BY ALASDAIR ROBERTS
Grand strategy is a concept familiar to experts on foreign policy and national security. Its meaning has inflated over the years. Some critics think that it has bloated so much that it is no longer useful — but they are wrong. The real problem with grand strategy is that it is not grand enough. In the 19th century, grand strategy was about the actual fighting of wars. A commander in a single theater of operation had a strategy for defeating the enemy, and top-level commanders had a larger plan for deploying forces across many theaters. Grand strategy, one writer explained in 1904, reckoned with “the whole armed force of the nation, ashore and afloat.”
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With the advent of total war, the concept expanded. If victory in war depended on mobilization of the entire physical and moral forces of the nation, as Gen. Erich Ludendorff argued, it followed that wartime planning should have similar scope. B.H. Liddell Hart defined grand strategy as a national policy guiding all aspects of social and economic activity toward the achievement of war aims. “The basis of grand strategy,” other experts agreed in 1942, “is the reciprocal relationship between war and the society in which war occurs.”
With the onset of the Cold War, the concept expanded again. Grand strategy was still concerned with mobilizing the full spectrum of societal resources. But the objectives became fuzzier. During the world wars, national leaders were concerned with actual war-fighting. After World War II, by contrast, the great powers were caught in a decades-long tussle for positional advantage. Thus the big view of grand strategy that we have today: as Thomas Christensen has defined it, “the full package of domestic and international policies designed to increase power and national security” in peacetime as well as wartime.
Some critics say that theorizing about grand strategy bears little relationship to the way that decisions actually get made. In the real world, they argue, proper coordination of domestic and international policies is all but impossible. Leaders are not visionaries, and they never maintain a steady course toward crisply defined goals. More often, leaders tinker with the status quo, experiment, and lurch from crisis to crisis.
These criticisms are largely misguided. Incrementalism and experimentalism are often a reasonable response to conditions of uncertainty and political polarization. More importantly, the fact that the actual course of policy is erratic or ineffectual does not imply that leaders are neglecting strategy. Some leaders try to behave strategically but are not very good at it. But an inept strategist is still a strategist, just as a bad writer is still a writer. And even the best-laid plans can be thrown into confusion by events.
Leaders are driven to strategy by force of circumstance. The world is a turbulent and dangerous place, and leaders cannot ignore the sphere of foreign affairs without jeopardizing vital interests. They must engage. Each decision must be driven by some calculation about ends and means, and about the implications for other decisions. These are the rudiments of grand strategy. Experts try to improve the quality of strategy, but the impulse for leaders to behave strategically is already there.
But here is the difficulty. The world of domestic affairs is equally treacherous. Machiavelli, the grand old man of realism, warned that a prince must have two fears — “one internal, based on his subjects, the other external, based on foreign powers.” In democracies, leaders who bungle internal affairs are tossed out in the next election. In autocracies, they are overthrown in coups. And sometimes, clumsy leaders suddenly discover their states collapsing beneath them. If danger in the sphere of foreign affairs impels leaders toward strategy, the same is also true in the sphere of domestic affairs.
It is easy to see that this is the case. Leaders are constantly refining political programs that are designed to manage threats to vital domestic interests, such as order, prosperity, justice, and their own survival in office. They try to mobilize societal resources and coordinate policy tools to secure these interests. In other words, they formulate a domestic grand strategy. Some leaders do this better than others, but all are driven to do it.
These two grand strategies, foreign and domestic, are intimately connected with each another.
These two grand strategies, foreign and domestic, are intimately connected with each another.
Because tranquility at home depends on economic growth, leaders search overseas for resources and markets. Foreign wars are launched or halted as domestic opinion sways back and forth. Leaders make concessions at home — extending the vote, building the welfare state, protecting civil rights — to bolster support for their overseas campaigns. Domestic regulatory powers are trimmed to cement trade agreements with key allies. And so on. The ways in which the two grand strategies may be entangled is endless.
However, we confront a conceptual problem. If there are two grand strategies — one foreign, one domestic — is either one of them really grand? Moreover, do leaders really think this way? We know the answer to these questions. Leaders do not keep Machiavelli’s two fears in separate boxes. They manage both at the same time and search for a coherent approach — a single strategy for governing — that reconciles domestic and foreign pressures at the same time.
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