In Defense of Grand Strategy Posted by Shawn Brimley

Grand strategy is important. Poor strategy is a recipe for either strategic drift or stumbling into ill-conceived wars. A good grand strategy can help articulate a vision or purpose, generate consensus, and help a nation retain its balance in a complex world.

I've been doing some thinking on grand strategy lately – principally as part of my day job, but also because there's been some great work on the topic of late. I often read or hear comments like "grand strategy is useless," or "great, another grand strategy idea." It's an understandable reaction. Everyone wants to riff on George Kennan, and create a blueprint that explains the positive use of American power in the world. Kennan himself warned against the attempt.

But whatever you want to call it, in times of great uncertainty and change in the international system, America has managed to articulate a broad vision of what its purpose and place is in the world. I would argue that "containment" was an excellent grand strategic idea that was relevant to its time and endured over the entire history of the Cold War. Containment meant different things to different Presidents, and its broad vision allowed for different approaches emphasizing different tools. In the 1990s, the closest the Clinton administration came was "engagement and enlargement," which I would argue was also highly relevant to the post-Cold War era and helped reflect where America wanted to go in the world. I do think that the Clinton administration just didn't try hard enough to generate both internal consensus and then sell a framework to the American people and the world. My colleague and friend Derek Chollet (and former Democracy Arsenal blogger) would probably disagree with me – and I recommend you all buy his new book when it comes out in a few months.

Some would argue that the post-9/11 era and all the complexities of Afghanistan, Iraq, globalization, proliferation, and climate change mitigate against or make impossible the articulation of a vision of American leadership that actually translates into action. Even if it were possible, many would argue that it would amount to nothing more than rhetoric. "Deeds matter more than words," they might say. And they would be right.

But grand strategy is not simply words – it is not an activity in rhetoric. Real grand strategy should drive investment patterns, frame diplomacy, place the use of military force within a framework, and help a nation manage its actions in a dangerous world. A real grand strategy is not a glossy public relations document like the "National Security Strategies" that recent administrations have produced.

I've even heard people compare American strategy to jazz – here, improvisation and the ability to react smoothly and anticipate changes in the international system should be the focus of policymakers. There is real truth here – jazz is better than architecture when thinking about the practice of statecraft. But grand strategy cannot and should not be improvised – grand strategy is about building a foundation, not day-to-day foreign policy. Again, containment worked because it allowed for various administrations to do different things (some presidents during the Cold War were architects, some were jazz musicians) – the Truman doctrine, Eisenhower's MAD, Kennedy's flexible response, Nixon's détente etc. Containment provided a solid foundation upon which different administration's pursued their own particular foreign policy priorities. Historian John Lewis Gaddis made this point in his book Strategies of Containment.

I am convinced that one of the many reasons America is stumbling and its image and legitimacy is erroding is the lack of a grand strategic foundation.

And I believe that five years after the start of an ill-conceived war, nearly seven years after 9/11, and nearly twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, to say we don't need a grand strategy is to willfully ignore the important role it can play in helping this country orient itself for the very challenging years ahead.

Comments

[Zathras]

Here's the problem, though. In a nutshell, the containment strategy for dealing with Soviet Communism had many contributors, but was more than anything the product of Dean Acheson. You ain't him.

I don't mean to be glib. A coherent, successful grand strategy requires that the government's foreign policy be directed by someone who has thought deeply about the subject. This doesn't have to be the President -- Harry Truman was unusually knowledgable among Presidents about history, but otherwise his contribution mostly lay in backing up Marshall and Acheson, and in using his judgment to make good choices among options he could not have devised himself. But someone has to run the show; it can't be a committee. Also, whoever is running the foreign policy show has to have the institutional resources to do so. We can't take those for granted at the moment.

Where are we now? Three remaining Presidential candidates: two of whom know enough to sound plausible on the subject of national security policy, while the other has considerable experience marred by his close association with the worst elements of the current administration and the hash it has made of our foreign affairs. We have a pretty good idea that Sen. Clinton, a creature of the permanent campaign, would seek to maintain the message discipline required in electoral politics by running foreign (also domestic) policy out of the White House. We don't know how Sen. Obama would operate, and he probably does not know himself (we do, via the Samantha Power episode, already have a disturbing indication that Obama does not back up his staff). Sen. McCain would continue many Bush administration policies, and could not avoid doing so with many Bush administration people. You could make a grand strategy out of that, but probably not a successful one.

That's not a promising set of choices. Important also, though, is the fact that the State Department -- the agency through which foreign policy must primarily be implemented -- is in a badly weakened state. The last really strong Secretary of State was James Baker, more than fifteen years retired from the job. Under the last two Presidents the Department was starved of resources, subordinated to the Pentagon in many areas of the world, and during one dark period a few years ago treated by the President almost as a foreign power.

