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Abstract
The Global Information Age has precipitated a dilemma for grand strategy scholars and policymakers. The dilemma concerns whether or not a single grand strategy can address the growing volume and variety of threats to national security in the twenty-first century. One contributing factor to this problem is the rapid spread of cyber technology and the resulting diffusion of power away from governments to citizens. This global phenomenon has altered the power dynamic between publics and their respective governments, as well as inter-state relationships. In short, the information age has transformed the nature of international politics. To address this systemic change, I present a contemporary model of international politics that depicts foreign publics and governments as discrete actors. The model demonstrates that grand strategy in the information age is best conceived as a three-level game that accounts not only for the interests of domestic groups and foreign governments, but also the increasingly independent will and opinion of foreign publics. I theorize that public capacitythe extent citizens are able to access, produce, store, and exchange information, build awareness of political events, and collaborate and coordinate action, locally and globallyhas important strategic implications. Namely, public capacity diminishes the information gap between governments and publics, permits alternative framing of government actions and policies, intensifies the reverberation of political messages and events, and subsequently, shapes global public opinion. To test this theory, the study employs models previously used to analyze global public opinion on American foreign policy developed from existing theories of security interests (interest model), socialized perceptions (socialization model), and foreign pressure (influence model). This research broadens the aperture of the grand strategy debate by outlining the logic for a more population-centric approach to grand strategy. The study accomplishes this by drawing attention to the central role of public capacity in shaping global public opinion, bringing into focus the discrete and expanding role that foreign publics play in international affairs, and identifying public diplomacy as an increasingly indispensable instrument of power.