectively align geostrategic imperatives with evolving geopolitical realities will safeguard their influence, stability, and long-term security and prosperity. 

Navigating geopolitical realities is also becoming more pertinent in outer space. Humanity’s exponential overdependence on outer space for daily needs means that if outer space becomes critically unsafe, it will not be selectively unsafe; it will be unsafe for all states, private corporations, and individuals alike. There is also a lot that needs to be urgently done to bolster collective space security and sustainability by improving space traffic coordination, addressing issues linked to space debris, gaps in state law, mitigating kinetic and non-kinetic threats (both intentional and accidental) to space assets, as well as preventing the militarisation of outer space. 

The Five Dimensions of Global Security

Global security is multifaceted, requiring states to continuously adapt their grand strategies and national security policies to address traditional and non-traditional challenges. There are five interrelated dimensions of global security: national, transnational, human, environmental, and transcultural. Human security involves protecting individuals from inequality, alienation, poverty, disease, and displacement. National security focuses on safeguarding sovereignty, national interests, and critical infrastructure, which remains the most crucial dimension in the international system. Transnational security relies on cooperation through alliances to combat issues that ignore borders, such as pandemics, transnational crime, supply chain disruptions, and terrorism. Environmental security addresses climate change and resource scarcity, fueling poverty, instability, institutional dysfunctionality, and state failure crises. Lastly, transcultural security involves countering cumulative historical misperceptions and antagonisms, binary ideological conflicts, as well as the deliberate denigration and demonization of others. It also covers skewed negative hierarchical views of other cultures in addition to ideologies and disinformation campaigns that destabilize societies.

Policy Influences

In formulating and implementing their grand strategies, states must navigate an intricate network of influences that span both domestic and international spheres. They balance pressures from lobbyists, media/social media, academia, think tanks, NGOs, business associations, and tech corporations. Each of these groups contributes distinct perspectives, expertise, and narrow selfish interests, which can significantly shape (positively or negatively) national policy debates and strategic priorities. Ultimately, by engaging with these diverse interest groups, states can develop more comprehensive, balanced, and adaptable policies better suited to address the complex challenges of today’s global environment and ensure the sustainable advancement of various national interests.

Human Nature Motivation and the Emotional Amoral Egoism of States: The Overlooked Forces Shaping Grand Strategy

Transdisciplinary research has shown how human predispositions deeply shape national strategic culture and grand strategy. Studies indicate that conditions undermining human dignity—such as resource scarcity, perceived insecurity, cultural pecking order, and human rights violations—can amplify tendencies toward defensive binary postures, violence, tribalism, and xenophobia, influencing how grand strategy adapts to immediate national security environments. These behaviors stem from our intrinsic emotional amoral egoism—a natural predisposition to prioritize perceived emotional and rational self-interest and react strongly to emotive stimuli. The latter play a critical role in shaping our moral compass. In fact, research demonstrates that our moral judgments are strongly shaped by rational self-interest, emotional biases, and perceptions, along with a powerful drive for neurochemical gratification, originating and processed in the mesolimbic reward center of the brain. The most powerful purveyors of neurochemical motivation are the “Neuro P5”: power, profit, pleasure, pride, and permanency. 

States, like individuals, are emotional, amoral egoists driven by deep-seated rational, emotional, and neurochemical incentives that shape their strategic behavior and moral decision-making. Grand strategy inherently involves moral judgments, from decisions on war and peace to alliances and humanitarian interventions. Whether subtly or overtly, leaders and policymakers are influenced by their emotional amoral egoism and the pursuit of the (individual and collective) Neuro P5 motivations, guiding both their strategic objectives and the means deemed acceptable to achieve them. The Neuro P5 framework provides insight into why states may sometimes act in “irrational” ways from a purely security standpoint and why their ethical judgments can seem inconsistent or distorted.

Nine Dignity Needs and the Five Neuro Motivations

In my previous work, I introduced Dignity-Based Governance as a countermeasure to the destructive force of the emotional amoral egoism that drives both states and individuals. Dignity is understood as much more than just the absence of humiliation, but rather the presence of recognition through the safeguarding of nine critical needs that include reason, security, human rights, accountability, transparency, justice, opportunity, innovation, and inclusiveness. Dignity means more than just political freedoms. This is because political freedoms can and do co-exist with economic, cultural, and ethnic exclusion, discrimination, and alienation, whereas dignity-based governance ensures political freedoms while safeguarding the nine critical human dignity needs. 

