Strategic Affairs Forecasting LLC

The following essay is a tour de force reviewing the contested ideas of  US grand strategy. Though long (9800 words), I believe you will find the article rewarding in its breadth.

The article comes courtesy of the Foreign Policy Research Institute and the Temple University Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy. Contact information is at the end.
CAN THE UNITED STATES DO GRAND STRATEGY?
By Walter A. McDougall

Walter A. McDougall is Alloy-Ansin Professor of
International Relations at the University of Pennsylvania
and a Senior Fellow of FPRI, where he co-chairs the History
Institute for Teachers. This paper was delivered in October
2009 at the Consortium on Grand Strategy, a project
sponsored jointly by FPRI and Temple University’s Center for
the Study of Force and Diplomacy and chaired by Richard
Immerman and William Hitchcock. The Consortium was
established in 2009 as part of the Hertog Program on Grand
Strategy.

          CAN THE UNITED STATES DO GRAND STRATEGY?

                   By Walter A. McDougall

In spring 2003, following the last lecture in my survey
course on U.S. diplomatic history since 1776, a brilliant,
inquisitive student approached me in the hall to ask a
final, confidential question.  She said that my course
helped her appreciate, as never before, how swiftly the
United States had become the mightiest nation ever, with
unprecedented military, economic, and cultural influence.
But how long would it last?  How long did I think the United
States could stay on top?

At first I was tongue-tied, because I was loath to inject a
future national leader with either complacency or despair.
Then an answer occurred to me.  It all depends on whether
the United States is as exceptional as we like to believe.
If the United States follows the pattern of all previous
powers, then demographic or technological trends, new
foreign threats, strategic folly, overextension, domestic
decadence, or sheer loss of will must hurl it into decline,
perhaps within fifty years.  If, however, our institutions,
values, and national character really do amount to a new
order for the ages, a potent mix enabling the United States
to reinvent itself and force other nations to adapt to the
challenges posed by us, then the republic may stay on its
asymptotic trajectory.  I stopped there, but as I walked to
my office I recalled Arnold J. Toynbee’s historical law to
the effect that empires die by suicide, not murder.

As recently as a decade ago the buzzwords in our foreign
policy discourse included new world order, end of history,
unipolar moment, benevolent hegemony, indispensable nation,
assertive multilateralism, and Washington consensus.  How
fast are the mighty fallen, through strategic and financial
malpractice, into a reprise of the terrible 1970s when the
buzzwords were imperial overstretch, exhaustion, and
decline.  Does another “Morning in America” await us so long
as we keep faith with ourselves, or has the United States
reached a climacteric and entered into a long British-style
decline?  In other words, is American exceptionalism the
source of an energy, ingenuity, resilience, and civic virtue
that propels our nation ever upward?  Or is a complacent
belief in American exceptionalism the source of a
profligacy, adventurism, disregard for experience, and civic
vice that portends a decline and fall?  Angelo Codevilla,
who says that what passes for strategy in the U.S.
government is mostly wishful or sloppy thinking, made the
same point in operational terms.  “Because doing the right
thing is important to Americans as to no other people,
American politics is like politics nowhere else….  Basing
statecraft on the American people’s penchant for trying to
do the right thing, as did Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt,
brings forth awesome energy….  But using the American
people’s righteousness as a propellant for private dreams,
as did [Woodrow] Wilson, or as cover for tergiversation, as
did George W. Bush, is ruinous.”[1]

Why do I begin on such a skeptical, gloomy note?  I think it
is because my training was that of an old-school European
historian, which gave me an outside vantage point from which
to view U.S. shibboleths more objectively than do U.S.
historians.  I suspect my training in European history also
inclines me to think about foreign policy in terms of
realism, balance of power, contingency, tragedy, irony,
folly, unintended consequences, and systemic
interactions-all of which are foreign if not repugnant to
U.S. citizens.  Finally, I am a Vietnam veteran skeptical of
nation- and state-building, winning hearts and minds, and
making the world over in the United States’ image.  As
FPRI’s Paul Dickler recently pointed out, I asked explicitly
in the 1997 book Promised Land, Crusader State, “can
Americans be better Iraqis than Iraqis themselves, or
presume to tell Chinese how to be better Chinese?  If we
try, we can only be poorer Americans.”[2]  That book was
well received except at The Weekly Standard and other venues
where neoconservatives were already calling for the forcible
removal of Saddam Hussein and a muscular foreign policy in
the name of “national greatness.”  After 9/11 they got their
way while I dropped out of sight to study early American
history.  To be sure, the invasion of Iraq in 2003 provided
me with a perfect case study to impress on students how hard
it can be to discern motive in history.  Thus, we were
variously told but with equal conviction that Operation
Iraqi Freedom was “all about” oil, Israel, the war on
terror, weapons of mass destruction, the Rumsfeld Pentagon’s
new way of war, neoconservative ideology, the Bush family
feud with Saddam, Karl Rove’s re-election calendar, or
democratizing the Middle East.  That leads one to ask
whether the Iraq invasion was doomed because too many
constituencies had too many irons in the fire.

That bears on the subject at hand: can the United States do
grand strategy?  I assume that this does not mean, can the
American people do grand strategy, because an easy answer
would be, sure they can and usually very poorly.  Rather I
assume the title means, can the relevant agencies of the
U.S. federal government plan, coordinate, and execute grand
strategy with sufficient competence to secure the nation and
defend its vital interests.  That is a complex question that
has inspired a recent spate of diagnoses of what ails U.S.
strategic planning and what prescriptions are indicated.[3]
I do not intend to choose among those expert assessments,
much less add to them since I claim no authority on the
subject of grand strategy apart from whatever U.S.
diplomatic history can teach.  In short, I plead non
possumus and absolve myself of the obligation to take any
controversial position.  Instead, I imagine my task merely
as that of a rapporteur and provocateur raising issues on
which we may need to reach some consensus before we can
agree on whether the United States can do grand strategy
and, if so, what that strategy ought to be at the present
time.

           *     *     *     *     *     *     *

Two recent quotations may serve to introduce those issues.

  We  are   led,  by  events  and  common  sense,  to  one
  conclusion:  The   survival  of   liberty  in  our  land
  increasingly depends  on the success of liberty in other
  lands.   The best  hope for  peace in  our world  is the
  expansion of  freedom in all the world.  America’s vital
  interests and our deepest beliefs are now one.  From the
  day of  our Founding,  we have proclaimed that every man
  and woman  on this  earth has  rights, and  dignity, and
  matchless value,  because they  bear the  image  of  the
  Maker of  Heaven and  earth.   Across the generations we
  have  proclaimed   the  imperative  of  self-government,
  because no  one is  fit to  be  a  master,  and  no  one
  deserves to  be a  slave. Advancing  these ideals is the
  mission that  created our  Nation.   It is the honorable
  achievement of  our fathers.    Now  it  is  the  urgent
  requirement of our nation’s security, and the calling of
  our time.

So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support
the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every
nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny
in our world.[4]

That, needless to say, was the gist of George W. Bush’s 2007
Second Inaugural Address, which a certain White House insider
pithily called “a crazy speech.”

