Clausewitz, Die Politik, and the Political Purpose of Strategy

Clausewitz’s writings stand in two traditions. On the one hand, with his own very narrow definition of strategy, “Strategy is the use of the [military] engagement for the purpose of the war,” he continued a tradition that goes back to Paul-Gédéon Joly de Maizeroy and beyond him to Byzantine Emperor Leo VI. It is not least because of Clausewitz’s espousal of this tradition that this narrow definition still dominated Soviet thinking. On the other hand, Clausewitz stood in a new tradition reflecting on the relationship between a political purpose of the war itself. This goes back to Guibert, Kant, Rühle von Lilienstern but also a long-forgotten anonymous work probably written by Zanthier. This dwelt on the bureaucratic process of strategy-making in the interface between (politically dominated) foreign policy and (hardware- and means-dominated) military policy. It is ultimately to the latter tradition that we owe his reflections on the domination of political considerations captured in his famous line about war being the continuation of politics by other means. This in turn is the foundation on which most other reflections on grand strategy have been built.