Other agencies in the foreign and national security areas have been damaged in recent years as well, but the State Department's badly weakened condition will have to be addressed for any foreign policy strategy, no matter how well conceived, to be implemented successfully. It will need reorganization; it will need more money and personnel. It will also need a Secretary able to break bureaucratic deadlocks because he is seen by everyone to be speaking for the President. You can make foreign policy without a strong Secretary of State -- Theodore Roosevelt (at times) and Franklin Roosevelt did, and of course Richard Nixon did as well. All of these men were in varying degrees able to serve as their own Secretaries of State; most Presidents can't, at least not well, and none of the remaining candidates this year can.

This is all logistics and process. It's not my purpose here to outline the use that might be made of revived institutions and orderly procedures for making foreign policy. I have my own ideas about that, of course, as do thousands of other people. Most of them, frankly, are zeroed in on the things they think we ought to do without giving much thought to whether the government is able to do them. That -- speaking only for myself -- is a major reason the phrase "grand strategy" inspires so much skepticism.

[Dan Kervick]

As one of the grand strategy skeptics to which Shawn might be referring, I suppose I should elaborate more on the reasons for my skepticism.

First, most of the grand strategy proposals I have read are filled with fairly vacuous suggestions. The strategic goals are so vaguely, ambiguously and loftily delineated that it is hard to believe that they could really exert any actual, substantive influence on decision-makers in times of crisis, or somehow collectively guide the thinking of the highly distributed and conflicted decision-making apparatus of the United States, caught up as it always is in endless rounds of horse-trading, influence-peddling, vote-buying, and bureaucratic inertia and infighting. These statements tend to contain banalities such as:

“Wherever possible, work with allies to pursue national goals and establish sustainable, broad-based approaches to international problems.”

“Extend the benefits of globalization as widely as possible.”

“Promote freedom and liberty.”

These sorts of statements are so broad and theoretical as to be practically impotent in real-world contexts. Many fall into a general formal pattern: “Generally speaking, do X, except in those circumstances where doing X is not such a good idea.” Such a maxim is as easy to follow as it is empty of substantive content.

The abstract terms also tend just to paper over substantive disagreements with noble-sounding language, rather than offer real guidance. Consider a strategic goal like “promoting liberty and freedom.” As a person of the left, I happen to think that promoting the liberty of large economic concerns and wealthy actors to lend and trade freely tends over the long run to undermine the freedom of the majority of the world’s people, and that promoting general freedom requires very aggressive regulation of this minority of powerful economic actors. Obviously, others have a very different conception of liberty. I also believe major inequalities in wealth are simply incompatible with genuine democratic governance, and reduce it to a formalistic sham of democracy that steals real freedom from its citizens-turned-subjects. So to promote the kind of freedom that comes from genuine self-governance, you would need a program of aggressive redistribution of existing wealth, along with a significant legal re-structuring of national and global economic institutions so as to prevent wealth from flowing into large pockets of inequality in the first place. Again, others don’t share this view of freedom.

Now you might be able to get me and some other guy to both sign onto the “promote liberty and freedom” grand strategy statement. But what does it really amount to if we have such different conceptions of what those words mean in practice? I think most of these grand strategy proposals are filled with this kind of superficial double-talk.

Grand strategy statements, at least insofar as I am familiar with them, also tend to be reactive. It is widely accepted these days, for example, that Bush administration unilateralism has caused a lot of trouble for the US. So now all the grand strategists are as one in saying “go multilateral”. But of course, if some multilateral course of action collapses or goes badly a few years from now, we can expect a new round of think-tanky strategy proposals filled with “more unilateralism” messages.

Shawn says,

I am convinced that one of the many reasons America is stumbling and its image and legitimacy is eroding is the lack of a grand strategic foundation.

And I believe that five years after the start of an ill-conceived war, nearly seven years after 9/11, and nearly twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, to say we don't need a grand strategy is to willfully ignore the important role it can play in helping this country orient itself for the very challenging years ahead.

It seems to me that the United States under Bush has a fairly well-defined national strategy foundation. The problem is that it happens to be one that much of the rest of the world doesn’t approve.

The Iraq war received broad support from the American foreign policy elite, representing an apparent diversity of political orientations. I see no reason to think that any of the grand strategy outlooks on the market would have done anything to stop it. Insofar as grand strategists love the idea of a national mission, Iraq fit very well into most of those beloved missions. As for stumbling, there certainly has been a lot of that. But the failures that produced Iraq were not failures of philosophy, mission statements or strategic outlooks. They were failures in forming a realistic anticipation of the consequences of specific actions. We can change our strategy outlook all we want, but it won’t help at all if US think-tankers and policy-makers still have dumb and unworldly ideas about what is likely to happen when you set off a combustible military firebomb in the middle of one of the most contested and contentious regions in the world. I would suggest that what the country needs is more foreign policy thinkers with their heads out of the philosophical clouds, and their feet planted on the ground of empirically measurable reality. We don’t need more and better explorations of the cloudy realms of abstract strategy goals.