By embedding the fulfillment of dignity needs into grand strategy formulation, states can shift their focus from a relentless, zero-sum pursuit of the Neuro P5 paradigm toward a vision anchored in non-conflictual competition, absolute gains, and symbiotic, win-win, sustainable peace for all. In fact, when states prioritize the dignity needs of their citizens and international counterparts, they redirect the quest for power from destructive or conflictual competition to policies that foster trust, dialogue, and shared sustainable and symbiotic security and prosperity.

MetaGeopolitics and the Seven Capacities of States

Geopolitics has traditionally been understood as the study of how geographic environments (such as boundaries or natural resources) influence international relations. But territorial fixation appears no longer sufficient in a world marked by de-territorialized threats (e.g., cyberterrorism) and transnational challenges, such as space debris or pandemics. While geographical conditions provide powerful opportunities and constraints that influence political action, focusing on them alone produces too simple a vision of the world to guide sound foreign policymaking. It is, therefore, time to embrace a more holistic and accurate method of analyzing international relations. “Meta-Geopolitics” does this by focusing on seven geographical and non-geographical factors, which I refer to as “state capacities.” These are: (1) Social/Health, (2) Societal Structures/Institutions, (3) Economy/Employment, (4) Environment/Geography, (5) Innovation/Human Potential, (6) Military/Security, and (7) International Diplomacy.

Case Studies of Grand Strategy in Practice: Comparing the US, China, and Russia

Having outlined the underpinnings of grand strategy from a theoretical perspective, we now turn to its practical manifestations. This section will examine how grand strategy functions in real-world contexts, influenced by national security culture, contemporary challenges, diverse policy influences, and inherent non-speculative human predispositions.

The United States 

US national strategic culture reflects a self-image grounded in American exceptionalism, the belief that American values, political ideals, and institutions are unique and intrinsically superior. This worldview is intertwined with an emphasis on liberal idealism and a pioneering spirit that fosters innovation, technological leadership, and a relentless pursuit of new frontiers—on Earth and in outer space. Historically, this belief in American exceptionalism has served as an ideological cornerstone for a grand strategy oriented toward spreading democratic values and maintaining global leadership, both on Earth and in Outer Space. It justified substantial investments in economic and military power, with the dual aim of safeguarding national interests and augmenting America’s international standing. 

As a result, Washington has often relied on multilateral alliances and international institutions as force multipliers, leveraging its economic prowess via market influence and technological innovation to shape global norms. This was evident in the policies championed by Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor under President Jimmy Carter. Brzezinski, like Henry Kissinger, was a realist, but his approach to grand strategy was more focused on the geopolitical role of the United States in a globalized world. Brzezinski’s ideas were more focused on managing US global leadership in a unipolar world, whereas Kissinger was more concerned with the balance of power among great nations.

Under the “America First” doctrine, US exceptionalism has been recast to advance more narrowly defined national interests aimed at revitalizing American strength. This approach has led to a reassessment of commitments to multilateral institutions and long-standing alliances. In democratic systems like the US, each administration brings its own perspective to strategic culture, leading to notable shifts in grand strategy and national security priorities. 

The interplay between strategic culture and grand strategy in the US is further complicated by the influence of powerful lobbies and interest groups. From influential pressure lobbies of foreign interests to the defense industry and its extensive lobbying efforts to technology conglomerates shaping cybersecurity and AI policies, diverse stakeholders vie for attention on Capitol Hill. Energy lobbies can sway debates on military deployments and alliance relationships, while academia, think tanks, and policy institutes also play an important role by providing research that can justify, challenge, or refine grand strategic visions. Consequently, US grand strategy emerges not simply from high-level executive pronouncements but through a complex negotiation among a multitude of influential voices.

Examining neuropsychological and neurochemical factors that underpin grand strategy calculations is essential for fostering long-term national security resilience. Studies show that pursuing the Neuro P5 can contribute to decision-making that prioritizes immediate gains over broader, more sustainable objectives. While the United States’ constitutional system of checks and balances, along with its competitive markets, is designed to mitigate these risks by dispersing power, challenges remain. The growing influence of political leaders, Super-PACs, major donors, powerful lobby organizations, and influential tech entrepreneurs underscores the difficulty of balancing democratic integrity and strategic interests. 