If it was crazy, perhaps the second quotation suggests a
good reason why.

  Strategic planning  for American foreign policy is dead,
  dying, or  moribund.   This,  at  least,  has  been  the
  assessment of  several commentators and policy-makers in
  recent  years.    Michele  Flournoy  and  Shawn  Brimley
  observed in 2006, “For a country that continues to enjoy
  an unrivaled  global position, it is both remarkable and
  disturbing that the United States has no truly effective
  strategy planning process for national security.”  At an
  academic conference  in 2007,  a former  director of the
  State Department’s policy planning staff complained that
  “six years  after 9/11,  we still  don’t  have  a  grand
  strategy”….  [And]   Council  on   Foreign   Relations
  president Richard  Haass argues  that the  United States
  has  “squandered”   its   post-cold   war   opportunity,
  concluding, “Historians will not judge the United States
  well for how it has used these twenty years.”

That lament introduces a new Brookings Institution volume,
edited by Daniel Drezner, on the forgotten art of grand
strategy.[5]

Such breathtaking vitality in terms of strategic ambition
combined with the certifiable death of strategic planning
would suggest a certain disconnect between the muscles and
brain of the sole superpower: a disconnect which, Drezner
writes, was just as evident in the prideful “ad hoc-ery” of
the Clinton years as in the prideful crusade of the second
Bush years.  Has that disconnect always, or usually existed,
or not?  Most contemporary critics agree with Aaron
Friedberg’s judgment that the United States “has lost the
capacity to conduct serious, sustained national strategic
planning,” which implies that it once had that capacity.  Of
course, Friedberg and most others hold that the United
States had that capacity during the Cold War, beginning with
George Marshall’s 1947 promotion of Policy Planning in the
State Department and President Eisenhower’s 1953 promotion
of strategic planning in the Pentagon.  The grand strategy
designed and executed over the long haul was Containment,
hence the corollary that ever since 1991 the United States
has been awaiting another George Kennan to tell us what new
grand strategy ought to discipline and focus U. S. energies.
Thus, there is a tendency in our strategic discourse,
illustrated by the Brookings volume, to assume that
Containment represented the norm and post-cold war drift the
aberration; to assume, in short, that the United States can
do grand strategy, did do grand strategy, and thus needs
only to recover the capacity displayed by the “greatest
generation” who were “present at the creation” in the heroic
years of the late 1940s.[6]

A broader tour d’horizon of U. S. history, however, might
suggest otherwise, as illustrated by another glaring
juxtaposition of quotes.

“There are two men who have imparted to American foreign
policy a tendency that is still being followed today; the
first is Washington and the second Jefferson….”  Their
principles of neutrality, no permanent alliances, and no
granting or soliciting special privileges from foreign
nations,

  … so plain and just as to be easily  understood by the
  people, have  greatly simplified  the foreign  policy of
  the United  States.   As the  Union takes no part in the
  affairs of Europe, it has, properly speaking, no foreign
  interests to  discuss, since it has, as yet, no powerful
  neighbors on  the American  continent…    The  foreign
  policy of  the United  States is eminently expectant; it
  consists more in abstaining than in acting.

  It is therefore very difficult to ascertain, at present,
  what degree  of sagacity  the  American  democracy  will
  display in  the conduct  of the  foreign policy  of  the
  country; upon  this point its adversaries as well as its
  friends must  suspend their  judgment.  As for myself, I
  do not  hesitate to  say that  it is  especially in  the
  conduct of  their  foreign  relations  that  democracies
  appear to me decidedly inferior to other governments….
  Foreign politics  demand scarcely any of those qualities
  which are  peculiar in a democracy; they require, on the
  contrary, the  perfect use  of almost all those in which
  it is deficient.  Democracy is favorable to the increase
  of the internal resources of a state; it diffuses wealth
  and comfort  … [but]  a democracy  can only with great
  difficulty  regulate   the  details   of  an   important
  undertaking, persevere  in a  fixed design, and work out
  its execution  in spite of serious obstacles.  It cannot
  combine  its   measures  with   secrecy  or   await  the
  consequences with patience.[7]

Democracies, especially the wild and vast American one, do
not do grand strategy, or else cannot do it very well or for
very long: such was the famous judgment rendered by
Tocqueville 170 years ago.  What then, does one make of the
even more famous conclusion to his chapter on the “three
races” populating the continent?

  It must  not, then,  be imagined that the impulse of the
  British race  in the  New World  can be  arrested.   The
  dismemberment of  the Union  and  the  hostilities  that
  might ensue,  the abolition  of republican  institutions
  and the  tyrannical government  that might  succeed, may
  retard this  impulse, but they cannot prevent the people
  from ultimately  fulfilling  their  destinies….  [Free
  immigration,  continental   expanse,   and   spirit   of
  enterprise will overcome all.] Thus, in the midst of the
  uncertain future  one event  at least  is sure.    At  a
  period that  may be said to be near, for we are speaking
  of the  life of a nation, the Anglo-Americans alone will
  cover the  immense space  contained  between  the  polar
  regions and  the tropics,  extending from  the coasts of
  the Atlantic to those of the Pacific Ocean….  The time
  will therefore  come when 150 million men will be living
  in North  America, equal  in condition, all belonging to
  one family,  owing their  origin to  the same cause, and
  preserving the same civilization, the same language, the
  same religion,  the same  habits, the  same manners, and
  imbued with the same opinions, propagated under the same
  forms.   The rest is uncertain, but this is certain; and
  it is  a  fact  new  to  the  world,  a  fact  that  the
  imagination strives in vain to grasp.

  There are  at the  present time two great nations in the
  world, which  started from different points, but seem to
  tend towards the same end.  I allude to the Russians and
  the Americans….   The  conquests of  the American  are
  gained by  the plowshare;  those of  the Russian  by the
  sword.  The Anglo-American relies upon personal interest
  to accomplish  his ends  and gives  free  scope  to  the
  unguided strength  and common  sense of  the people; the
  Russian centers all the authority of society in a single
  arm.  The principal instrument of the former is freedom;
  of the  latter,  servitude.    Their  starting-point  is
  different and  their courses  are not the same; yet each
  of them  seems marked  out by the will of Heaven to sway
  the destinies of half the globe.[8]

Bottom line: in the age of Jacksonian Democracy, Manifest
Destiny, and escalating Sectional Crisis, Tocqueville
described a nation that was uninterested in practicing grand
strategy as the rest of the civilized human race understood
it-hence the Great Rule obeyed since Washington’s time-and
yet was destined to know grand strategic success in terms of
growth, power, and security, that no other state in the
world save perhaps Russia could match.  Talk about
disconnect!  Can it be that the United States flourished
over its first century despite, or because of, its
government’s lack of any self-conscious grand strategy?   Or
can the elements, however passive, of nineteenth-century
American foreign and military policy be rightly deemed grand
strategy?  Or can a civil faith-faith that divine
Providence, historical progress, or one’s own righteousness
mystically guarantees the national destiny-function as a
sort of force multiplier or self-fulfilling prophecy, in
which case strategies based on amoral power politics and
Machiavellian cunning can amount to a suicidal tempting of
fate?

