ELIZABETH BORGWARDT, CHRISTOPHER M c KNIGHT NICHOLS, AND
ANDREW PRESTON
3
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DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190695668.001.0001
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To those we love and have lost recently Carolyn Nichols, Rodney Nichols, Kevin Preston
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Christopher McKnight Nichols and Andrew Preston
I. FRAMEWORKS
1. Getting Grand Strategy Right: Clearing Away Common Fallacies in the Grand Strategy Debate 29 Hal Brands
2. The Blob and the Mob: On Grand Strategy and Social Change 49 Beverly Gage
3. Turning the Tide: The Application of Grand Strategy to Global Health 63
Elizabeth H. Bradley and Lauren A. Taylor
II. HISTORICAL GRAND NARRATIVES
4. Extending the Sphere: A Federalist Grand Strategy 83
Charles Edel
5. Grand Strategy of the Master Class: Slavery and Foreign Policy from the Antebellum Era to the Civil War 106 Matthew Karp
6. A Useful Category of Analysis? Grand Strategy and US Foreign Relations from the Civil War through World War I 123 Katherine C. Epstein
7. Grand Strategies (or Ascendant Ideas) since 1919 143 David Milne
III. RECASTING CENTRAL FIGURES
8. Woodrow Wilson, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Beyond: American Internationalists and the Crucible of World War I 175
Christopher McKnight Nichols
9. Franklin Roosevelt, the New Deal, and Grand Strategy: Constructing the Postwar Order 201
Elizabeth Borgwardt
10. Foreign Policy Begins at Home: Americans, Grand Strategy, and World War II 218
Michaela Hoenicke Moore
11. National Security as Grand Strategy: Edward Mead Earle and the Burdens of World Power 238
Andrew Preston
12. The Misanthropy Diaries: Containment, Democracy, and the Prejudices of George Frost Kennan 254
David Greenberg
13. Implementing Grand Strategy: The Nixon-Kissinger Revolution at the National Security Council 272
William Inboden
14. George H. W. Bush: Strategy and the Stream of History 292
Jeffrey A. Engel
IV. NEW APPROACHES
15. Foreign Missions and Strategy, Foreign Missions as Strategy 311 Emily Conroy-Krutz
16. The Unbearable Whiteness of Grand Strategy 329
Adriane Lentz-Smith
17. Rival Visions of Nationhood: Immigration Policy, Grand Strategy, and Contentious Politics 346
Daniel J. Tichenor
18. Disastrous Grand Strategy: US Humanitarian Assistance and Global Natural Catastrophe 366
Julia F. Irwin
19. Denizens of a Center: Rethinking Early Cold War Grand Strategy
Ryan Irwin
20. Reproductive Politics and Grand Strategy 401
Laura Briggs
V. REFLECTIONS FROM THE AMERICAN CENTURY
21. Casualties and the Concept of Grandness: A View from the Korean War 427 Mary L. Dudziak
22. American Grand Strategy: How Grand Has It Been? How Much Does It Matter?
Fredrik Logevall
Acknowledgments
For their support of this project and the international conference at Oregon State University in 2016 that helped to generate this book, we thank the OSU College of Liberal Arts and Dean Larry Rodgers, the OSU School of History, Philosophy, and Religion, and Directors Ben Mutschler and Nicole von Germeten, as well as the OSU Center for the Humanities. We are very grateful for the support of Patrick and Vicki Stone, the Andrew Carnegie Corporation, and our other sponsors and collaborators. We want to recognize C-SPAN’s coverage of the conference, and we extend special thanks to Robert Peckyno, Natalia Bueno, and Dougal Henken for exceptional design and conference support.
We deeply appreciate the superb team at Oxford University Press who helped to shepherd this volume to completion. In particular, we owe a personal and professional debt of gratitude to Susan Ferber. Thank you, Susan, for sticking with this project over several years. The project has benefitted enormously from your keen editorial eye, sharp analysis, and friendly enthusiasm.
