Applied realism, American grand strategy, and strategic interests in the European balance

Text of working paper, presented at the Center for Security Studies, ETH Zürich, on the 20th of October, 2021.

American Grand Strategies

How do we explain the vigorous debate about what American grand strategy should be? Most of the proponents are Realists, and this is particularly true for the alternatives of Restraint and Deep Engagement discussed here. These camps disagree not about whether the US is in decline, but in how secure it is, how tightly the world is interconnected, how much commitments can be kept within bounds, whether alliances and military ties are necessary to underpin a productive international economic system, and the links between foreign policy and domestic values. Few analysts in either camp are willing to acknowledge tradeoffs among the significant values they hold, which indicates that psychological processes as well as analytical differences are at work.

Getting Grand Strategy Right

Grand strategy is essential to effective foreign policy. Yet even as the study of grand strategy has flourished within the academy, many academics have remained skeptical of grand strategy as a concept or been harshly critical of grand strategy as practiced by the United States. This essay defines the concept of grand strategy, emphasizing that it is best understood as the logic undergirding state action. The essay also explains why common academic critiques are mistaken; they set fire to straw-person visions that either reduce grand strategy to impractically detailed and rigid plans rather than recognizing the logic that guides purposeful state action, however imperfectly implemented, or to impossibly grandiose visions of American power in the post-Cold War era that ignores the genuine achievements of the last thirty years. Finally, the essay discusses how academics can usefully contribute to public debates on American grand strategy.

Introduction

This chapter sketches out the characteristics of today's global security environment in a broad brush by describing the US Department of Defense. It focuses on the science of war, a subdiscipline of defense analysis that, beginning with a foundation of basic facts and figures about military organizations and operations, uses analytical methods to tackle key questions in the national security field. With this context, the chapter illustrates the analytical methods including simple computational algorithms for assessing military effectiveness and predicting combat outcomes. It also includes the study of defense budgets and economics, as well as efforts to understand the physics and technology of military weapons and operations today. The chapter then discusses many of the ABCs of the US armed forces. It explains the evolution of American grand strategy — the theory of the case for how the nation should ensure its safety, prosperity, and survival — that these forces are designed to undergird.

Getting Grand Strategy Right

This chapter highlights ten common fallacies in the study of grand strategy and clarifies the misconceptions underlying them. Clearing away this conceptual confusion can lead to more productive debates about grand strategy writ large; it can also better inform discussions about the prospects for American grand strategy today. One of the fallacies is thinking of grand strategy as a principle or a doctrine rather than a process. Another is the idea that only certain types of grand strategies are worthy of the label. An additional one is the idea that democracies in particular just cannot get grand strategy right. The chapter then looks at the importance of politics and policy debates to grand strategy.

American Grand Strategy

This chapter assesses how grand American grand strategy has been. If the containment followed by the United States in the Cold War is the most successful, or at least most celebrated, grand strategy the United States has ever pursued, it is worthy of a closer look. This chapter considers two foundational writings from the early Cold War: George Kennan's “X” Article, published in Foreign Affairs in 1947 (under the pseudonym “X”), which laid out the containment policy—that is to say, the containment of Soviet power—and National Security Council Memorandum 68 (NSC-68) of April 1950. Both of these documents are held to have played major roles in shaping the grand strategy that helped the United States deal successfully with the Soviet threat and ultimately win the Cold War. Each has indeed been referred to as the “blueprint” for US policy in the struggle. The chapter then addresses a second question: How much does grand strategy matter in the context of American history? History suggests that grand strategies do not alter the trajectory of great-power politics all that much. In the case of the United States, even radically imperfect strategies have not fundamentally affected its rise and fall.