According to Tocqueville’s observations the U.S. government
needed to do very little to realize the national destiny and
the only way it could fumble it away was by gratuitous
interventions or invitations that risked making North
America once again a target of the  European Great Powers.
The unilateral neutralism of Washington’s Great Rule and
Jefferson’s “no entangling alliances,” the ideological
prudence of John Quincy Adams’s “not going abroad in search
of monsters to destroy,” the regional and republican
separatism of Monroe’s Doctrine, and the expansionist
Manifest Destiny heralded by Jacksonians might appear to be
coordinated, mutually reinforcing principles of a brilliant
national strategy exploiting the United States’ asymmetrical
diplomatic, economic, ideological, and military advantages
in that era to maximal effect.  It is just that they do not
look like grand strategy because nobody outside the Prussian
General Staff and British Admiralty or East India Company
thought in those terms in the mid-nineteenth century or (if
they did) expressed their grand strategic ideas in so many
words.

Hence, two big issues that scholars and strategists need to
address are simply: does grand strategy have to be
articulated for it to be said to exist at all; and if not,
can grand strategy be said to move a nation even when that
nation’s fluctuating roster of mostly incompetent leaders
are unsure as to why they do anything?  In other words, was
Auguste Comte correct when he insisted that demography is
destiny, or Robert Strausz-Hupe when he insisted that you
cannot argue with geography?  We quote such lines to good
effect, but are they operationally true in the sense of
being impersonal forces that move events?  One need not be a
rigid determinist to grant that, especially in retrospect,
there is often a logic to strategic interactions that the
players sensed, if at all, by sheer instinct.  Experts at
poker or bridge call that “card sense.”  Talleyrand called
it the art of statecraft to foresee the inevitable and
expedite its occurrence.  Bismarck called politics the art
of the possible and statecraft to hear “the steps of God
sounding through events, then leap up and grasp the hem of
His garment.”  Kissinger called that people blessed whose
leaders can look destiny in the eye without flinching, but
also without trying to play God.  What are they trying to
describe?  It seems as if successful grand strategy requires
both acquiescence and aspiration, observation and
imagination, prudence and audacity, prideful mastery of men
and humble service of Providence, not to mention the
meticulous groundwork, assessment of the correlation of
forces, and deft timing whose strategic fruits appear, to
the victimized and the envious, as contemptible luck.

           *     *     *     *     *     *     *

To those who doubt the U.S. government can do grand strategy
well (something on which “beltway bandits” and critical
bloggers seem to agree)[9], the on-line STRATFOR
Geopolitical Diary had a definitive answer.  In anticipation
of the 2009 Fourth of July it posted an essay celebrating
what it confidently professed to be our overarching,
automatic, and now 230 year-old grand strategy.  It began
(rightly) by tracing U. S. strategic ideas back to
eighteenth-century Britain inasmuch as the thirteen colonies
could aspire to their mother country’s geopolitical
advantages as an insular, maritime, commercial power
benefitting from the rivalries and balance of power
prevailing among its continental Europe rivals.  Another
idea it failed to mention, however, was the impressive,
exemplary, hard-won unity among England, Wales, Scotland,
and Ireland.  That was what freed the Crown, Parliament,
Bank of England, and Board of Trade to mobilize national
resources for the pursuit of power and wealth abroad.
During and after 1776 the Founders of the United States had
the United Kingdom (and the United Provinces of the
Netherlands) very much on their minds.

STRATFOR went on to postulate the existence of “five core
rules” or “geopolitical imperatives” that have allegedly
“determined the behavior” of the United States.  The first
was to secure strategic depth by pushing inland from the
Atlantic coast, crossing the Appalachians, and in the 1783
treaty of peace with Britain obtaining title to all the land
east of the Mississippi.  The second was to expand that
strategic depth across the continent.  It was accomplished
through the Louisiana Purchase, its successful defense in
the War of 1812, the subsequent treaties demilitarizing the
U.S.-Canadian boundary, and especially in the Mexican War of
1846-48, which yielded all of Texas, California, and the
land in between.

The third step, says STRATFOR, was “to gain control of the
ocean approaches” which was accomplished, in the Caribbean
and Pacific alike, by the dawn of the twentieth century.
“Once a nation controls its approaches, the next logical
step – the fourth imperative – is to reach farther and
control the oceans themselves.”  Of course, that strategic
genius Uncle Sam achieved that by the end of World War II,
securing its grip on the oceans through naval hegemony and
alliances with littoral states in Europe and Asia.  All that
remained was the fifth imperative, which was to prevent any
one power from dominating the Eurasian land mass.  Needless
to say, that mandated the successful Containment and
Deterrence of the Soviet bloc.  STRATFOR concludes: “These
five strategic imperatives are not found anywhere in the
Constitution of laws of the United States.  But every one of
the country’s 44 presidents, regardless of intention, has
conformed to them, compelled by the inexorable logic of
geography….  And the same geopolitical imperatives that
drove these actions will shape American efforts into the
future – just as they have since 1776.”[10]

How credible is that?  I would certainly dispute the
assertion that every single president conformed to this
programmatic template.  On the contrary, presidents who have
given evidence of strategic vision are a decided minority.
But the very notion of U. S. traditions of foreign policy,
such as I developed in Promised Land, Crusader State,
implies continuities even, or especially, when the president
and secretary of state are ignorant, distracted, or running
on auto-pilot because no crisis beckons.  Thus, I argued
that (1) Exceptionalism, narrowly defined as the defense,
not risky export, of U. S. liberty, plus (2) Unilateralism
endorsed in Washington’s Farewell and Jefferson’s Inaugural,
plus (3) the American System of States envisioned by the
Monroe Doctrine, plus (4) continental Expansion imagined as
an idealistic, pioneer-driven “manifest destiny,” but
enabled by a diplomatic and military “manifest design” begun
by Washington and Benjamin Franklin during the War of
Independence and climaxing in the Oregon Treaty and Mexican
War under James K. Polk, comprised a mutually reinforcing
body of strategic principles that guaranteed the nation’s
stupendous growth against any contingency except civil war
(and even managed to surmount that emergency).[11]

Indeed, one useful measure of sound grand strategy could be
derived from the successful example of the United States’
rise to world power and the failed examples of Germany and
Japan.  Paul Kennedy elegantly styled the latter “middle
powers” seeking to break into the ranks of the world powers
seemingly destined to loom over the coming twentieth
century: the Russian, British, and American empires.  Kennedy
underscored their importance by discarding the usual
periodization with breaks at 1871, 1890, and 1914, in favor
of a section beginning in 1885, when Meiji Japan and
Imperial Germany began questing for overseas empire.[12]  In
two world wars their excellent general staffs backed by
fully supportive regimes conducted military operations at
the highest level and won stunning triumphs.  But they
brought utter ruin in the end because they wrongly assumed
that sufficient operational success at the level of strategy
could transform realities at the level of grand strategy.
My definition of sound grand strategy, therefore, simply
postulates the opposite: an equation of ends and means so
sturdy that it triumphs despite serial setbacks at the level
of strategy, operations, and campaigns.  The classic example
is Allied grand strategy during World War II.[13]