We thank our families for their support and forbearance through the many twists and turns of this project. Conceiving and orchestrating this conference and developing and revising this book project helped to generate intellectual community, which sustained and distracted us over a number of years during which we experienced significant suffering and loss. We dedicate this book those we love and have lost recently: to Kevin Preston, to Carolyn Nichols, and to Rodney Nichols.
Finally, his fellow editors would like to thank Chris Nichols for carrying this project forward when challenges presented themselves and difficulties mounted. After hosting the conference that got this book off the ground, Chris’s drive and focus, but even more importantly his optimism and good humor, kept us on target. It is no exaggeration to say that without his efforts this book would not have been published.
Contributors
Elizabeth Borgwardt is Associate Professor of History at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights (Harvard University Press, 2005).
Elizabeth H. Bradley, PhD, is President of Vassar College in New York. She was previously the Brady-Johnson Professor of Grand Strategy and Professor of Public Health at Yale University. She is the co-author of the American Health Care Paradox: Why Spending More Is Getting Us Less (PublicAffairs, 2013) and is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and the Council on Foreign Relations.
Hal Brands is the Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School in Advanced International Studies, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is writing a book about the Cold War and long-term competition.
Laura Briggs is Professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the author of a number of books, including Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and US Imperialism in Puerto Rico (University of California Press, 2002), and, most recently, Taking Children: A History of American Terror (University of California Press, 2020).
Emily Conroy-Krutz is Associate Professor of History at Michigan State University and the author of Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic (Cornell University Press, 2015).
Mary L. Dudziak is the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law at Emory University, past president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and the author of War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences (Oxford University Press, 2012), among other books.
Charles Edel is a senior fellow at the University of Sydney’s United States Studies Centre; previously, he was Associate Professor at the US Naval War College and served on the US Secretary of State’s policy planning staff from 2015 to 2017. He is co-author of The Lessons of Tragedy: Statecraft and World Order (Yale University Press, 2019) and author of Nation Builder: John Quincy Adams & the Grand Strategy of the Republic (Harvard University Press, 2014).
Jeffrey A. Engel is the founding director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University. Author or editor of twelve books on American
foreign policy, politics, and the American presidency, his latest are Impeachment: An American History (Modern Library, 2018) and When the World Seemed New: George H. W. Bush and the End of the Cold War (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017).
Katherine C. Epstein is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University-Camden and the author of Torpedo: Inventing the Military-Industrial Complex in the United States and Great Britain (Harvard University Press, 2014). She studies technology transfer, the intersection of national security and intellectual property regimes, and the political economy of power projection.
Beverly Gage is Brady-Johnson Professor of Grand Strategy and Professor of History at Yale University. She is the author of The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in Its First Age of Terror (Oxford University Press, 2009) and a forthcoming biography of J. Edgar Hoover.
David Greenberg is Professor of History and of Journalism & Media Studies at Rutgers University. His books include the prize-winning Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image (W.W. Norton, 2003) and, most recently, Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency (W.W. Norton, 2016).
Michaela Hoenicke Moore is Associate Professor of History at the University of Iowa and the author of Know Your Enemy: The American Debate on Nazi Germany, 1933–1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2009), which won the 2010 SHAFR Myrna Bernath Book Prize.
William Inboden is the William Powers Jr. Executive Director of the Clements Center for National Security and Associate Professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. Earlier he was Senior Director for Strategic Planning on the National Security Council.
Julia F. Irwin is Associate Professor of History at the University of South Florida. She is the author of Making the World Safe: The American Red Cross and a Nation’s Humanitarian Awakening (Oxford University Press, 2013) and is now working on a second book tentatively entitled Catastrophic Diplomacy: A History of U.S. Responses to Global Natural Disaster.
Ryan Irwin is Associate Professor of History at the University at Albany-SUNY and the author of Gordian Knot: Apartheid and the Unmaking of the Liberal World Order (Oxford University Press, 2012).
