Russia

2019 ◽  
pp. 50-72
Author(s):  
Céline Marangé
Keyword(s):  
Crucial Role ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
Institutional Setting ◽  
Strategic Culture ◽  
Military Interventions ◽  
National Interests ◽  
Hybrid Warfare ◽  
Current Leadership ◽  
Military Activity

This chapter argues that Russia’s current leadership has consistently promoted a grand strategy that is fundamentally defensive in nature and offensive in practice. It has prioritized security and the quest for recognition in assuming that Russia’s status has been purposely diminished, and that the strategic environment poses a tangible threat to both Russian national interests and the regime’s survival. The institutional setting and strategic culture play a crucial role in the formulation of a strategic security agenda. Although defensive in character and reactive in nature, Russian strategies have embraced bold, proactive, and transformational agendas that have extended beyond military activity. New ways and means have been developed to heighten Russia’s security, assert regional dominance, and attain global recognition. Russia’s leadership not only resorts to military interventions and hybrid warfare and to strategic deterrence and intimidation, but also to comprehensive influence and political destabilization, while using military rhetoric and victories to conceal its domestic shortcomings.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Rebecca Lissner
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
Military Interventions ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Policy Debates ◽  
New Information ◽  
Strategic Adjustment ◽  
Grand Strategies ◽  
The Cold War

More than 75 years after the end of World War II, military interventions—rather than major wars—have emerged as a defining feature of contemporary geopolitics. Yet, for all the fierce policy debates over interventions and their lessons, scholars have largely ignored the systematic linkages between these smaller-scale wars and transformations in the grand strategies of states that prosecute them. This book develops a new theory—the informational theory of strategic adjustment—to explain why military interventions can be crucibles of grand strategy. It argues that, by prosecuting a military intervention, states glean rich and rare information about adversaries’ capabilities and intentions, as well as their own military power and cost tolerance. The uniquely costly nature of warfighting renders this data particularly credible. Amidst background conditions of intense interstate competition and pervasive uncertainty, states face strong incentives to reassess their grand strategies in light of this new information. This process of grand strategic updating begins with a reassessment of the strategic assumptions directly tested on the battlefield, but it doesn’t end there. Indeed, the grand strategic effects of military interventions are far-reaching because information conveyed via warfighting is widely extrapolated to related strategic assessments. This book demonstrates the plausibility of the informational theory of strategic adjustment in three historically detailed case studies that trace the evolution of American grand strategy over the course of the Cold War and into the early post–Cold War era: the Korean, Vietnam, and First Gulf Wars.

Saudi Arabia

2019 ◽  
pp. 239-261
Author(s):  
Ghaidaa Hetou
Keyword(s):  
Saudi Arabia ◽  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
National Security ◽  
Political System ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
Internal Stability ◽  
Strategic Culture ◽  
Regional Role ◽  
Regional Factors

This chapter evaluates the formulation, implementation, and consistency of Saudi Arabia’s grand strategy since 1979. It examines how internal and regional factors influenced that strategy through the optic of a series of critical regional turning points, often overlain by shifting US debates on the Kingdom’s regional role. The chapter delineates why Saudi elites prioritize certain long-term objectives, how they perceive threats, and why they respond in specific ways. Its guiding conceptual framework is informed by four elements: the Kingdom’s dominant strategic culture, its political system, perception of national security, and regional alliance formations. The chapter demonstrates how the current Saudi establishment’s ability to sustain a grand strategy—primarily a regional role—is closely linked to its economic power, financial solvency, and internal stability.