Of course, throughout the nineteenth century the United
States was so blessed that except for the Civil War
Americans could realize imperial ambitions on a pittance.
No wonder they developed the habit which Harvey Sicherman
calls “cheap hawkery.”  Moreover, Americans could defend
what they had and grasp what they wanted without too much
aforethought.  To be sure, the authors of our grand
traditions knew what they were doing or, just as important,
refraining from doing, and why.  As early as 1789 Alexander
Hamilton wrote in The Federalist No. 8: “If we are wise
enough to preserve the Union we may for ages enjoy an
advantage similar to that of an insulated situation.  Europe
is at a great distance from us.  Her colonies in our
vicinity will likely to continue too much disproportioned in
strength to be able to give us any dangerous annoyance.
Extensive military establishments cannot, in this position,
be necessary to our security….  This is an idea not
superficial or futile, but solid and weighty.”  Throughout
the ante-bellum era only a few dozen diplomats and military
professionals, such as General Winfield Scott and naval
Lieutenant Matthew Maury, needed to think in terms of grand
strategy.  But the miniature army on the frontier and navy
in the Mediterranean and western Pacific did such excellent
duty that American settlers and merchants took their new
frontiers for granted.  Henry James did not wonder at that
insouciance because, he wrote in 1879,

  That generation which grew up with the century witnessed
  during  a   period   of   fifty   years   the   immense,
  uninterrupted material development of the young Republic
  … there  seems to  be little room for surprise that it
  should have  implanted a  kind of superstitious faith in
  the grandeur  of the country, its duration, its immunity
  from the  usual troubles  of earthly  empires….   From
  this conception  of the American future the sense of its
  having problems  to solve  was blissfully  absent; there
  were  no  difficulties  in  the  programme,  no  looming
  complication, no rocks ahead.”[14]

Right around that year of 1879, however, responsible people
in responsible posts in the United States began to notice
that the heretofore friendly strategic environment was in
rapid flux.  The industrial revolution was spreading through
Europe and was launched in Japan.  Revolutions in commerce,
shipping, and communications were forging a global economic
and military arena, as symbolized by bulk cargo oceanic
steamships, the trans-Atlantic telegraph cable, the
Transcontinental Railroad and Suez Canal of 1869, and the
shift in 1876 of the global futures market for cereals from
Danzig to the Chicago Board of Trade.  In the decades to
come Britain and her many new challengers for naval and
colonial power bumped up against U. S. interests and spheres
of influence.  The time had come to institutionalize grand
strategy.

Chief among the responsible people who did so were Commodore
Stephen B. Luce, who founded the Naval War College in 1884,
Captain A. T. Mahan whom Luce recruited to teach the
influence of sea power on history, Secretary of the Navy
Benjamin Tracy who challenged Congress in 1890 to fund a
modern two-ocean navy, the magnates of steel mills and
shipyards who built the United States’ first military-
industrial complex, and Progressive publicists ranging from
pastor Josiah Strong to politician Albert Beveridge, press
mogul William Randolph Hearst, and pundit Herbert Croly.
Thanks to all the above most Americans took in stride the
Yankee imperialism beginning in 1898.  That era’s “great
equation” of federal policies to promote defense, exports,
sustainable growth, conservation, assimilation of
immigrants, free enterprise with measures to check its worst
abuses, and both secular and Social Gospel safety nets
amounted to the United States’ first articulated grand
strategy, perhaps best personified by Theodore
Roosevelt.[15]   The only aspect of that strategy that did
not serve the nation well was its humanitarian, “white man’s
burden” notion to the effect that the American people
possessed the calling, the means, and the wisdom to uplift
foreign cultures.

What is more, that nation- or state-building component
explains why I also deemed Progressive Imperialism the first
in a new category of foreign policy traditions.  For over
the course of the twentieth century U. S. policy elites,
perceiving their nation increasingly threatened by wars and
revolutions in a shrinking, global arena, ceased trying to
keep the outside world from shaping their nation and instead
began trying to reshape the world.  The next new tradition
was Wilsonianism which spiritualized and universalized the
local, partly strategic humanitarian crusades of Progressive
Imperialism and purported to do for the world what the
United States had manifestly been unable to do for Cuba or
the Philippines.  Being essentially utopian, Wilsonianism
was a grievous temptation and failure after both world wars.
The upshot was another tradition, Containment, which proved
slow, costly, and sometimes morally compromising.  But since
it was grounded in realism and periodically renewed by
serious grand strategy – for instance, during the first
terms of Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan – Containment
prevailed.[16]  The final new tradition, which sometimes
stood alone but always co-existed with the others, was what
I call Global Meliorism, the idea that the United States has
not just a destiny as an exemplar, but a mission as an
actor, to bestow peace, prosperity, human rights, and
freedom as the American people understand those terms on the
entire world.  From Herbert Hoover to Jimmy Carter to George
W. Bush national leaders have repeatedly formulated (or at
least justified) grand strategies on the basis of global
meliorist ideology.  Hoover said the way to fight Communism
in Russia was with food, not with guns.  Kennedy’s and
Johnson’s “best and brightest” said the way to defeat
Communism in the Third World was to win the hearts and minds
of South Vietnamese by offering them a better social and
political revolution.  George W. Bush said the way to defeat
terrorism in the Muslim world was to drain the swamps of
despair and disaffection by democratizing the Middle East.
(Tony Blair, even now, spurns the expediency of a
Machiavelli, Bismarck, and by implication Thatcher and
Reagan, in favor of militant idealism because, he says, our
cause “is just, right, and the only way the future of the
world can work.”[17])

My list of nineteenth and twentieth century U.S. foreign
policy traditions – given a sufficiently liberal definition
of terms – would seem to support the contention that the
United States has a rich and varied experience with grand
strategy.  Its people possessed, if perhaps somewhat
intuitively, a de facto grand strategy that not only ensured
the nation spectacular growth, but was so low-maintenance as
to be almost imperceptible beyond the tiny Departments of
State, War, and Navy.  In the latter nineteenth century the
nation designed a de jure grand strategy that required more
vigorous mobilization of federal resources to manage an
increasingly urban industrial society at home and militant
imperial rivalries abroad.

