Abstract
This fascinating and carefully organized anthology examines U.S. grand strategy from the Federalists to the present and strategists from W.E.B. du Bois to George H. W. Bush, from angles ranging from diplomacy to race. It begins with Christopher McKnight Nichols and Andrew Preston’s overview of the term’s origin, the relevant literature and key sins of commission and omission by grand strategists.
Part I concerns frameworks. Hal Brands describes what grand strategy is not. Beverly Gage highlights Saul Alinsky’s 1971 Rules for Radicals as a guide for social action by both the left and the right. Elizabeth Bradley and Lauren A. Taylor praise George W. Bush’s application of grand strategy to health in his Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.
Part II focuses on historical grand narratives. Charles Edel appraises the Federalists’ grand strategy of domestic unity, territorial expansion, commercial power, neutrality and naval buildup to preserve the republic and republicanism. Matthew Karp lays out the Confederate grand strategy to preserve slavery by promoting slave-holding states and nations by appointing southerners as secretaries of state, war and navy, and as ministers abroad. In the interwar period (1865–1918), rather than the mushrooming U.S. industrial and agricultural production highlighted by the Wisconsin School of diplomatic history, Katherine C. Epstein emphasizes the marginality of the U.S. navy, merchant marine, overseas basing, financial services and global cables and wireless infrastructure that hamstrung U.S. global influence. David Milne then provides a sweeping intellectual history of post-First World War U.S. grand strategy highlighting grand strategists, such as Woodrow Wilson, Walter Lippmann, George Kennan, Paul Nitze, Henry Kissinger, Paul Wolfowitz and Jeane Kirkpatrick.
This neatly transitions to Part III, focusing on central figures, starting with Christopher McKnight Nichols’s chapter juxtaposing Wilson’s internationalism to Senator William Borah’s isolationism, Jane Addams’s peace internationalism and W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black internationalism. Elizabeth Borgwardt then examines Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose emphasis on ‘collective security, economic stability, and accountability through the rule of law’ (p. 202) as the organizing principles of the international order remain enduring aspirations. Nevertheless, Second World War polling data used by Michaela Hoenicke Moore reveals deep ambivalence with most Americans favouring both avoiding war and defeating Germany, and with southerners (amongst the most vocal interventionists) favouring a White master race at home. Andrew Preston shows how Edward Earle Meade, editor of the widely used text, Makers of Modern Strategy (first ed., 1943), brought grand strategy to prominence by expanding the purview from military operations to national security in both war- and peacetime. David Greenberg turns to Kennan, the apostle of containment and also bigotry, who took a dim view of communists, non-Whites, women, homosexuals and even democracy itself. William Inboden then credits Nixon and Kissinger with permanently resurrecting the National Security Council gutted under presidents Kennedy and Johnson. The section concludes with Jeffery A. Engel’s chapter on George H. W. Bush’s Hippocratic (do-no-harm) grand strategy emphasizing restraint and institutions in the pursuit of peace and the spread of ‘democracy, free markets, and freedom’ (p. 302) in Europe that left the Cold War won, Germany unified within NATO, Kuwait sovereign, the North American Free Trade Act negotiated and the disintegration of the Soviet Union peaceful.
Part IV highlights neglected topics. Emily Conroy-Krutz examines the role of missionaries in the nineteenth century. Adriane Lentz-Smith juxtaposes the optimism of Carl Rowan, a Black journalist and diplomat, to the pessimism of Sam Greenlee, a Black poet, concerning the possibility of breaking the White monopoly on high-level foreign policy appointments. The most eye-opening chapter is Daniel J. Tichenor’s discussion of immigration reform, revealing the fraught domestic politics making it immune to grand strategy and leaving Congress not Presidents in control, as well as the rare progress under the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which boomeranged on those preferring a White America. The negotiations traded the old national quotas yielding 70% of immigrants from Great Britain, Ireland and Germany (p. 359) for preferences prioritizing family reunification over and above the new hemispheric quotas. Since family members from rich countries had no reason to move, while those from poor places did, U.S. ethnic composition changed.
Julia F. Irwin charts the expansion of U.S. humanitarian assistance capabilities from 1812 forward. Ryan Irwin emphasizes the cultural origins of the legalistic U.S. approach to grand strategy reflected in Justice Felix Frankfurter, who mentored another lawyer, Dean Acheson, and befriended columnist Walter Lippmann, who together advocated using laws to order international relations. Laura Briggs turns to birth control, abortion and adoption (reproductive politics), beginning with family planning to mitigate global poverty under Kennedy that became entangled with abortion politics under Reagan, and ending with international adoptions that became entangled with kidnapping.
The final section reflects on ‘the American Century’. Mary L. Dudziak enumerates the deaths, mutilations and psychological trauma from warfare. Fredrik Logevall concludes that U.S. prosperity reflects more its good fortune (seas insulating it from the world’s troubles, a large population, its self-sufficient industrial base), than any clever thinking (grand strategy) or clever thinkers (Lippmann, Kennan, Nitze), whose threat exaggerations cost the United States dear. Logevall is pessimistic about professional military education, particularly the teaching of operational and grand strategy. He argues that much of grand strategy is for naught. According to Carl von Clausewitz in On War, strategies can be evaluated only in comparison to the feasible alternatives (book 2, chapter 5). Often all choices are costly, so the absolute costs are no criticism, only the relative costs, requiring a counterfactual analysis of the alternatives.
The chapters offer competing definitions of grand strategy. Here is mine: the grandness of the strategy comes not from the scale of the project, the greatness of purpose or a country’s size, but from the multiplicity of instruments integrated to achieve intended goals. In short, grand strategy entails the integration of multiple of instruments of national power to achieve overarching goals in both peace and war. Concretely, Cabinet portfolios represent the instruments of national power and Cabinets meet to coordinate grand strategy. However daunting the task and flawed the process, countries without institutionalized and professionalized Cabinets tend to fare worse.
Rethinking American Grand Strategy was thought provoking and enjoyable to read, a volume that invites further research. It focuses on team America. However, to evaluate the effectiveness of grand strategy, one must cross to the non-U.S. side of the tennis court net to give equal analytical time to the opposing team. Life is an ongoing interaction with others. To evaluate the success or failure of the interaction requires a deep understanding of others and analysis of what one does, how others respond, how one reacts and whether anyone achieves what they want at an acceptable cost. Sports enthusiasts routinely study all teams and rehash the interaction, play by play. Why should the study of international relations, let alone war, the most consequential of all human interactions, demand less than what Americans devote to sports? A failure to consider the priorities and strategies of others is an origin of the hubris that often gets Americans into trouble. Future research on grand strategy should focus on the interaction because, as we say at the U.S. Naval War College, ‘the enemy is not a potted plant’ and, indeed, ‘gets a vote’.