The notion of strategy is primarily central to military science but finds interest and usage in many other fields. It is central to the military in the context of military campaigns, and it implies the need to make sure that the appropriate approach to winning is selected. There, a strategy can be defined as Lykke (1989), among many others do, as any process aiming to tie together articulated ends (objectives) with means (instruments of national power) and with ways (course of action). Another definition by Taylor (2019:10) states, “Strategy is what connects means with ends by describing which forces are necessary and how they will be used”. But even there, the concept eventually evolved in its breadth to include areas beyond the immediate concern of the generals in the battlefields. It eventually went beyond the national military. One, among others, who helped to produce that evolution and helped to understand matters of wars as not solely about the violence of the battlefield was the Prussian von Clausewitz (1832). In his book On War, he expanded the focus on winning wars beyond the battlefield and into the larger field of policy and national objectives. He argued that wars were more than the crushing of enemy forces. Although a decisive officer who did argue that “direct annihilation of the enemy forces must always be the dominant consideration” (1832:228), von Clausewitz was a thinker. As such, he recognized the fact that matters of wars did not start nor did they end on the battlefield. They started and ended with national objectives. National objectives are, however, a primary concern of statecraft, not of the generals alone. Hence, military campaigns and wars were instruments of statecraft, of national objectives. At the national objective level, war is just one among the many instruments the state disposes of to reach a defined objective. Military strategy was just a part of a larger strategy that a state may employ for its national objectives. And when such a strategy enlists the support, utilization, mobilization, and contribution of other instruments of statecraft for the attainment of ambitious objectives, it becomes grand. The concept of grand strategy, consequently, has been increasingly adopted in many fields to analyze the multifaceted approaches of some actors in the pursuit of ambitious objectives in challenging environments.

From its Greek etymological origin, the term strategy suggests command from a general, but most importantly, it is the assumption and expectation that any such command is, well thought out. Hart (1967:334) has defined it as a: “practical adaptation of the means placed at the general disposal to the attainment of the object in view”. Strategizing implies thinking. After all, the consequences of an inadequate or insufficiently thought-out command by a general in matters of wars are naturally costly, in the fullest sense of the word. Strategies, therefore, connote a product of reflection, the result of a ripen reasoning. They entail calculations that take into account all known factors and are wary of the unknown. They anticipate resistance and surprises. They must make the most of any opportunity and means. They consider the most effective use of resources and personnel. They make use of time and space, and naturally, plan for proper execution hoping for the desired outcome. The use of the term, anywhere, implies such a process. It is then assorted with the adjective “grand” to bring into consideration all other factors that directly or indirectly contribute to securing the desired outcome. Hart’s notion of “indirect approach” suggests using instruments of statecraft against any foe, anyhow possible to tilt the balance in one’s favor. Today, the notion of “indirect approach” can be extended into areas and theaters that Hart has not anticipated, given the possibilities that today’s technology offers. But, winning on the battlefield is not enough. A grand strategy ought to guarantee the enduring effect of victories. It ought to seek to achieve peace. Applying this perspective to the case of the United States had a grand strategy in winning World War II, but also made sure it won the peace through the liberal order of postwar liberal institutionalism. Here is where adopting a grand strategy approach goes beyond the immediate business of conduct of war. It ensures that the achievement of national objectives is not ephemeral.

Consequently, a grand strategy is an encompassing approach. Van Hooft (2017)¹ simply defines grand strategy as one that “establishes how states, or other political units, prioritize and mobilize which military, diplomatic, political, economic, and other sources of power to ensure what they perceive as their interests”. It utilizes instruments of power such as diplomacy, formal, and public; foreign policy; economic and financial incentives; a country’s resources; political will; national mobilization; and a narrative. This effort requires coordination. And if such coordination requires the mobilization of various states’ resources for the attainment of a national objective, then the process justifies the description of grand strategy (Corbett, 1988). It is then grand, as in a “major” objective to be distinguished from a “minor” objective, which is what foreign policy is about. Feng Zhang (2012:319) defines grand strategy broadly “as the distinctive combination of political, economic, military, cultural and ideological means by which a state seeks to ensure its national interest”. The grand strategy was, he wrote, “a conjunction of national interest and strategic ideas”.

From the Chinese perspective, we start by recalling the argument made by Luttwak (2012) in The Rise of China and the Logic of Strategy, namely, that different cultures have different degrees of awareness of strategy. The reason is that strategic thinking is a necessity induced by specific competitive circumstances. The same author, Luttwak, contends that China has a different culture of strategy, different from, let us say, Europe, simply because it did not have equally competitive or comparably powerful neighbors to think about. Such neighbors are what Luttwak calls “others”. Their relevance is that they compel one to strategic thinking. China was too superior to worry about its neighbors. And when such neighbors came from the North, they found China unprepared. Historically, China was not consumed by matters of strategy. In Luttwak’s view, strategic thinking begins with concocting a plan, a move, or steps to take, but knowing that the opponent or opponents may react and that oneself should think of anticipating and countering their reaction, and what comes of that, and so on. This was the basis of strategic thinking, which requires strategic logic. China did not have to develop it. Therefore, China did not develop strategic thinking. What China has was behavior to deal with its contentious situations, which includes tricks and stratagems. They require planning, but they do not induce strategic thinking nor logic. Luttwak concludes by saying that China has a strategic culture but not a strategic logic. And if China did not have strategic thinking, it cannot have had grand strategic thinking. Indeed both militarily and academically, grand strategic thinking, the way it is defined today, is relatively recent in China and elsewhere.