What followed was an era of global turmoil that began in
1898, escalated around 1911 with the Chinese and Mexican
revolutions, turned total upon U.S. entry into the world war
in 1917, and has for all practical purposes never ended.
The American people hoped the era of global turmoil had
ended during the 1920s, again in 1945-46, and again in the
1990s.  But each time new threats and opportunities
emanating from abroad compelled-or at least seemed to
compel-the U.S. government to react, which meant it had to
make some kind of geopolitical reading as to what the
circumstances required.  Hence, the historical record would
seem to indicate, first, that the United States can and has
embraced grand strategies (even during the eras once scorned
as isolationist), second, that strategies based on realist
premises have been mostly fruitful, and third, that
strategies based on idealist premises have been mostly
abortive.[18]

           *     *     *     *     *     *     *

Robert Kagan, the neoconservative heavyweight, does not
agree.  Indeed, he is devoting years to a two-volume history
of U.S. foreign relations seemingly to debunk
interpretations such as my own — albeit without so much as
a footnote to the scholarship he dismisses. Dangerous
Nation, Kagan’s first volume, covers the century down to
1898 during which neutrality, unilateralism, and reticence
seemed to characterize U.S. foreign policy.  On the
contrary, Kagan labors to argue, the American people have
believed ever since their nation’s inception in their
mission to liberate the whole human race, not just by
example but exertion abroad.  In short, George Washington
was a neo-con.[19]  The sometimes explicit, but always
implicit message of Kagan’s books and columns is that the
true and abiding U.S. grand strategy is to export democracy,
free markets, and human rights in what amounts to universal
regime-change.  Now, there are prophecies of the Kingdom of
Heaven on earth where swords are beat into plowshares and
lions lie down with lambs.  For a few years after the Cold
War there were also Hegelian prophecies of an end to history
thanks to the ideas that conquered the world.[20]  But grand
strategy is not usually thought of as a faith-based
initiative.  Or does Kagan really believe the U.S.
government knows how to pacify and develop Fallujah or
Kandahar?  If so, he ought to inspect how little billions of
dollars in urban renewal have achieved over forty years in
the United States’ own inner cities.  What is more, even if
such Global Meliorism, with or without guns, were a viable
option for terrorist sanctuaries under U.S. occupation, what
strategic relevance can nation-building theory possibly have
for such sources of geopolitical angst as Iran, China, and
Russia?

Andrew Bacevich disagrees with my interpretation of the U.S.
foreign policy traditions and grand strategies for the
opposite reason than Kagan.  While agreeing with us that
American isolationism is a myth, Bacevich rejects both my
emphasis on geopolitics and Kagan’s emphasis on ideology in
favor of an economic interpretation.  Indeed, his paleo-
conservative critique of what he calls the new U. S.
militarism and empire revives the New Left revisionism of
William Appleman Williams.  That “Wisconsin” or “Open Door”
school was not strictly Marxist, but it did advance a mono-
causal economic theory for what Williams called the tragedy
of U. S. diplomacy.   The real motive for U.S. foreign
policy during all eras of history was not security or
liberty, but the capitalist appetite for new markets,
resources, and customers, at home and increasingly abroad.
So the American Dream was real, but therein lay tragedy
because in order to meet the growing expectations of a
growing population the United States was ineluctably drawn
to imperialism that belied its liberationist rhetoric.
Keenly aware of the consumerism and seductive advertising
lurking behind this national tragedy, Bacevich blames the
United States’ grand strategic folly on the iron triangle of
business, political, and military elites who alone benefit
from the nation’s peripatetic crusades.  Indeed, the
statistics he cites on U. S. debt and over-extension suggest
a Ponzi scheme at the end of its tether.  In sum, the United
States has indeed pursued a grand strategy ever since 1776.
But far from being ideological, benign, and destined to
triumph, as Kagan suggests, it is material, malign, and
destined to ruin.[21]

Christopher Layne, a paleo-conservative political scientist
of libertarian leanings, is just as critical of U. S.
imperial overstretch.  But his excavation in search of the
roots of our strategic overstretch and malaise discovers
them, not in the post 9/11 era where crusading neocons
lurked, nor in the post-Cold War era where the Lexus and
Olive Tree glistened.  On the contrary, Layne spies an
essential continuity in U. S. grand strategy after and
before 9/11, after and before the entire Cold War, even
after and before World War II.  He identifies the abiding
U.S. grand strategy as one of “extra-regional hegemony” and
locates its roots in the planning the Roosevelt
administration initiated in 1940 and brought to maturity by
1944-45.  What FDR’s wartime brain trust, both civilian and
military, were tasked to do and did, was to draft the
blueprints for  U. S. dominance over the security,
economics, and ideologies of Europe, the Middle East, and
East Asia, well before Soviet intransigence gave them the
added incentive of Containment.

Political science theories would not have predicted such
behavior, given the lessons of history about the cost, risk,
and ultimate futility of quests for hegemony.  But the
United States had the means and opportunity to bid for
hegemony, and the Open Door (here Layne parallels Bacevich)
provided the motive.  The foreign policy and business
establishments in the United States concluded from the era
of the world wars that the nation’s core values of liberty,
peace, and ever-greater prosperity could never be truly
secure until democracy and open markets prevailed
everywhere.  So they manipulated American politics and
institutions to promote hegemony through global engagement,
albeit under the guise of anti-hegemonic Deterrence,
Modernization, Democratic or Liberal Regime theory.
Eisenhower alone opposed the hegemonic consensus, asserts
Layne, but he was isolated even within his own
administration.  The upshot, since the Realist theory of
international relations is valid, was that U.S. hegemony
invariably conjured into being opponents while obliging the
imperial power to wage perpetual wars in the name of
perpetual peace (if only to purchase the continued loyalty
of clients), even where U.S. interests were only marginally
engaged.  So whereas the post-9/11 wars in the Muslim world
might have driven the United States to the limits of its
financial and military strength, such a denouement was
inevitable for a nation pursuing a grand strategy based on
the delusion that empire pays for itself.  Layne concludes
with a survey of the grand strategies now available to the
United States – Hegemony, Selective Engagement, Offshore
Balancing, and Isolationism – and argues that the only one
that would honestly fulfill the criteria of grand strategy
with regard to priorities, ends, means, economy,
asymmetrical advantage, and acceptable risk is Offshore
Balancing.  He would terminate U.S. security treaties with
NATO, Japan, and South Korea, cease pestering China and
Russia about their internal affairs, stand offshore of the
Persian Gulf, and launch a crash R&D program to escape
dependence on foreign oil.  In sum, he recommends a return
to the pre-1917 era of U.S. grand strategy.[22]

That so many analysts of the Realist school of international
relations have soured on U.S. military assertion abroad,
even in the wake of the first attack on the United States
since Pearl Harbor, says plenty about how unpersuasive U.S.
strategy has become.  Barry Posen, Stephen Van Evera, and
Stephen Walt, like Chris Layne former students of Kenneth
Waltz, have all pleaded for a grand strategy based on
restraint.  So, too, has Colin Dueck, who characterized
American strategic culture as uniquely prone to utopian
ambitions and universal commitments sold to the public with
lofty rhetoric and the promise of minimal cost, or “limited
liability.”  Thus, writes Dueck, “It was an illusion to
think that a stable, secure, and democratic Iraq could arise
without a significant long-term U.S. investment of both
blood and treasure….  But even after 9/11, the preference
for limited liability in strategic affairs continued to
weigh heavily on Bush.”  The Administration really believed
Rumsfeld’s boast that 9/11 gave America another World War II
sort of opportunity “to refashion the world.”  Believing
that siren’s song, President Bush proceeded to replicate the
worst features of Liberal Internationalism by “pursuing a
set of extremely ambitious and idealistic foreign policy
goals without initially providing the full or proportionate
means to achieve those goals.  In this sense, it must be
said, George W. Bush was very much a Wilsonian.”[23]