Matthew Karp is Associate Professor of History at Princeton University and the author of This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy (Harvard University Press, 2016).
Adriane Lentz-Smith is Associate Professor of History and African & AfricanAmerican Studies at Duke University as well as Senior Fellow in Duke’s Kenan Institute for Ethics. The author of Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World
War I (Harvard University Press, 2009), she has published in American Quarterly, Southern Cultures, and elsewhere.
Fredrik Logevall is Laurence D. Belfer Professor of International Affairs at Harvard University. His newest book is JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century (Random House, 2020).
David Milne is Professor of Modern History at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of America’s Rasputin: Walt Rostow and the Vietnam War (Hill and Wang, 2008) and Worldmaking: The Art and Science of American Diplomacy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015); currently he is writing a biography of the trailblazing journalist Sigrid Schultz.
Christopher McKnight Nichols is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Center for the Humanities at Oregon State University. An Andrew Carnegie Fellow and frequent commentator of the historical dimensions of American politics and foreign relations, Nichols is the author, co-author, or editor of six books, most notably Promise and Peril: America at the Dawn of a Global Age (Harvard University Press, 2011).
Andrew Preston is Professor of American History and a Fellow of Clare College at the University of Cambridge. His most recent book is American Foreign Relations: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2019).
Lauren A. Taylor is a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Population Health at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. She holds a PhD in Health Policy and Management and a Masters of Divinity from Harvard.
Daniel J. Tichenor is the Philip H. Knight Chair of Political Science and Program Director at the Wayne Morse Center of Law and Politics at the University of Oregon. His most recent book is Rivalry and Reform: Presidents, Social Movements, and the Transformation of American Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2019).
Rethinking American Grand Strategy
Introduction
Christopher McKnight Nichols and Andrew Preston
What is grand strategy? What does it aim to achieve? Does it have relevance—and, if so, applicability—beyond questions of war and peace? And what differentiates it from normal strategic thought—what, in other words, makes it “grand”?
In recent years, historians and other scholars have offered useful definitions, most of which coalesce around the notion that grand strategy is an amplification of the “normal” strategic practice of deploying various means to attain specific ends.1 “The crux of grand strategy,” writes Paul Kennedy, co-founder of the influential Grand Strategy program at Yale University, “lies . . . in policy, that is, in the capacity of the nation’s leaders to bring together all the elements, both military and nonmilitary, for the preservation and enhancement of the nation’s long-term (that is, in wartime and peacetime) best interests.”2 John Lewis Gaddis, the program’s co-founder with Kennedy, defines grand strategy succinctly as “the alignment of potentially unlimited aspirations with necessarily limited capabilities.”3 Hal Brands, an alumnus of Yale’s program and a contributor to this volume, observes that grand strategy is best understood as an “intellectual architecture that lends structure to foreign policy; it is the logic that helps states navigate a complex and dangerous world.”4 Peter Feaver, who followed Yale’s model when establishing a grand strategy program at Duke University, is somewhat more specific: “Grand strategy refers to the collection of plans and policies that comprise the state’s deliberate effort to harness political, military, diplomatic, and economic tools together to advance that state’s national interest.”5 International Relations theorist Stephen Walt is even more precise: “A state’s grand strategy is its plan for making itself secure. Grand strategy identifies the objectives that must be achieved to produce security, and describes the political and military actions that are believed to lead to this goal. Strategy is thus a set of ‘contingent predictions’: if we do A, B, and C, the desired results X, Y, and Z should follow.”6