In the case of China, it “is a rather untapped territory in China”, to use the words of Honghua Men (2020:1). The fact that interest in grand strategic thinking is emerging in China is due to the rise of China; and the contextual circumstances of the international system provide a theater of equal and worthy competitors and therefore requires grand strategic thinking. This seems to support Luttwak’s contention. Honghua Men argues, however, that the concept of strategy is a known factor in ancient China. However, like anywhere else, the term is used in its military context of battlefield behavior. Citing the many references where the term appears in ancient sources, he eventually names the relentlessly cited in this context, namely, Sun Tsu’s The Art of the War. In the strategies laid out by Sun Tzu, known as Miao Suan to defeat the enemy, Honghua Men sees elements that require an interest in the behavior of strategy beyond activities on the battlefield. One of such elements mentioned in the concept of Miao Suan is the intent to subdue the enemy without fighting. He concludes with the existence of grand strategic thinking and awareness in ancient China.

The concept is certainly understood in a variety of ways by those using it. This naturally opens it up to different nuances and emphases. While some authors emphasize the idea of a grand strategy to be just about grand plans, grand principles, and grand behavior with identified patterns in the implementation (Silove, 2018); others, such as Luttwak (2009) using the case of the Byzantine Empire, argue that a grand strategy needs not to be written down. In fact, states always have grand strategies, he argues, whether they know it or not. The existence and coherence of grand strategy execution do not presume awareness of it. However, a lack of awareness can become a flaw if it interferes with the ability of the state to formulate a narrative to accompany the execution of its grand strategy. A diplomat can coherently seek to achieve a material foreign policy objective without articulating a deeper reason. But knowing the purpose that the policy objective serves, certainly contributes to the level of commitment to that objective. For instance, during the Cold War if you were a US diplomat executing a policy objective against the Soviet Union acquired another dimension, knowing that it was designed against communism, not just the Soviet Union. From the US perspective, the fight against communism, for the free world, was the narrative. That is what justifies the narrative of grand strategies. However, maybe even such a narrative is not important. Drezner (2011) argues just that, namely, that the concept itself was overrated. Luttwak insisted that what counted was a structured and constant manner in which the strategy is conducted. He pointed to the fact that the Byzantine Empire used instruments such as diplomacy, financial inducements, clients, intelligence, and force to stay in power much longer than its counterpart in the West. Gray (2010) sees a grand strategy as a bridge connecting means and end. John Lewis Gaddis (2009)² has many complementary definitions, among them, the more poetic says that grand strategy was “about seeing the forest, but not the trees”. More recently, however, like Gray, Gaddis (2018) defined grand strategy as the ability to match potentially unlimited aspirations and necessarily limited capabilities. And when such unlimited aspirations do not reckon with practical material limitations, the imbalance is what Paul Kennedy (1990) draws attention to. Paul Kennedy sees the use of grand strategy in action by rising powers, reaching their ambitious objectives but only losing sight of the limitation of their economic capabilities to sustain the effort. He sees the pattern as recurrent, and therefore hubris as the cause of their demise. Needless to say that Kennedy’s analysis found echoes in the debate ensuing in the United States after the realization that its economy could no longer sustain the ambitious objectives of the neoconservative ideologues in W. Bush’s Administration. Strachan (2005) on the other hand, regrets that the concept is simply used by many to denote nearly any policy objective, making it difficult to delineate and even diluting much of its real meaning. The regret is justified simply because grand strategies are bigger than foreign policy. Grand strategies are not just slogans or bullet points. They are not just instruments of material objectives. They are bold. They are visionary. They are projections. They ought to articulate more than an idea—an ideal, and a purpose; otherwise, they are just foreign policy objectives, not grand strategies.

In any case, if grand strategies are about ambitious national objectives, such objectives, must not necessarily be achieved through military confrontation. They must not necessarily involve the military. Grand strategy takes the notion of strategy fully outside the realm of the military, simply because the object in view here is not a battlefield victory. States’ national interests or objectives are thought neither primarily nor solely in military terms. Today’s battlefields have multiple theaters, both physical and nonphysical. In nonphysical theaters, cyberspace, for instance, military generals are not in command. In command, are policymakers and other kinds of actors. Placing grand strategy into the hands of statecraft is predicated on the ability of policymakers and political leaders to do more than what military commanders can. Grand strategy subsumes any military campaigns. The benefit is to avoid battlefield victories that do not produce enduring peace or produce meaningless victories, as demonstrated in the case of Napoleon in Russia. Despite separating the realm of politics from that of the military, one cannot escape the analogy between battlefield and statecraft, or between military commanders and political leaders. Both battlefields and statecraft are fields of action, and both military commanders and political leaders must make the most of the available resources to achieve the desired outcome using their abilities. They must demonstrate the abilities to be both tactical and strategic, which leads us to Archilochus’ (7th century BC) metaphor of hedgehogs and foxes as reported by Isaiah Berlin (1953) and recently, in this context by Gaddis (2018). While the skills of the fox allow it to manage a variety of situations flexibly which implies tactical decisions; the skills of the hedgehog allow it to master the reality of a specific domain in all its intricacies, which implies a profound and strategic view of it. As a result, the fox is a generalist, while the hedgehog is an expert. In our analogy, both the military general and the political leader ought to develop both skills. Losing sight of the skills of either dimension leads to a less comprehensive understanding of the concept. Grand strategy requires both tactical and strategic skills. In the fields of both politics and the conduct of military campaigns, there are just too many interfering factors and intervening variables that require both flexibility and contextually.

In the end, the definitions we mentioned and others we have not reveal several commonalities. The only dissent lies in the objective nature of the concept. The concept of grand strategy is contextual. The context is that of challenge, competition with an objective in mind, that specific actors and states take at the unit level. This means the concept itself does not identify a specific core phenomenon or object, as Silove (2017) rightly argues. Unlike the objective phenomenon of the rise of prices which implies the decrease of the value of money that underlies the concept of infl...