Pity the leaders of great powers who are burdened with the challenge of grand strategy. Grand strategy is a tricky business at the best of times, requiring the balancing of demands and interests in both the international and domestic arenas across numerous military, economic, and diplomatic issues. Leaders must make decisions about grand strategy with incomplete and often erroneous but nevertheless voluminous information, which in turn amplifies the effects of bias and ideology as means of sorting and prioritizing information.
Yet as the editors and contributors to the present volume note, grand strategy is sometimes more difficult inasmuch as the international environment is sometimes more or less permissive, even for great powers. In the years between the twentieth-century’s two world wars, the focus of this volume, the environment varied from permissive in the 1920s to restrictive in the 1930s. Looming over the entire period was the legacy of the Great War, which shattered empires across Europe and brought to prominence ideologies that were radically different from previous governing philosophies.
It follows, then, that examining how leaders sought to craft grand strategy during this difficult era will be fruitful for understanding subsequent efforts to create grand strategy. It is doubly appealing, as previously unavailable government records have revealed much more detail about how and why certain decisions were made. Moreover, the editors and contributors note that conventional wisdom about this period, such as the danger of appeasement as at Munich in 1938, has cast a long shadow over subsequent decisions about grand strategy.
The Challenge of Grand Strategy and its substantive chapters are organized around four questions. First, what is the conventional wisdom about a particular issue (e.g., that French grand strategy was almost purely coercive in attempting to prevent a reemergence of a threat from Germany)? Second, what do new conceptual approaches reveal about the conventional wisdom? Third, what evidence, much of it newly available, supports the new approach? Fourth, what does the foregoing illuminate about current challenges and scholarship on grand strategy?
The overall approach used in the volume to answer these four questions is qualitative and historical rather than quantitative. As the editors note, the focus is on the interplay of domestic and international factors, which is consonant with the research paradigm known as neoclassical realism. This is unsurprising as the editors have previously collaborated on a 2009 volume entitled Neoclassical Realism, The State, and Foreign Policy (which compels me to note I also reviewed), making the present volume a quasi-sequel. The individual chapters are, by and large, excellent examples of qualitative social science, combining historical sensitivity with careful theoretical arguments.
While the grand strategy of each great power (France, Britain, Japan, Germany, the United States, and the Soviet Union) is touched upon in at least one chapter, Britain emerges as the most central, as British decisions had the broadest ramifications for the other great powers. For example, as the chapters by Peter Jackson and Scott Silverstone demonstrate, France’s grand strategy was highly dependent on Britain. Likewise, in his chapter on Soviet grand strategy, Mark Haas makes clear that the lack of alignment between Britain and the Soviet Union contributed greatly to “the broken balance” of the interwar years.
The centrality of Britain to the overall balance of power and development of grand strategies during the period in turn highlights the importance of understanding why Britain behaved in the way it did. One of the main conventional wisdoms decimated in this volume is any belief that Britain’s leaders were feckless and naive in responding to the challenge of Nazi Germany. As David Edelstein admirably sums up in his concluding chapter, the other contributors to the volume demonstrate that while Britain’s leaders always accepted that Germany would reemerge as a great power, and were therefore not unduly alarmed by the remilitarization of the Rhineland, they soon came to see Germany as a significant threat. Yet, confronted by a less permissive international environment, the need to defend a globe-spanning empire, and financial constraints, Britain had to temporize and prioritize its response to this threat. Norrin Ripsman and Jack Levy demonstrate in their chapter that appeasement, far from spineless capitulation, was intended to buy time for British rearmament. Steven Lobell’s chapter illustrates the effect of prioritization, with Britain focusing scarce resources on air power, which British leaders considered the most pressing weakness with regard to Germany. This latter point is perhaps one of the most salient for current grand strategy, as the United States faces similar global challenges in an era of more limited resources, with similar prioritization required.
There was ambivalence in Britain’s view of the German threat, however, which Ripsman and Levy note briefly and which Haas has described in more detail in The Ideological Origins of Great Power Politics (2005). Particularly in the first half of the 1930s, the fear of the spread of communism was at least as worrying as German rearmament. This fear limited British incentives to act preventively against Germany, which British leaders believed would become more vulnerable to communism after another war. This specter of communism hung heavily over Britain as labor unrest, which had threatened the stability of the country until temporarily suspended during the Great War, reemerged in the interwar years. While the Soviet Union was not the cause of this unrest, it provided moral and, in some cases, more than moral support to the British proletariat.
This concern about internal stability and security underpinned British antipathy toward the Soviet Union, which, as Haas describes, was equaled by Soviet fear of capitalist encirclement. Indeed, the fear of communist subversion was substantially greater than the fear of pro-fascist movements inside Britain. Only relatively late in the interwar period did concern about the primarily external threat of Nazi Germany trump the primarily internal threat of communism. While this provides additional support for Haas’s emphasis on the importance of ideology for alliances, it also underscores that Soviet fears of British intentions were not pure paranoia.
Overall, this volume is a welcome addition to international relations theory, adding depth and nuance to views of great-power leaders struggling to craft grand strategy in challenging times. In addition to the specific insights derived from a reexamination of the interwar years, it provides a valuable template for scholars seeking to meld international relations theory with international history in other eras. As ever more historical material from the Cold War becomes available, a similar effort to apply new approaches and new evidence to conventional wisdom from that era will surely be both necessary and fruitful.
