The Blob and the Mob

This chapter explores social movements as a new lens through which to approach grand strategy. Although grand strategists and social movement strategists often view each other as opposites, they have more to learn from each other—and more in common—than either group might think. Within the realm of strategic thought, there has long been significant intellectual overlap between military, political, and social-movement approaches. Far from standing apart from questions of war and peace, stability and instability, conflict and diplomacy, nearly every significant movement for social change has actively engaged these questions, including the real or potential use of violence. Around the world, still more radical movements, many of them at least nominally Marxist in orientation, produced vast literatures on the virtues and vices of revolutionary strategy, as well as the complex task of transforming members and leaders, after victory, from revolutionaries into statesmen. In modern Western democratic societies, social-change strategists tend to favor non-violent methods, but debates rage nonetheless.

The Unbearable Whiteness of Grand Strategy

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.

Turning the Tide

This chapter describes the principles of grand strategy as applied to global health and public health. It analyzes President George W. Bush's program, called the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (known as PEPFAR). Developed largely in secret and placed outside the traditional USAID bureaucracy, the PEPFAR program pole vaulted the United States into a leadership role in global health. The chapter then highlights how the use of grand strategic principles resulted in a highly successful, if still limited, global health intervention. The Bush Administration articulated explicit goals, or ends, and connected those to the larger ecology of national interests related to demonstrating American morality, and protecting the United States from the threat of pandemic HIV/AIDS. However, PEPFAR as a strategy was incomplete. It failed to address critical root causes of the spread of HIV/AIDS—the social and economic conditions in which such pathogens emerge and spread.

The Misanthropy Diaries

This chapter studies George Frost Kennan's diaries that the historian Frank Costigliola published in 2014. Kennan has long been renowned for having formulated the containment doctrine that guided American policymakers as they lurched through the Cold War, as well as for his significant role in shaping US foreign policy as both a diplomat and thinker. Over many decades, biographers, foreign policy hands, politicians, intellectuals, and journalists have showered Kennan with praise and hailed him as the prime example of a grand strategist. For all the scholarly disputes about Kennan, there is general agreement that he was correct about many of the most vital issues of his time, and his “realism” has often been treated as a model from which subsequent American policymakers departed at their peril. Still, as Kennanologists have long known, there is more to the story. His acclaimed 1951 study, American Diplomacy, included disparaging statements about democracy, and his writing exhibited nasty, misanthropic, and aristocratic currents. The chapter then considers the relationship between Kennan's personal prejudices and his political ideas.

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.

Denizens of a Center

This chapter reviews the most commonly utilized historical example of grand strategy—the early Cold War—and revisits the period's most frequently analyzed protagonists: George Kennan, Walter Lippmann, and Dean Acheson. However, it is not about that era's seminal strategic doctrine: containment. Instead, it explores the relationship between law and power and argues for a new understanding of the intellectual architecture of the early Cold War. At mid-century, American liberals shared a particular vocabulary about strategy—about realism itself—that reflected specific claims about natural law, sovereign interdependence, and World War I. Drawing on rarely examined primary documents, the chapter excavates this conversation and suggests that these assumptions informed how American leaders defined their aspirations and their capabilities. At a time when US leaders are profoundly divided over the country's foreign policy, there is value in revisiting the concepts that animated and circumscribed an earlier generation's strategic thought.

George H. W. Bush

This chapter evaluates George H. W. Bush as a grand strategist. Determined above all else to preserve the elements of traditional American power amid a tumultuous world and to prevent as much as possible a rapidly transforming world from descending brinto chaos, Bush successfully achieved the markers he set in pursuit of this goal. These included sustaining relations with a reeling China, preserving the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), uniting Germany, negotiating a continental-wide free trade zone designed to counter the rise of Asian and European economic consolidation, and protecting the sanctity of international sovereignty and the import of the United Nations in a post–Cold War world. Ultimately, gauging Bush's success in 1991, or in 2001, or in 2011 produces different answers. A hero in the first instance, perhaps the reason Americans faced problems in the Middle East in the second, he was by the third date largely celebrated for the restraint his son never exhibited. Times changed, his actions in office did not, nor did the central tenets he embraced and embodied as a strategist: he faced instability, believed in the stream of history, and by acting to ensure the American stability he considered paramount to security, helped keep chaos at bay.

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.

Disastrous Grand Strategy

This chapter traces the evolution of the US government’s international disaster assistance policy, beginning at the dawn of the nineteenth century and culminating with the landmark enactment of Public Law (P.L.) 94–161, the International Development and Food Assistance Act of 1975. Avowing the United States’ readiness to provide humanitarian relief in the wake of foreign catastrophes, it empowered the president (or his appointed delegates) to furnish relief and short-term rehabilitation assistance to any country affected by “natural or manmade disasters.” With this act, US international disaster assistance was officially codified as an instrument of US foreign policy. The chapter then analyzes the state's gradually expanding role in the humanitarian sphere in light of the shifting architecture of nineteenth- and twentieth-century US grand strategy. If a grand strategy framework can help make sense of US international disaster assistance, studying the history of catastrophes and disaster relief—and the history of humanitarian aid, more broadly—also stands to say something new about US grand strategy itself.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of grand strategy. Grand strategy is best understood as a holistic and interconnected system of power, encompassing all aspects of society in pursuit of international goals “based on the calculated relationship of means to ends.” It is not simply about winning wars or attaining specific foreign-policy objectives, important as these priorities are; it is not only an answer to the question of what power is meant to achieve. Grand strategy is also about creating a durable peace that follows a war and then maintaining the stability of that peace long after the war has faded into a distant memory. It is—for the United States especially, with its global ambitions, widespread commitments, and enormous capabilities in all forms of power—about trying to shape world conditions so as to ensure the protection of national security and the flourishing of national values. The chapter then studies the grand strategies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Ultimately, this book argues for the relevance and usefulness of grand strategy, and builds on the concept of strategic culture.