China

Chinese strategic culture is marked by distinct characteristics that warrant close attention from foreign state leaders and actors seeking to engage with China effectively. China’s grand strategy is inextricably tied to its strategic culture. While Western scholars and policymakers often highlight the Communist and authoritarian underpinnings of Chinese strategic culture, many Chinese thinkers highlight a culturally moralist outlook rooted in Confucian preferences. Overall, China’s strategic culture remains realist at its core and is profoundly shaped by the memory of national humiliation and the determination to restore its global status and prominence. These cultural factors drive China’s strategic priorities: upholding Communist Party rule, fostering continued economic growth, advancing science and technology, and modernizing national defense. 

Technological innovation—from artificial intelligence to space exploration—stands at the heart of China’s long-term plan to assert its superiority on the world stage. Kissinger often contrasted American foreign policy’s tendency toward short-term crisis management with the strategic patience of countries like China, making the case that a successful grand strategy requires thinking beyond immediate crises. China’s long-standing belief in its cultural superiority continues to shape a grand strategy aimed at elevating its status, especially in the Asia-Pacific region, but also in the frontiers of outer space. A key facet of this approach is preventing external powers from dominating China’s immediate periphery, leading to ambitious infrastructure projects and demonstrating how strategic culture informs concrete policies.

In recent years, China has attempted to displace American influence regionally and globally through “strategies of displacement” at the military, political, and economic levels. This strategy involves building alternatives to US-led institutions, cultivating new partnerships (such as The Belt and Road Initiative), and leveraging China’s substantial market power to reshape global norms. At a deeper level, China’s strategic priorities are driven by the pursuit of the Neuro P5 motivations shared by all nations—the pursuit of power, economic growth, and global influence—all filtered through a distinct Chinese lens. Its aspirations in emerging technologies, military capabilities, and governance models reflect a broader vision to play a lasting and influential role on the world stage, aligning with its long-standing self-image as a central force in global affairs.

Russia

Russia’s national strategic culture is deeply influenced by its historical experiences and enduring great power mentality. A strong awareness of past invasions and external interference has fostered a perception of vulnerability, leading Moscow to frequently invoke the image of a “besieged fortress.” From the Mongol invasions to Napoleon and Hitler, these historical experiences have reinforced a belief that national security depends on maintaining formidable military capabilities and centralized decision-making. This perspective continues to shape Russia’s strategic priorities, underpinning significant investments in military modernization and efforts to sustain a strong defense against perceived external pressures.

Russia’s grand strategy focuses on affirming its global standing and preserving what it considers its rightful sphere of influence, particularly in the former Soviet space. Deep-seated security concerns and skepticism toward Western intentions have driven Moscow to counter perceived threats through multiple avenues, including leveraging energy exports as a geopolitical tool, strengthening ties with non-Western states, and employing military force in the case of Ukraine’s potential NATO membership. The impact of Western sanctions and diplomatic tensions has further reinforced Russia’s “pivot to the East” and the Global South, toward partners like China, North Korea, India, Iran, Brazil, and the Arab Gulf states, with the Kremlin seeking to expand its global (as well as cosmic) influence, and develop alternative economic partnerships.

As with other major powers, Russia’s strategic behavior is shaped by fundamental drives such as power, economic interests, and national pride. However, the country’s distinct political and historical legacy influences how these factors manifest. This dynamic, reinforced by historical experiences and concerns over external threats, emphasizes centralized authority and military strength. 

Policy Recommendations: Reconciling Grand Strategy, Strategic Culture, National Security, and Domestic and Global Influences

Building on the transdisciplinary insights detailed above, these policy recommendations help states reconcile non-speculative neuroscientific views of human nature and motivations, grand strategy, strategic culture, national security, and domestic and global pressures into an adaptive, forward-looking framework. By acknowledging the interplay of historical legacies, collective biases, emotional drives, and evolving global challenges, policymakers can craft strategies that integrate cultural values, scientific knowledge, and ethical governance. 

