Kaine was born at Saint Joseph's Hospital in St. Paul, Minnesota. He is the eldest of three sons born to Mary Kathleen (nee Burns), a home economics teacher, and Albert Alexander Kaine, Jr., a welder and the owner of a small iron-working shop. He was raised Catholic. One of Kaine's great-grandparents was Scottish and the other seven were Irish.
After the 2016 presidential campaign, Kaine wrote an extensive essay in Foreign Affairs outlining his underlying foreign policy philosophy.  According to Kaine, American foreign policy has suffered a lack of direction since the 1990's because the end of the Cold War rendered irrelevant America's previous grand strategy, which Kaine identifies as the Truman Doctrine. This lack of grand strategy makes American actions seem random, complicating the policy making process and hindering efforts by American leaders to convince the general public that American foreign policy is worthwhile. To remedy this, Kaine proposes a new grand strategy based mainly on democracy promotion. Kaine's grand strategy is informed by a tri-polar balance of international power, with one pole being democratic states including the United States and its allies, the second being autocratic powers led by Russia and China, and the third being nonstate actors (multinational corporations, NGOs, gangs, etc.). First, Kaine believes that the United States should work to support democracy in already democratic countries, as democracy globally has been declining for many years.  To maintain democracy in democratic countries, Kaine proposes the creation of an intergovernmental organization consisting of all the world's democracies in which states can cooperate on solutions to problems such as corruption and voter inclusion. He compares this hypothetical group to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, in which advanced industrialized countries collaborate on economic policy. Kaine believes that this new organization will help democracies remain democratic, as well as promoting democracy in other countries by providing those countries viable democratic examples for them to emulate. In this way, Kaine says that the United States should no longer see itself as the indispensable nation, but rather the "exemplary democracy." Second, Kaine proposes that democracies should coordinate to best interact with authoritarian states. Depending on the circumstances, democracies should either "confront," "compete," or "cooperate" with autocracies. For example, Kaine observes that the United States competes with its authoritarian adversaries by strengthening military and commercial alliances, and it confronts them by decrying their human rights records. Finally, Kaine believes that democracies and autocracies should cooperate when they have the same interests, such as combating climate change. In July 2017, Kaine expanded on the grand strategy proposed in this essay in an interview at the Brookings Institution with international relations scholar Robert Kagan.

Q: What was Tim Kaine's grand strategy?
A: Kaine proposes a new grand strategy based mainly on democracy promotion.
How did he work to promote democracy?
To maintain democracy in democratic countries, Kaine proposes the creation of an intergovernmental organization consisting of all the world's democracies Kaine proposes the creation of an intergovernmental organization consisting of all the world's democracies in which states can cooperate on solutions to problems such as corruption and voter inclusion. To maintain democracy in democratic countries, Kaine proposes the creation of an intergovernmental organization consisting of all the world's democracies Kaine proposes the creation of an intergovernmental organization consisting of all the world's democracies in which states can cooperate on solutions
Kaine proposes the creation of an intergovernmental organization consisting of all the world's democracies in which states can cooperate on solutions