The Grand Strategies of Great Powers

Tudor A. Onea

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781138287181
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351975872
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

What is grand strategy and what is it good for? What are great powers, and which states are great powers today? What are the grand strategies available to great powers? What are the conditions under which a certain strategy is suitable and when should it be rejected? What are the factors affecting the success or failure of a given grand strategy? The present volume provides answers to these questions by introducing a typology of great power grand strategies, as strategies of rising, status quo, and declining powers, as well as through historical illustrations of each type. The reader is thus exposed to strategies such as divide and conquer, biding your time, opportunity strike, primacy, semi-detachment, concert, and appeasement through the experiences of leaders such as Bismarck, Peter the Great, Metternich, Deng Xiaoping, Neville Chamberlain, and Stalin. This analysis is then brought to bear on present developments in the grand strategies of the United States, China, and Russia. The volume should be of interest to both the academic and foreign policy-making communities, and in particular to students of international relations, diplomacy, history, and current international affairs.

1 Introduction

What is grand strategy?

More than 500 books on grand strategy saw print in the roughly three decades since the end of the Cold War. Proposing, debating, and criticizing grand strategy has become so commonplace that in 2011, a Foreign Affairs article observed that “whenever a foreign policy commentator articulates a new grand strategy, an angel gets its wings.” Starting with the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986, which requires the US government to provide a yearly statement of its national security strategy, states have increased production of national strategies or white papers on defense or foreign policy. Presently, more than 30 countries have in place such a formal version of grand strategy. Departments of International Relations and Political Science around the world regularly teach courses on grand strategy, and the subject is even beginning to be offered as a major. Clearly, there is an on-going spike in research, policy-making, and educational interest in grand strategy.¹

At the same time, there is an increasing need for order in how we think about grand strategy as a distinct field of study. The existing scholarship on grand strategy has pursued three main directions. The first is represented by single country studies of grand strategy, such as the grand strategy of the United States or of China, or historical examples such as the grand strategy of Philip II of Spain or of the Roman Empire. The second direction consists of whirlwind reviews of the evolution of grand strategy through history, bringing together pell-mell strategic theorists, such as Sun Tzu, Thucydides, Machiavelli, or Clausewitz, celebrated practitioners such as Bismarck, Churchill, and Kissinger, and the grand strategy of individual countries at given times, such as containment during the Cold War. Finally, the third direction views grand strategy as part of strategic behavior writ large. For instance, the magisterial volume by Sir Lawrence Freedman discusses, besides grand strategy, military strategy, the business strategy of companies, the strategy of social groups, and even theological strategy, such as the strategy that Milton’s Satan resorts to against God.² The problem is that it is very hard to derive from either direction identifiable strategic behavior patterns that would yield general rules of how to analyze or select grand strategy. In other words, we are left with no answer to perhaps “the most basic question of social science: of what is this an instance?”³ Indeed, we do not know if great powers have a grand strategy in place; if so, what sort of grand strategy are we dealing with; and if, and under what circumstances, a grand strategy that applies to one state would work for others.

By contrast, this book seeks to explore questions such as what are the grand strategies available to great powers. What are the conditions under which a certain strategy is suitable and when should it be rejected? What are the factors affecting the success or failure of a given grand strategy?

Definition

There are manifold definitions of grand strategy in the literature. A recent influential account by Nina Silove has attempted a classification of these definitions into three types. Accordingly, grand strategy may refer to a grand plan, to a grand organizing principle, or to grand behavior. In the first two types, grand strategy is formulated explicitly and intentionally by decision-makers; while in the latter, it takes shape and reveals itself progressively through the trials and tribulations of successive decision-makers. The difference between grand plan and grand principle comes down to the respective attention they give to detail. While the grand plan version of grand strategy considers in painstaking minutiae how exactly the grand strategy will be carried out, the grand principle version is content to trace a general outline, while leaving most of the specifics to be sorted out as they go. Meanwhile, the grand behavior version believes that not only the details of implementing the grand strategy, but also its very fundamentals, are worked out over time, as grand strategy evolves into a recognizable pattern. Despite their differences, all three versions agree that grand strategy is a long-term endeavor, that it guides the state in both war and peace, and that it seeks to advance the state’s most important interests.⁴ Silove concludes that “the most important reason for distinguishing the three concepts is that questions about the relationships among grand plans, grand principles, and grand behavior ought to be central to scholarship on grand strategy.”⁵

This book opts for a definition of grand strategy as grand design or principle. But this design is not so sparse as Silove suggests, in the sense that grand strategy also incorporates aspects of the grand plan understanding of the concept, by considering the consequences, as well as the complications that are likely to arise from translating the guiding principle into practice. What grand strategy does not do, however, is work out every detail of how it is going to be executed in advance. Grand strategy is not decided through repeated meetings and debates between decision-makers huddled around a table, in an approximation of the ExCom in the Cuban missile crisis. Instead, grand strategy is a great design, vision, idea, or master blueprint that orders and guides what a state does in interactions with the other actors, whether states or non-states, in the international system. Grand strategy is thus the product of one or of several individuals’ efforts at reflection concerning the present and likely future state of the international situation and of where one’s state stands in it.