While clear about grand strategy’s purpose, these definitions do not explicitly address its proper scope and focus. Why? In spite of recognizing the complexity of their subject, the generators of these definitions and other noted scholars of grand strategy have often limited their analytic framework to moments of conflict and the “purposeful employment of all the instruments of power available to a security community”— in other words, war. 7 Tackling episodes from antiquity to the present, in many cases with remarkable depth and sophistication, scholars of grand strategy have examined the relationship between armed conflict and the peace that follows. Many theorists argue that it should continue to be this way. 8 The tight focus on policy and warfare, they suggest, provides precision, particularly considering that the scope of their work tracks millennia— from Herodotus and Thucydides to Kennan and Kissinger. Even those otherwise insightful studies that look beyond the conduct of warfare still perceive grand strategy as falling strictly within the realm of high diplomacy, deterrence, macroeconomic power, and other measures that fall just short of war— a perspective broader than warfare, perhaps, but not by much. 9
Because these scholars focus on statecraft as it has been conventionally understood, they omit much else that could be considered political. However, as the definitions by Kennedy, Gaddis, and others demonstrate, it is possible to consider, and even reach, a more capacious understanding of grand strategy, one that still includes the battlefield and the negotiating table but can also expand beyond them. While the concept of strategy is undoubtedly military in origin, and although strategic culture retains a high degree of its original military character, there is no reason to confine grand strategy solely to the realm of warfare. Scholars have similarly located the origins of sovereignty, law, and statehood in the realm of warfare, yet it is hard to think of these topics as falling exclusively within the domain of military history.10 Just as contemporary world politics is driven by a wide range of non-military issues, the most thorough considerations of grand strategy must examine the bases of peace and security as broadly as possible.11 As one recent survey of the topic puts it, “An exclusive focus on military force appears inconsistent with the contemporary environment of world politics.”12 A theory that bears little resemblance to the reality around us every day—in which gender, race, the environment, public health, and a wide range of cultural, social, political, and economic issues are not only salient but urgently pressing—can only be so useful.
For this reason, among others, some scholars have doubted the usefulness or even very legitimacy of studying grand strategy. Skeptics tend to mount criticisms in roughly three key areas: definitions, discipline, and scope. One argument that combines definitional and disciplinary criticism argues that “the more the output of grand strategists is examined, the more the enterprise comes down to a desire by statesmen, and their would-be tutors, not so much to understand the world as to stake their place in it.”13 Other critics suggest that those who make as well as those who study grand strategy are likely to find the grandiosity they seek. Richard Betts, for example, admonishes scholars that “it is good to step back and realize that there is less in the idea of this voguish concept than meets the eye.” Actual policy is just too messy to be the product of a coherent advanced planning, and grand strategy is not “what actually drives governments’ actions.”14
Taking the modern United States as a nation-state case study, Rethinking American Grand Strategy instead argues for the relevance and usefulness of grand strategy; and, in doing so, demonstrates that grand-strategic analysis can be much more capacious than the usual politico-military framework of international history. To encompass the fullest dimensions of grand strategy, scholarship must include the forgotten voices that contributed to the intellectual architecture, plans, policies, and aspirations of US foreign policy, especially those voices that traditional scholarship has neglected. Not only have these understudied and undertheorized figures and topics long factored into US strategic thought, but they have actively shaped it.15 One of the principal aims of this book is to integrate these forgotten voices into the broader contours of American grand strategy.
Case Study I: The Unexpected Grand Strategy of George W. Bush
Sometimes the most effective and farsighted grand strategy has little to do with armed conflict. By way of illustration, consider the policies of President George W. Bush.16
It is clear that many people in the Bush administration saw the attacks of September 11, 2001, as an opportunity to deal with Iraq once and for all. Their view carried the day, in the teeth of opposition from national security officials and anti-war protestors alike. But despite Bush’s determination for a showdown with Saddam Hussein, and despite later perceptions, there was
no rush to war—a full eighteen months passed between 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq. In that time, Bush convened many National Security Council (NSC) meetings on Iraq. Key members of the administration spent countless hours explaining both the nature of what they saw as an Iraqi threat and the regional and international benefits of removing that threat. Most notable was the National Security Strategy, a thirty-one-page document released in September 2002 that explicitly laid out Bush’s vision for prosecuting the “global war on terror.”