Dueck’s historical survey echoes Layne’s list of strategic
choices.  Following World War I, the United States could
have opted for engagement through the League of Nations,
disengagement, or limited engagement in the European balance
of power (military alliance with France and Britain).  After
World War II, the United States had four options:
disengagement, rollback of Communism, an amicable spheres-
of-influence deal with Stalin, or worldwide containment.
After the Cold War, the United States could have chosen
disengagement, balance of power, liberal internationalism,
or hegemony.   In every case, Dueck argues, the United
States opted for limited-liability strategies and, in the
wake of Iraq, are likely to do so again.  Hence, he
concludes, “the choice between a strategy of primacy and a
strategy of liberal internationalism, which currently seems
to characterize public debate over U.S. foreign policy, is
almost beside the point.  Neither strategy will work if
Americans are unwilling to incur the full costs and risks
that are implied in either case.”[24]

           *     *     *     *     *     *     *

If the gloom-sayers are even partially right it would seem
the United States has no good grand strategic options at
present.  Indeed, we may have none at all given that the
global financial meltdown can only reinforce our “cheap
hawk” proclivities, given that the Wilsonian moralistic
conceit so dear to the nation’s self-image obliges U.S.
foreign policy to be (or pretend to be) a crusade to abolish
grand strategy, given that our Constitution mandates
frequent turnover in the executive branch, given that our
checked and balanced, multi-branched system of government is
either spastic or strait-jacketed by design, and given that
those executive bureaucracies charged with strategic
planning often seem more interested in thwarting each other
than America’s enemies.  Just consider the sobering
testimony offered by two smart, experienced veterans of
strategic planning, Richard Betts and Leslie Gelb.
According to Betts, no government, not least the United
States, can really “do” grand strategy because nobody can
accurately forecast the costs of strategic choices, or
predict the outcomes of alternate choices, or determine the
variables and stakes in a given competition or war, or
control for the Clausewitzian friction and fog of battles
both military and bureaucratic, or predict (much less
counter) the reactions of adversaries, or surmount the
Tocquevillian incompetence and impatience of democracies.
According to Gelb, strategic planning can perversely work
too well!  In a large democracy like the United States, he
observed during the Vietnam War, the process of bargaining
among agencies and with the Congress tends to privilege what
he called “Option B,” the sort of incremental half-measures
that meet the requirements of no coherent strategy at
all.[25]

Finally, as Drezner wrote after the 2006 elections
registered their verdict on President Bush’s crusade, the
American people found themselves back at square one waiting
for a new George Kennan who, like Samuel Beckett’s Godot,
never shows.   But if the gloom-sayers are right we are even
worse off than that because even the “greatest generation”
that was “present at the creation” of the Cold War
architecture was not the role model we want to believe.  For
instance, Dueck has denounced the “cheap hawkery” that made
the Truman Doctrine a risible bluff until the Korean War
(itself partly a product of U. S. blunders).  John Lewis
Gaddis has long argued that NSC 68, the document that
allegedly reversed the “cheap hawkery,” was itself a deeply
flawed blueprint for strategy.[26]  Gaddis even regards
Kennan’s concept of Containment to have been myopic and
idiosyncratic.  Thomas Wright goes so far as to indict the
whole 1940s cohort and believes the only lessons to be
learned are from their mistakes.[27]   To be sure,
Eisenhower’s 1953 strategic planning “for the long haul,”
expertly documented by Bowie and Immerman, enjoys a long
overdue exemplary status.  But however commendable
Eisenhower’s process, the “Strategies of Containment” are
only of limited relevance because the correlation of forces,
nature of the adversaries, and asymmetrical strengths and
vulnerabilities were so different then than now.  Just
contrast Paul Nitze’s analysis of Soviet intentions and
capabilities in the 1950s with Andrew Krepinevich’s “seven
deadly scenarios” in the 2010s.[28]  What is more, even
though Containment ultimately brought the Cold War to a
triumphant end without undermining our values, its cost in
terms of lives, treasure, and economic opportunities was far
more than the American people are willing or able to
pledge.[29]

Not surprisingly, therefore, Drezner rejects all the
strategic concepts advanced by the self-nominated candidates
for Kennan’s mantle, including Jeffrey Legro, Michael
Mandelbaum, Anatol Lieven and John Hulsman, John Ikenberry
and Anne-Marie Slaughter, and Benjamin Page and Marshall
Bouton.[30]  One could add to that list Francis Fukuyama and
Amitai Etzioni among others.  Why do all these authoritative
authors fall flat?  Because none says anything very
original.  They just reflexively damn the Bush
administration’s hubris and poor execution while reaffirming
human rights, democracy, and an open world economy as the
proper goals of American strategy.  Invariably, the result
is some rhetorical hybrid reminiscent of Dr. Doolittle’s
fanciful Pushmi-pullyu, the beast with two heads and no rump
We are told, for instance, to be visionary yet pragmatic
(Legro), ethical yet realistic (Lieven and Hulsman),
realistic yet Wilsonian (Fukuyama), moral yet muscular
(Eztioni), focused yet ambiguous and flexible (Drezner
himself).[31]

World weary as I am, having witnessed so many disappointing
and disillusioning cycles of politics and foreign policy,
having acquired so much vicarious experience of human folly
and forgetfulness from my study of history, I nurture no
hope that a great burst of grand strategic creativity lies
just ahead.  Oh, this or a subsequent administration may
make institutional reforms, such as insisting that the
National Security Strategy document address resources and
means instead of just goals, or reinventing the Eisenhower
NSC structure with its Planning and Operations Coordinating
boards.  But otherwise, I incline to the wisdom of Harvey
Sicherman.  Whenever I wax imaginative about the clever
schemes of statesmen, past or present, Harvey assures me
that I am giving them way too much credit for knowing what
they are doing or being able to do it.  So whatever buzz
words become the shorthand for a new American strategy, I
expect the most we can hope for is that our national
security agencies and their consulting firms just post on
their walls the business strategist Richard Rumelt’s list of
ten strategic blunders and meditate on them every day.[32]
They are:

  1. Failure to recognize or take seriously the fact that
  resources are scarce

  2. Mistaking strategic goals for strategy

  3. Failure to recognize or state the strategic problem

  4. Choosing unattainable or poor strategic goals

  5. Failure to define the challenge competitively

  6. Making false presumptions about one’s competence

  7. Loss of focus due to too many stakeholders and
  bureaucratic processes to satisfy

  8. Inaccurately determining one’s areas of competitive
  advantage

  9. Failure to realize that few people have the cognitive
  skills needed for strategy
  10. Failure to understand the adversary.