As such, grand strategy emerges fully shaped, like armored Minerva out of Jupiter’s brow, rather than coming into being over time through trial, error, and improvisation, as held by the grand behavior interpretation.⁶ Decision-makers use this grand vision or design as a guidebook for ulterior foreign policy, relying on conclusions already reached, instead of continuously starting the process from scratch. Foreign policy’s job is therefore to translate grand strategy to individual country contexts, as well as to adjust it to developing circumstances, such as shifts in capabilities, the advent of new technologies and ideas, the availability of allies, or emergence of new enemies.⁷

Thus, while the strategic pattern that emerges over time necessarily differs in particular points from the original formulation, it is still recognizably guided by the same fundamentals, being handed over to the government from its predecessor, and being then passed on to its successor, as in a relay race. If the fundamentals change, then one deals with a different grand strategy. Consequently, the book is skeptical concerning the interpretation of grand strategy as “muddle through.” Instead, it argues that the contribution made by decision-makers as they go, or by successive governments amounts to making corrections to an already laid down navigation course.

However, grand strategy is more akin to a navigation rutter, a naval pilot guidebook, than to a map, to which it is frequently compared. Unlike a map, a rutter was also concerned with offering directions pertaining to undertaking a voyage, such as describing channels, tides, harbors, and supply points, and warning of dangers such as reefs or enemy bases, and even providing advice on how to plot a course or how to treat disease on board. Correspondingly, grand strategy does far more than just picture where a state wants to go and how it should reach this destination. What it does is give instructions on which goal to pursue, the path to get there, and the obstacles to overcome. Thus, the chief intention of Frederick the Great, the King of Prussia, in his Political Testament of 1752, very much a statement of Prussia’s grand strategy, was to “communicate to the posterity what I had learned by experience as a pilot who knows the stormy surroundings of the political seas; I undertake to indicate to them the reefs that they have to avoid and the harbors where they can find shelter.” Likewise, the historian John Lewis Gaddis quotes the movie Lincoln (2012) for a similar insight:

a compass will point you true north from where you are standing, but it’s got not advice about the swamps and deserts and chasms that you’ll encounter along the way. If in pursuit of your destination, you plunge ahead, heedless of obstacles, and achieve nothing more than to sink in a swamp … what’s the use of knowing true north?⁸

Effectively, grand strategy can be understood as a trinity of fundamentals: goals, means, and challenges. A useful illustration is a “strategic triangle,” in which each factor affects and is affected in turn by the other two (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 The strategic triangle.

States choose to pursue certain goals in the international arena by taking into account the power at their disposal and the ways to use it, as well the foreign opposition they will likely face.⁹ They develop their own resources and choose tactics in light of the objectives they pursue, as well as of the magnitude of the resistance they anticipate. Finally, states identify which actors are most likely to oppose them depending on what they seek to achieve, and on their perception of how their resources and tactics fare by comparison. It follows that the strategic decision-making process does not occur in a chronological linear sequence, with one fundamental element predating and claiming paramount importance over the others. States do not pick their goals in a vacuum, based solely on their preferences derived from their peculiar cultural or ideological inclinations, or from the competing interests of domestic interest groups and coalitions—and only after that start to think about their resources or ways to use them or anticipate likely challenges. Nor do states simply do whatever they are able to do because of their means, while turning a blind eye to motives for action or to other states’ reactions. And no grand strategy is defined just by the presence of an enemy, because for an enemy to exist and be identified as such, it should pose in the first place a threat to the state’s goals, and its power and ways to use it compared to those of the state should be formidable enough to be a concern.

So how do states formulate their grand strategy? The hypothesis on which this book relies is that states choose to carry out a specific course of action according to their position in the international environment confronting them. Environment refers to all international phenomena to which the state’s activities may be related.¹⁰ Consequ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: What is grand strategy?
• 2 The great powers
• 3 The grand strategies of rising powers
• 4 The grand strategies of status quo powers I
• 5 The grand strategies of status quo powers II
• 6 The grand strategies of declining powers
• 7 Great powers’ grand strategies today and tomorrow
• Index