What is particularly striking about those eighteen months of planning and deliberation, however, is how un-strategic the Bush administration’s thinking was: its highly ambitious ends bore almost no relationship to realistic means. For example, in early March 2003, shortly before they would oversee the invasion of Iraq, military commanders met with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and predicted a quick victory that would see US forces occupying Baghdad within a matter of weeks. But those plans, focused narrowly on defeating the Iraqi army, did not come close to matching up with, let alone achieving, the administration’s almost limitless regional and global objectives. At an NSC meeting the day after Rumsfeld’s consultation with the generals, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith laid out a wish list, including the preservation of Iraq’s territorial integrity, an improved quality of life for the Iraqi people, international support for the US invasion, international participation in Iraq’s reconstruction, and the development of “democratic institutions” in Iraq that would serve “as a model for the region” and perhaps even pave the way for a final settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Bush left the meeting uneasy with Feith’s abstractions, but when he met with a Vatican envoy sent to Washington to convey the pope’s opposition to war, he simply repeated Feith’s platitudes.17 Right on the eve of war, then, the architects of a war entirely of their own making had little grasp of how they were going to complete their design. Unsurprisingly, the war failed to meet its goals and instead caused new problems for American security. Nearly four years later, Bush launched another strategic initiative to deal with Iraq. Since its start, the war had gone disastrously wrong. Only one of Feith’s objectives, preserving the territorial integrity of Iraq, had been achieved, at unimaginable cost—but even that was simply a status quo objective, not the kind of transformation for which Bush had launched the war in the first place. Bush then fired Rumsfeld after the Republican Party suffered a heavy defeat in the 2006 midterm elections in which the Iraq War was the main issue. Instead of beginning a withdrawal from Iraq, however, Bush
convened a series of high-level, top secret meetings designed to turn the war around. The meetings were, observed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, being conducted separately, in “atomized fashion,” and needed coordination.18 Bush placed National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley in charge, who by all accounts brought order to the Bush administration’s chaos. Planning under Hadley was both extensive and intensive, and an administration notorious for its dysfunctional infighting reached a pragmatic consensus. The result was the so-called Surge, a deployment of 30,000 additional troops, combined with new efforts to win over Sunni opposition fighters in Iraq. The new approach, implemented in January 2007, stabilized the war, and Bush and his supporters were quick to claim it as a victory. But while the Surge may have stabilized an ever-deteriorating operational situation, it could not secure a strategic victory in any meaningful sense. The original objectives that Feith had outlined four years earlier still remained well out of reach, and America’s reputation still lay in tatters.19
In these two episodes, the same people devoted significant time and resources to forward strategic planning to solving, more or less, the same problem. In 2002–3, the Bush administration’s planning on Iraq was haphazard and unrealistic, and the result was humiliating defeat. In 2006–7, the administration’s planning on Iraq was well coordinated and tightly focused, yet while the result was a tactical success the United States was still no closer to achieving even its most limited, modest goals. The Surge succeeded in the short term by focusing on the small details that would win battles, not wars, and it did not create a peace to follow the fighting. Admiral William J. Fallon, head of US Central Command, put it bluntly a few months after the Surge had been launched. “Nobody’s doing any strategic thinking,” he complained. “They’re all tying their shoes. Now I understand why we are where we are. We ought to be shot for this.”20
Now consider what might well turn out to be, in the long run, Bush’s most enduring strategic endeavor. As two contributors to this volume, Elizabeth H. Bradley and Lauren A. Taylor, explain, Iraq was not the only focus of Bush’s planning. In a series of secret meetings in 2002, running alongside the administration’s meetings on Iraq, Bush and some of his advisers discussed ways of tackling the AIDS crisis in Africa. The result was an ambitious but realistic plan to fight an epidemic that was ravaging the African continent and had the potential to spread far beyond. Non-traditional foreign policies, including humanitarian causes like health care, are not usually included in analysis of grand strategy. Yet they should be, not simply for the sake of
inclusivity but because they meet the test of grand-strategic objectives: creating the conditions for an enduring peace, fostering international stability, advancing US ideals and interests, and reducing anti-Americanism. Bradley and Taylor illustrate that the successful implementation of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) owed much to the principles of grand strategy. In doing so, they also show that the boundaries of grand strategy extend far beyond the conduct of warfare.
