Since Yale’s Johnson-Brady Program in Grand Strategy was established in 2000, there has been an explosion of interest in the subject of grand strategy, reflected in an outpouring of books and articles by diplomatic historians and security studies scholars. Notable contributions on this topic have been made by Hal Brands, Colin Dueck, John Lewis Gaddis, Melvyn Leffler, John Mearsheimer, Barry Posen, Stephen Walt, and this writer.
This literature engages several key questions: What is grand strategy; that is, how should it be defined? What is the difference between grand strategy and military strategy? What grand strategy should the United States follow: primacy, deep engagement, offshore balancing, or restraint? Some scholars have posed intellectually subversive questions about whether grand strategy is an analytically useful concept. Thus, Brands asks in the title of his 2014 book, What Good Is Grand Strategy? And, in a coauthored Foreign Affairs article, David Edelstein and Ron Krebs wonder if grand strategy is a “delusional” concept (“Delusions of Grand Strategy: The Problems with Washington’s Planning Obsession,” 94(6), 2015).
In this interesting book, Ionut Popescu offers his own take on whether grand strategy can usefully serve as a guide for policymaking. He begins by laying out two ideal type approaches to grand strategy.
The first is what Popescu calls the Grand Strategy model, which conceives of grand strategy as “an overarching design that guides the nation’s foreign policy decisions toward the accomplishment of its most important goals” (p. 6). He says that the Grand Strategy model is dominant in both policymaking circles and in the field of security studies. The key features of this model are long-term planning, the careful delineation of policy objectives, and the matching of ends and means.
There is another way of thinking about grand strategy, however, what the author calls the Emergent Strategy model. This alternative model is borrowed from recent literature on business strategy. Here, he deserves credit for reaching beyond international relations and diplomatic history and bringing this literature to bear on the analysis of grand strategy.
Rather than conceptualizing grand strategy as a long-term policy design resulting from rigorous planning exercises, the Emergent Strategy model views grand strategy as the result of incremental decision making. This model holds that grand strategy is the outcome of adaptation and learning by policymakers, rather than the consequence of preset strategic plans. As Popescu puts it, the Emergent Strategy model argues that “successful strategies can form without being fully formulated in advance. Advocates of this school of thought are skeptical about the real world applicability of the Grand Strategy model of strategic planning, but they suggest that organizations can learn over time, thus allowing for coherent, consistent, and successful strategies to emerge.” (pp. 9–10; emphasis in original).
According to Popescu, the Grand Strategy and Emergent Strategy models present competing visions of how grand strategic policy is made. The former holds that “policymakers should engage in a deliberate strategic planning process aimed at analyzing various strategic options; they should set priorities by making trade-offs and then design a realistic plan to achieve their long-term goals by matching ends, ways, and means.” (p. 14). In contrast, the Emergent Strategy model focuses on short-term goals rather than long-term ones, because the further out in time that policymakers project, the more uncertain the future is. Rather than formulating a grand design and sticking to it, the Emergent Strategy paradigm emphasizes flexibility: “hedging one’s options with multiple ‘bets’ on the future, choosing the most adaptable investments, and relying on emergent learning to make the right choices down the road” (p. 14; emphasis in original).
Using a case study approach, Popescu tests competing hypotheses drawn respectively from the Grand Strategy and Emergent Strategy paradigms. Employing process-tracing methodology, he examines seven instances of post-1945 U.S. grand strategy: the origins of the early Cold War containment strategy; the globalization of containment resulting from NSC-68 and the Korean War; Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “New Look” strategy; the Richard Nixon–Henry Kissinger detente strategy; Ronald Reagan and the end of the Cold War; George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and the Post–Cold War era; and the George W. Bush administration’s so-called War on Terror.
Popescu makes an important point: Great power politics, indeed, is a realm of uncertainties: about other states’ intentions, and about the future distribution of power. Hence, as he correctly argues, rigid long-term grand strategic plans are unlikely to be successful. To do well, policymakers, like hockey teams, must be able to change on the fly if necessary, and adapt their grand strategy to the evolving realities of the international security environment. Popescu offers two key insights that will enrich how scholars think about—and policy-makers practice—grand strategy. First, in the real world, there is a feedback loop between the formulation of grand strategy and its implementation. Second, “formal strategic planning reviews rarely determine the future strategic course of the nation: the plans coming out of such exercises have at best a marginal impact on future decisions. Incremental policy decisions, early responses to crisis situations, and specific initiatives have a larger impact on long-term strategic success than far-sighted designs” (p. 19).
On these two points, the author’s argument will command wide agreement. Few scholars would argue that grand strategy practitioners are like chess grandmasters who are able to see multiple moves in advance. Grand strategy is too complex for that for several reasons. It is interactive because each great power’s grand strategy is affected by the actions of its rivals. It takes place at the intersection of geopolitics and domestic politics (and economics). It is produced, as the historian Stehen Kotkin has observed, by the interplay of agency and the international system’s structure. And grand strategy takes place under the shadow of war.
Successful grand strategies—and grand strategists—must therefore, as Popescu reminds us, be able to adjust to both unanticipated constraints and opportunities in the external environment. Few leading scholars believe that grand strategy is about rigidly applied “game plans.” But many would argue that grand strategy does require a conceptual road map to help policymakers navigate the competitive and conflictual world of great power politics. As Walt argues, grand strategy is a state’s theory of how to gain security for itself. As he and other leading scholars have argued, that theory requires policymakers to define the state’s interests, identify the main threats to those interests, and to balance (in Lippmanesque fashion) resources—which are always scarce—with commitments (a task the importance of which Popescu minimizes).
Emergent Strategy and Grands Strategy is not without its flaws. Discerning readers will note that the case studies on the Cold War reflect an orthodox view of the U.S.–Soviet rivalry, in which the U.S. championed liberal democracy and made—mostly—the right grand strategic decisions. They will also discern that Popescu implicitly embraces a neoconservative view both of the Cold War and contemporary events. An infusion of Michael Hogan, Michael Hunt, Melvyn Leffler, and even William Appleman Williams would have enriched Popescu’s case studies, compelling him to deal seriously with the issue of whether there were other, better policies that the United States could have followed after World War II.
To come to grips with the question of grand strategic alternatives, one must answer the question of where American grand strategy comes from. The Emergent Strategy model offers a vision of grand strategy by parthenogenesis, which overlooks the factors that explain the continuity in American grand strategy: liberal ideology, domestic political culture, and U.S. hard-power capabilities. Since 1945, the United States self-consciously has sought (as Paul Nitze put it in NSC-68) a “preponderance of power,” or what security studies scholars today call primacy.
There is a difference between the academic world of theory and the real world of policy. One of Popescu’s key arguments for the Emergent Grand Strategy paradigm is that it allows policymakers to learn and adapt. So one would hope, but this expectation is not supported by experience. For example, in embarking on its military adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, the George W. Bush administration demonstrated that it had learned nothing from the Vietnam debacle. In the real world , the Emergent Strategy paradigm’s theoretical virtues notwithstanding, it seems like the same old, same old with respect to grand strategy—and the attendant dangers of conflict with China, confrontation with Russia, forever wars in the Middle East, and fiscal–military overextension.
These concerns do not alter the fact that Emergent Strategy and Grand Strategy is a significant contribution to the literature. This book marks the entrance of an insightful new voice into the ongoing debate about the theory and practice of American grand strategy—a debate certain to intensify in coming years.