I also have a problem with the general tendencies of the schools of thought that tend to produce grand strategic thinkers. The grand strategy tradition and its lofty rhetoric seems to come out of courtly philosophical schools of European thought that accompanied much more aristocratic and autocratic forms of government. But the US remains some kind of democracy, highly imperfect though that democracy may be. Its foreign policy, except in rare emergency circumstances when the populace bands together and looks to authority figures in a primitive fear reaction, lacks theoretical and long-term unity. It cannot be practiced in the fashion and traditions Louis the XIV, Peter the Great or Bismarck. It is a highly political process, and is bound to be a muddle. Americans are a highly diverse group of people. There are only a few goals that command broad national consensus, and they hardly amount to a “strategy”. Democratic publics muddle along and are constantly torn in several directions, with inertial attachments to the past habits usually winning out over suggestions that something new needs to be done. The current collection of habits, institutions, stakeholders etc. usually has too much influence to be defeated politically, except in cases of spectacular policy collapse.

The large strategy visions composed by grand strategic thinkers embody unrealistic expectations of policy-making in a democratic society. Strategic goals will not bear the strain of public scrutiny and debate, and so actual strategies tend to be secret. It’s really sort of humorous to observe the consistent gap between US strategic goals, as observed in actual behavior, and lofty public statements. For example, if a strategist says out loud that we ought to preserve the existing US global military footprint in perpetuity, extend that footprint as military opportunities present themselves, and use that expanding power to convert as many global assets as possible into instruments of US profit, said strategist is likely to be met with shocked and vigorous denunciations and harrumphing, since this strategy is so clearly at odds with America’s self-image as a non-imperial, democratic republic. And yet, something like that strategy clearly is the one we actually see carried out in practice. And when the shocked denouncers were then confronted with the logical opposite – that the US should devise an action plan for contracting its global military footprint, and devolving many of its overextended obligations onto other parties – the national ideological poobahs are just as aghast and won’t give the anti-imperialists the time of day. It’s a very hypocritical rhetorical game.

Grand strategists are part of a small club of people who mainly talk to themselves. With a few exceptions, they never seem to get around to engaging in the truly massive efforts of political organization and public education and propaganda that would be necessary to fix their strategic agenda in the minds of tens of millions of Americans, and build a sustained political basis for its implementation. They’re all talk. Nevertheless, every grand strategy manifesto, editorial or seminar paper that appears on the web is immediately linked to by all the other would-be grand strategists, with fulsome compliments about how insightful or brilliant or far-seeing it is – despite the fact that most of these documents seem to be re-hashes of all the similar documents produced by this same clubby bunch. I like to adapt here a famous lyric from Steely Dan:

“Foreign policy kids, writin’ articles ‘bout themselves; you know they don’t give a fuck about anybody else.”

I exempt the neoconservatives from the general criticism that strategists don’t do effective politics. Regrettably for all of us, the neocons seem to have mounted a several decades long campaign aimed at buying up media instruments, funding think tanks, taking over editorial boards, etc. and were able as a result to convert many Americans to their vision. Instead of just talking about taking seizing the ship of state, and writing articles for themselves, they actually worked to do it.

I tend to reject the notion that in addition to consistent policies to achieve practical, identifiable goals, established in response to concrete and presently definable national and global challenges, America also needs a “mission”. The US is not a church or a cause. It’s a contingent historical entity, made up of millions of people pursuing their own agendas, held together by a messy and often dysfunctional political system that nevertheless accomplishes its minimal purpose of allowing us to make some decisions and muddle along without killing each other. It is not a visionary “project” or “experiment” directed by John Harvard , Cotton Mather or Thomas Jefferson. The practical basis for democracy is that it provides a decision-making mechanism for resolving disagreements among very diverse people who have little more in common than the fact that they live together in one place. We’re just not cut out for grandness of the grand strategists.

Grand strategy statements, in my estimation, are about as significant as the “Our Vision” or “Statement of Purpose” pages one finds on company and organizational web sites. It’s just a lot of public relations folderol for public consumption.

[Peace]

John Gaddis, who was mentioned in this blog, supports the Bush doctrine in his most recent book "Surprise, Security, and the American Experience." The only problem with grand strategy is that it has the potential to be inflexible and ignore the writings by Clausewitz which state that leader has to constantly adjust to the chaos of war. This was the case during the Cold War in which the United States became so entrapped by its containment doctrine that it went into Vietnam. But grand strategy can also surve a Clauswitizian purpose in that it should give concrete political goal for the struggle that the nation is in but these goals can shift from being limited such as the case Frederick the Great's War or be being total as in the case of the Napoleonic struggle. The main problem with the premption doctrine and the neoconservative spread of democracy is that it is aiming for a unlimited goal fo what is limited problem such as the spread of terrorism. A progressive foreign policy strategy should once again aim at a limited goals such as the stopping the spread of terrorist organizaions in the Middle East and not trying to reorganize the political structure of the region.