The Unbearable Whiteness of Grand Strategy

2021 ◽  
pp. 329-345
Author(s):  
Adriane Lentz-Smith
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
National Interests ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Foreign Relations ◽  
The Third World ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter explores grand strategy as an intellectual and cultural project by considering its willful unseeing of race as a political project. To ignore race is to misapprehend how power works in the United States and how domestic formulations of subjectivity, difference, and racialized power imbue American foreign relations. The chapter focuses on African Americans in the era of Cold War civil rights. For Carl Rowan and Sam Greenlee, the two African American veterans who provide concrete cases for thinking about the United States and the world, their blackness and ambitions for their people would color how they interpreted America's role in political and military struggles in the Third World and beyond. As with other people of color, their encounters with white supremacy shaped their understandings of liberation, violence, and the United States security project. Their perspectives challenge scholars’ conceptions of the Cold War as a period of “defined clear national interests” and “public consensus.” Centering the stories of Rowan and Greenlee highlights not simply ongoing contestation over the myth and history of the Cold War, but, more fundamentally, the unthinking whiteness of grand strategy itself.

American Grand Strategy in the Indo Pacific: Plus ça change?

2019 ◽  
Vol 92 (4) ◽  
pp. 741-757
Author(s):  
Thomas S. Wilkins
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
Strategic Culture ◽  
Ir Theory ◽  
Theoretical Understanding ◽  
The Core ◽  
Rise Of China ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
The Rise Of China ◽  
American Grand Strategy

In an era of heightened great power competition, debates about American grand strategy in the Indo-Pacific region have returned to the fore. This review essay looks at three recent volumes that directly address such debates. After introducing the concept of grand strategy, Part I reviews each of the books individually in sequence, outlining their scope, contents, and contributions. Part II then integrates the contributions of each of the volumes into a broader discussion relating to four pertinent issues: American perspectives on "Asia"; international relations (IR) theory; American strategic culture; and the rise of China, before concluding. The books under review are to differing degrees orientated toward one of the core IR theory paradigms: realism (Green), liberalism (Campbell), and constructivism/ critical approaches (Kang). As such, read together, they contribute to a multi-faceted theoretical understanding of US grand strategy in the Indo Pacific that will be of significant value to both scholars and practitioners.

Grand Strategy, Strategic Culture, Practice

2005 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iver B. Neumann ◽  
Henrikki Heikka
Keyword(s):  
Grand Strategy ◽  
Strategic Culture

scholarly journals The essential role of democracy in the Bush Doctrine: the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan

2013 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Helena de Castro Santos ◽  
Ulysses Tavares Teixeira
Keyword(s):  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
Qualitative Content Analysis ◽  
Bush Administration ◽  
Military Interventions ◽  
National Interests ◽  
Rogue States ◽  
Bush Doctrine ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Military

Everyone knows that democracy played a role in the Bush Doctrine. What not everyone knows is that this role was essential for the doctrine to be put into operation under which the Iraq invasion was prepared and launched. We argue moreover that, even if aggressive, the Bush doctrine is compatible with the American Liberal Tradition. To demonstrate these arguments we analyze the links between democracy, security, and the US national interests as expressed in the pillars of the American foreign policy since the end of Cold War. The consequential belief of the Bush Administration on the positive effect of exporting democracy by the use of force to Afghanistan and Iraq to fight terrorism will be remarked. It will be shown, however, that in the first years of the Bush Administration, among the justifications for the military interventions in the two countries, security reasons prevailed over democratic concerns, although the latter was significantly present since the early hours after September 11. It was only when it became clear that WMDs did not exist in Iraq that the exporting of democracy as the ultimate weapon to fight terrorism grew remarkably and prevailed over security reasons to invade those rogue states. The paper uses quantitative and qualitative content analysis of the speeches of President Bush and his Secretaries of State and Defense.

scholarly journals Is Russia That Powerful in Hybrid Warfare?

2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 317-324
Author(s):  
Tomiță Cătălin Tomescu
Keyword(s):  
Military Power ◽  
Hybrid Warfare ◽  
Short Answer ◽  
Current Leadership ◽  
Financial Power ◽  
Financial Intelligence

Abstract Short answer is yes. As it is stated in a NATO reference hybrid warfare actions can be applied to the full DIMEFIL (Diplomatic, Information, Military, Economic, Financial, Intelligence, Legal) spectrum. This paper will demonstrate that Russia has significant elements which makes this country very well suited for this type of war and gives her some advantages on all DIMEFIL areas. In my view those elements are: current leadership, history and political mentality, size and geography, economic and financial power and military power.

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