I would add to this list one more:

  11. Failure to understand ourselves.

In his famous “Silent Majority speech” President Richard
Nixon assured listeners that North Vietnam could not defeat
the United States, “only Americans can do that.”  I suspect
that were we to run our minds over the whole sweep of U.S.
diplomatic and military history we could readily trace our
nation’s disasters and wasteful detours in good part to our
own nation’s foibles.  They are legion.  We are human.  But
chief among them is a tendency to be so dazzled by our own
destiny and morality that we cannot see ourselves as others
see us.  So even as the American people must figure out how
to frustrate our terrorist enemies and Great Power rivals in
the era to come, so must we hearken to Edmund Burke.  “Among
precautions against ambition,” he warned, “it may not be
amiss to take one precaution against our own.  I must fairly
say, I dread our own power and own ambition; I dread our
being too much dreaded…. [W]e may say that we shall not
abuse this astonishing and hitherto unheard of power.  But
every other nation will think we shall abuse it.  It is
impossible but that, sooner or later, this state of things
must produce a combination against us which may end in our
ruin.[33]

Grand strategy, whatever other ambitions it may serve,
cannot aim at the abolition or obviation of grand strategy
itself.  That is why U.S. strategists, while devoting all
their imagination to the prevention of specific dangers,
cannot be about eliminating the possibility of deadly
scenarios altogether.  To cite a Samuel Huntington metaphor
told me by Jim Kurth, the most a wise statesman can do is
imagine his ship of state on an infinite sea, with no port
behind and no destination ahead, his sole responsibility
being to weather the storms certain to come, and keep the
ship on an even keel so long as he has the bridge.

Of Related Interest: For previous essays in The Telegram
series, visit: http://www.fpri.org/telegram/

For McDougall’s FPRI essays, visit:

http://www.fpri.org/byauthor.html#mcdougall

———————————————————-
Notes

[1] Angelo M. Codevilla, Advice to War Presidents: A
Remedial Course in Statecraft (New York: Basic Books, 2009),
p. 273.

[2] Walter A. McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State: The
American Encounter with the World Since 1776 (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1997), p. 220.

[3] See inter alia Aaron L. Friedberg, “Strengthening
Strategic Planning,” Washington Quarterly 31:1 (2007): 47-
60; Rupert Smith, The Utility of Force: The Art of War in
the Modern World (New York: Knopf, 2007); Andrew F.
Krepinevich and Barry D. Watts, Regaining Strategic
Competence: Strategy for the Long Haul (Washington, D.C.:
Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2009); and
Codevilla, Advice to War Presidents.  For a standard classic
defining the field in general see John M. Collins, Grand
Strategy: Principles and Practices (Annapolis, Md.: Naval
Institute Press, 1983).

[4] George W. Bush, “Second Inaugural Address” (Jan. 20,
2007) accessed Sep. 29, 2009) at

http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres67.html.

[5] Daniel W. Drezner, ed., Avoiding Trivia: The Role of
Strategic Planning in American Foreign Policy (Washington,
D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2009), pp. 3-4.

[6] Aaron L. Friedberg, “Strengthening U.S. Strategic
Planning, in ibid., pp. 84-97.

[7] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York:
Vintage, 1945), pp. 240-45; for other editions just see
volume 1, chapter 13.

[8] Ibid., pp. 450-52 (volume 1, chapter 18).

[9] For instance, see

http://zenhuber.blogspot.com/2009/09/another-krock-of-

krepinevich.html

[10] STRATFOR Geopolitical Diary, “America’s Indivisible
Imperatives” (July 2, 2009), accessed July 22, 2009) at

http://www.stratfor.com/geopolitical_diary.

[11] The hardball war and diplomacy of the Polk
administration that belied the benign, idealistic “Manifest
Destiny” school of U.S. expansion, is summarized by
McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State, pp. 76-98, and
described in depth by Thomas R. Hietala, Manifest Design:
American Exceptionalism and Empire (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University, 2003), and David M. Pletcher, The Diplomacy of
Annexation: Texas, Oregon, and the Mexican War (Columbia:
University of Missouri, 1973).

[12] Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers
(New York: Random House, 1987), pp. 194-346.

[13] Krepinevich and Watts, Regaining Strategic Competence,
which cites in turn Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won (New
York: Norton, 1995), and Andrew Rogers, Masters and
Commanders: How Roosevelt, Churchill, Marshall and Alan
Brooke Won the War in the West (London: Allen Lane, 2005).

[14] Henry James, Hawthorne (New York: Harper & Bros.,
1879), pp. 142-43.

[15] See the Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press
publications by  Robert Seager, Alfred Thayer Mahan: The Man
and His Letters (1977), Robert G. Albion, Makers of Naval
Policy, 1798-1947 (1980), and James C. Bradford, ed.,
Admirals of the New Steel Navy (1990); also Richard D.
Challener, Admirals, Generals, and American Foreign Policy
1898-1914 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University, 1973),
Richard H. Collin, Theodore Roosevelt, Culture, Diplomacy,
and Expansion: A New View of American Imperialism (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1985), and Walter A.
McDougall, Let the Sea Make a Noise: A History of the North
Pacific From Magellan to MacArthur (New York: Basic Books,
1993).

[16] On Eisenhower’s Solarium exercise and the drafting of
the New Look blueprint NSC 162/2 of Fall 1953; see Robert R.
Bowie and Richard H. Immerman, Waging Peace: How Eisenhower
Shaped an Enduring Cold War Strategy (New York: Oxford
University, 1998).

[17]  Tony Blair, “Doctrine of the International Community:
Ten Years Later,” Yale Journal of International Affairs 4:2
(2009): pp. 5-14. Blair spoke in Chicago in April 1999 and
again April 2009 when he declared “I remain adamantly in the
same spot, metaphorically as well as actually, of ten years
ago, that evening in this city.  The statesmanship that went
before regarded politics as a Bismarck or Machiavelli
regarded it.  It’s all a power play; a matter, not of right
and wrong, but of who’s on our side, and our side defined by
our interests, not our values….  I never thought such
politics very sensible or practical.  I think it even less
so now….”

[18] But wait, you may say, was not isolationism the
“default mode” of the United States whenever a clear and
present danger was not evident or, as in the 1930s, even
when a clear and present danger should have been evident?
That is what proponents of interventionist schools, be they
Progressive Imperialist, Wilsonian or Global Meliorist, want
us to believe.  If we are not with them on some ambitious,
always moral, foreign commitment, then we are selfish,
stupid isolationists.  But beginning with my research on the
post-World War I era for my first book way back in the 1970s
and culminating with my research for Promised Land, Crusader
State in the mid-1990s, I was forced to conclude that U.S.
foreign policy was never isolationist except for the years
1933-38.  Indeed, the Republican administrations of the
1920s pursued a highly articulated grand strategy with
sophisticated military, diplomatic, financial, and political
components.  It was wrecked by the Great Depression, but
diplomatic historians now agree that Charles Evans Hughes,
Frank Kellogg, Herbert Hoover, J. P. Morgan, etc., conceived
of a strategy just as liberal and far more effective than
Woodrow Wilson’s.

[19] Robert Kagan, Dangerous Nation (New York: Knopf, 2006).
On the Founders see Kagan, “Neocon Nation: Neconservatism,
c. 1776,” World Affairs 1, no. 2 (Spring 2008).

[20] See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last
Man (New York: Free Press, 1992), and Michael Mandelbaum,
The Ideas That Conquered the World: Peace, Democracy, and
Free Markets in the Twenty-first Century (New York: Public
Affairs, 2002).

