If danger in the sphere of foreign affairs impels leaders toward strategy, the same is also true in the sphere of domestic affairs. And sometimes, clumsy leaders suddenly discover their states collapsing beneath them. In autocracies, they are overthrown in coups. 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. The world of domestic affairs is equally treacherous. Experts try to improve the quality of strategy, but the impulse for leaders to behave strategically is already there.īut here is the difficulty. These are the rudiments of grand strategy. Each decision must be driven by some calculation about ends and means, and about the implications for other decisions. The world is a turbulent and dangerous place, and leaders cannot ignore the sphere of foreign affairs without jeopardizing vital interests. Leaders are driven to strategy by force of circumstance. And even the best-laid plans can be thrown into confusion by events. But an inept strategist is still a strategist, just as a bad writer is still a writer. Some leaders try to behave strategically but are not very good at it. More importantly, the fact that the actual course of policy is erratic or ineffectual does not imply that leaders are neglecting strategy. Incrementalism and experimentalism are often a reasonable response to conditions of uncertainty and political polarization. More often, leaders tinker with the status quo, experiment, and lurch from crisis to crisis. Leaders are not visionaries, and they never maintain a steady course toward crisply defined goals. In the real world, they argue, proper coordination of domestic and international policies is all but impossible. Some critics say that theorizing about grand strategy bears little relationship to the way that decisions actually get made. #Grad cafe international affairs decision fullThus 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. After World War II, by contrast, the great powers were caught in a decades-long tussle for positional advantage. During the world wars, national leaders were concerned with actual war-fighting. Grand strategy was still concerned with mobilizing the full spectrum of societal resources. With the onset of the Cold War, the concept expanded again. Grand strategy, one writer explained in 1904, reckoned with “the whole armed force of the nation, ashore and afloat.” 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. In the 19th century, grand strategy was about the actual fighting of wars. “The basis of grand strategy,” other experts agreed in 1942, “is the reciprocal relationship between war and the society in which war occurs.” Liddell Hart defined grand strategy as a national policy guiding all aspects of social and economic activity toward the achievement of war aims. Erich Ludendorff argued, it followed that wartime planning should have similar scope. If victory in war depended on mobilization of the entire physical and moral forces of the nation, as Gen. With the advent of total war, the concept expanded. Grand strategy, one writer explained in 1904, reckoned with "the whole armed force of the nation, ashore and afloat." The real problem with grand strategy is that it is not grand enough. Some critics think that it has bloated so much that it is no longer useful - but they are wrong. Grand strategy is a concept familiar to experts on foreign policy and national security.
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