1. Study the strategic cultures of other states: Recognize that historical and cultural contexts profoundly shape policy responses and threat perceptions. Tailoring engagement to these nuances fosters trust, reduces miscommunication, and strengthens diplomatic effectiveness.
2. Continuously “debias” national strategic culture: Proactively reassess your nation’s strategic traditions to identify and correct skewed narratives. Such critical introspection reduces the likelihood of misinterpretations that undermine diplomacy. By drawing on insights from history, political science, and cultural studies, policymakers can ensure that their strategic culture remains rooted in core values while adapting to fast-changing global realities.
3. Adopt a meta-geopolitical approach to global security: Recognise that today’s security challenges transcend purely military concerns, spanning human, national, international, environmental, and transcultural dimensions. Embrace “Meta-Geopolitics,” which analyses seven key variables: societal structures, economic power, domestic politics, environmental/geographical conditions, human potential and technological capabilities, military assets, and diplomatic engagement. 
4. Engage diverse stakeholders in policy formulation: Establish systematic consultation processes involving academia, NGOs, think tanks, tech firms, and civil society. Drawing on multiple perspectives reduces groupthink, enriches evidence-based decision-making, boosts domestic legitimacy, and bolsters international credibility. 
5. Account for emotional and neurochemical drivers: Recognize how innate human predispositions influence strategic decisions. Incorporating these insights can help curb harmful biases, moderate aggressive instincts, and channel human motivations toward constructive ends. 
6. Embed Dignity-Based Governance principles: Elevate the nine dignity needs to the heart of grand strategy. By prioritizing these needs, policymakers can shift from zero-sum competition to policies that foster trust, dialogue, and shared prosperity, ultimately supporting a more stable and ethical international order. 
7. Adopt the “Symbiotic Realism” framework and its transdisciplinary analysis and synthesis of the conduct of international relations: Recognise that seven deeply interrelated forces shape the 21st-century strategic landscape: (1) disruptive technological advancements, (2) the evolving role, threats, and capacities of non-state actors, (3) the emergence of novel strategic domains, (4) collective civilizational frontier risks, (5) the weaponization of economic interdependence, (6) intensifying sub-/supra-national transcultural historical schisms, and (7) fundamental human predispositions underpinning all the others. Symbiotic Realism is a transdisciplinary approach that weaves these complexities into a cohesive framework that helps policymakers eschew zero-sum thinking in favor of multi-sum outcomes, absolute gains, and win-win non-conflictual competition. 

Conclusion and the Way Forward

Grand strategy emerges from an intricate tapestry of national priorities, a rapidly evolving international system on Earth and in outer space, historical legacies, cultural norms, external pressures, and deeply rooted human predispositions. It is not simply the product of rational, top-down decision-making, but also the result of leaders and policymakers wrestling with inherited strategic cultures, competing interest groups, as well as emotional amoral egoism and Neuro P5 neurochemical motivations. These innate human predispositions intertwine with material factors—shifting power balances, perceived or real threats to national interest, and technological disruptions—to create a complex, ever-evolving strategic environment. A transdisciplinary view of grand strategy provides a uniquely powerful lens for understanding the drivers behind national security strategies and policies. This holistic approach must factor in the distinct characteristics of global powers, not least the current recasting of American exceptionalism, China’s culturally moralist outlook rooted in Confucian preferences, and Russia’s sense of vulnerability and fear of encirclement rooted in the country’s political and historical legacy. 

Frameworks such as Symbiotic Realism, the Sustainable History theory, a non-speculative understanding of human nature and innate motivations, and Meta-Geopolitics seek to provide such a holistic view by integrating neuroscientific and philosophical insights into the study of national and global security, uncovering the deeply human impulses that direct grand strategy. By drawing on transdisciplinary research, policymakers can better anticipate emerging challenges and other collective disruptive challenges, move beyond zero-sum to multi-sum thinking, and craft non-conflictual competitive strategies rooted in ethical governance, win-win strategies, absolute gains, and shared peace and prosperity. This approach recognizes that enduring stability arises from balancing rational strategic planning, an awareness of the emotional and cultural undercurrents shaping international affairs, as well as reconciling the diverse national and cultural interests of all stakeholders, thereby fostering more inclusive and sustainable outcomes for all on Earth and in outer space. 

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