[21] Bacevich’s scholarly evolution seems to have been
inspired by his fierce loyalty to the U.S. military which in
turn bred righteous anger over the damage done by the
excessive demands made on the army and marines in particular
since 9/11.  Compare his American Empire: The Realities and
Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University, 2002), to The New American Militarism: How
Americans Are Seduced into War (New York: Oxford University,
2005), and The Limits of Power: The End of American
Exceptionalism (New York: Metropolitan, 2008).  His theory
about the elites manipulating grand strategy is reminiscent
not only of William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of
American Diplomacy, rev. ed. (1962), but of his
contemporary, the sociologist C. Wright Mills, The Power
Elite (New York: Oxford University, 1956).

[22] Christopher Layne, The Peace of Illusions: American
Grand Strategy from 1940 to the Present (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University, 2006).  Geir Lundestad’s critical review
at www.politicalreviewnet.com/polrev/reviews/DIPH/R_145_2
faults Layne for depicting U.S. strategy over many decades
as one-dimensional and invulnerable to domestic political
resistance.  If so, then how can his recommended alternative
of offshore-balancing be a realistic alternative?  He also
faults Layne for underestimating the seriousness of the
Soviet confrontation and European eagerness for a U. S.
commitment.  Lundestad himself has referred to the U.S.-led
Western bloc as “empire by invitation.”

[23] Colin Dueck, Reluctant Crusaders: Power, Culture, and
Change in American Grand Strategy (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton, 2006); quote on p. 162.

[24] Ibid., p. 171.

[25] Richard K. Betts, “Is Strategy an Illusion?”
International Security 25, no. 2 (Fall 2000): pp. 5-50;
Leslie H. Gelb, The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked
(Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1979).

[26] See the Gaddis commentary in Ernest R. May, ed.,
American Cold War Strategy: Interpreting NSC 68 (Boston: St
Martin’s, 1993), p. 146.  He asserts NSC 68 was not a
strategy at all, or else a poor one, because it made all
interests “vital” and thus made possible negotiations “only
on the basis of Soviet capitulations.”  That in turn,
transferred the power to define American interests to the
Soviets themselves and made inevitable the militarization of
an ideological conflict.

[27] Thomas Wright, “Learning the Right Lessons from the
1940s,” in Drezner, Avoiding Trivia, pp.125-36.  The lessons
are: 1. Be flexible because “consistency” can lead to over-
extension and imprudence; 2. Don’t neglect bilateral
diplomacy for which institutions are no substitute; 3.
Secure and retain domestic legitimacy without which no
strategy can be sustained; 4. Prioritize problems and try to
solve them rather than over-emphasize process and
institutions; 5. Manage expectations and appeal to the
President for support.

[28] Andrew F. Krepinevich, 7 Deadly Scenarios: A Military
Futurist Explores War in the 21st Century (New York: Bantam,
2009).

[29] Derek Leebaert, The Fifty-Year Wound: The True Price of
America’s Cold War Victory (Boston: Little, Brown, 2002).

[30] Daniel W. Drezner, “The Grandest Strategy of Them All,”
The Washington Post (Dec. 17, 2006); Drezner is author of
All Politics is Global: Explaining International Regulatory
Regimes (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University, 2007).

[31] Legro, Rethinking the World: Great Power Strategies and
International Order (Ithaca, N.Y.:Cornell University, 2005),
defines the prerequisites for a paradigm shift in world
views, arguing that they must be visionary but also
pragmatic insofar as they recommend concrete steps to be
taken.  Mandelbaum, The Case for Goliath: How America Acts
as the World’s Government in the Twenty-first Century (New
York: Public Affairs, 2005), insists that the United States
is the indispensable power, hence it cannot afford to starve
its military of resources in favor of feeding its oil
addiction and social entitlements.  Lieven and Hulsman,
Ethical Realism and American Foreign Policy (New York:
Pantheon, 2006), argues a Realist case said to reflect the
ethical tradition of Kennan, Hans Morgenthau, and Reinhold
Niebuhr.  American strategy should refocus on strengthening
the home front and leading the world by example.  Fukuyama,
America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the
Neoconservative Legacy (New Haven: Yale University, 2006),
calls for a “realistic Wilsonianism” expressed in a “multi-
multilateralism” of overlapping international institutions
rather than unilateral militarism.  Ikenberry and Slaughter,
Forging a World of Liberty Under Law (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton Project on National Security, 2006) is billed as a
“collective X article.”  The authors stress international
law and institutions to channel U.S. power and a “concert of
democracies” to promote human rights.  Etzioni, Security
First: For a Muscular, Moral Foreign Policy (New Haven, Ct.:
Yale University, 2007), criticizes democratization and
nation-building as far too expensive, uncertain, and
ineffective to warrant priority. The United States ought
instead to seek legitimacy for its exertion of power through
multilateral enforcement institutions such as the
Proliferation Security Initiative.  Page and Bouton, The
Foreign Policy Disconnect: What Americans Want From Our
Leaders But Don’t Get, (Chicago: University of Chicago,
2006) is an outlier insofar as it agrees with Christopher
Layne that U.S. business and foreign policy elites conspire
to frustrate the common sense of the American people.  But
far from being libertarian, these authors advocate economic
nationalism in the name of “fair trade.”

[32] The ten “common strategy sins” as presented by Rumelt
in a CSBA seminar on Sept. 25, 2007, cited by Krepinevich
and Watts, Regaining Strategic Competence, pp. 33-34.

[33] Burke quoted by Layne, Peace of Illusions, p. 204.  The
obverse of this collective self-satisfaction is what Toynbee
called ‘the mirage of immortality.”  At the height of a
civilization its members “are prone to regard it, not as a
night’s shelter in the wilderness, but as the Promised Land,
the goal of human endeavors” and thus invite their own
destruction from decadence within and/or attack from
without.  See Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of
Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1996), p. 301.  Is America or the West an
exception?  Huntington cites Matthew Melko, The Nature of
Civilizations (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1969), p. 155, who
asks, “First, is Western Civilization a new species, in a
class by itself, incomparably different from all other
civilizations that have ever existed?  Second, does its
worldwide expansion threaten (or promise) to end the
possibility of development of all other civilizations?”  If
the likely answer to either is no, then we had better guard
against imagining ourselves immortal.

Foreign Policy Research Institute
www.fpri.org
Temple University
Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy

http://www.temple.edu/cenfad/GrandStrategy.htm

The Telegram
Newsletter of the Hertog Program in Grand Strategy
No. 3, April 2010

———————————————————-
Copyright     Foreign      Policy     Research     Institute
(http://www.fpri.org/). You  may forward  this essay  as you
like provided that it is sent in its entirety and attributed
to FPRI.  , provided  that you  send  it  in  its  entirety.
Contact FPRI for permission to repost it at another website.

———————————————————-

FPRI, 1528 Walnut Street, Suite 610, Philadelphia, PA 19102-3684
  For more information, contact Alan Luxenberg at 215-732-
    3774, ext. 105, email fpri@fpri.org, or visit us at
                       www.fpri.org.