The impact of the Diplomatic approach in the 2017 USNSS and the 2016 EUGS: Towards a smarter approach?

The European Union (EU) and the United States (US) have recently converted their security and foreign policy guidelines into official documents: the 2016 European Union Global Strategy (EUGS) written by Federica Mogherini and the 2017 US National Security Strategy (NSS) by Donald Trump. Although non legally binding, both Security Strategies have a diplomatic relevance within and without their territorial scope of application. Analyzing both Strategies is a topic of significant importance within the scientific debate around the presence of multiple links between past and present Strategies that could be analyzed from several points of view. This dissertation intends to dwell on the diplomatic dimension. This work investigates whether today’s Security Strategies demonstrate a higher diplomatic engagement with regard to previous strategy Documents. This thesis contributes to the field of comparative diplomacy by promoting two parallel inward-looking comparisons: on the one hand, the American dimension with the 2017 NSS and the 2002 NSS; on the other hand, the European dimension with the 2016 EUGS and the 2003 European Security Strategy (ESS). The choice of these two time intervals stems from the original idea of assessing the diplomatic responsiveness of both the EU and the US in the aftermath of big domestic shocks: the 2015 European crisis and the 9/11 terrorist attack.