What Is Grand Strategy?
So, to return to our opening question, what is grand strategy? This is unsteady theoretical and historiographical ground, for there are virtually countless definitions in existence, including many not quoted here. “No simple, clear definition of grand strategy can ever be fully satisfactory,” observes military historian Williamson Murray, while others have noted that it is “hard to overstate how much questions of definition bedevil contemporary studies of grand strategy.”21 These reservations may be true, but they should not mean that definitions should be avoided altogether. If analysts do not provide high definition to what they claim to be investigating, why should anyone pay attention to their conclusions?22 For a volume on how scholars and practitioners should rethink grand strategy, it is therefore incumbent upon the editors to make clear what we talk about when we talk about grand strategy.23
By engaging with various dimensions of the historical record, this volume argues that grand strategy is best understood as a holistic and interconnected system of power, encompassing all aspects of society in pursuit of international goals “based on the calculated relationship of means to ends.”24 While it is, as Barry Posen puts it in a now-classic formulation, “a state’s theory about how it can best ‘cause’ security for itself,” how states cause their own security is often down to the actions of non-state actors who produce their own theories of power and security.25 In a representative democracy like the United States, grand strategy helps answer the underlying question, “What is our power for?”26 Capacious and far-sighted (long-term) perspectives differentiate a higher-order (grand) strategy from more proximate strategies, or lower-level operational pursuits and tactics. Grand strategy is not simply about winning wars or attaining specific foreign-policy objectives, important as these priorities are; it is not only an answer to the question of what power
is meant to achieve. Grand strategy is also about creating a durable peace that follows a war and then maintaining the stability of that peace long after the war has faded into a distant memory. It is, and has been, about making or preventing large-scale change. It is—for the United States especially, with its global ambitions, widespread commitments, and enormous capabilities in all forms of power—about trying to shape world conditions so as to ensure the protection of national security and the flourishing of national values.27 If “normal” strategy is pragmatic, essentially an exercise of short-term problem solving, “grand” strategy is ideological, a programmatic vision of reshaping a state’s external environment and reordering, to the extent that it’s possible, the people who live in it.
While strategy has a conceptual lineage stretching back to antiquity, grand strategy has a decidedly more modern pedigree. Although the label of “grand strategy” might be applied to the statecraft of leaders from before the modern period,28 only in the last two centuries or so have strategic thinkers explicitly conceptualized strategy on a “grand” scale, and only in the last hundred years has strategy been codified as “grand.”29 Even the great Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz did not write about “grand” strategy in what is probably the most important strategic treatise in diplomatic and military history, On War; nor did his influential contemporaries, such as Antoine-Henri Jomini. In fact, nobody did until the first era of modern globalization, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the mass armies and nationalist movements of the nineteenth century were joined to the industrial economies, innovative technologies, and ideological visions of the twentieth century. Shortly before World War I, two naval strategists, American Alfred Thayer Mahan and Briton Julian Corbett, offered a totalistic conception of strategy that reached far beyond the military, including its economic, political, and, at times, cultural and ideological dimensions. In 1911, Corbett even distinguished between forms of “minor” and “major” strategy. But it was not until after the Great War that “grand strategy” came into existence in a formal and theoretical way.30
It was entirely fitting, then, that grand strategy was forged as a separate discipline during the global conflicts of the twentieth century. The phrase “grand strategy” first appeared with some recurrence in English-language writing in the 1860s, but it does not appear to have been much used until the World War II era, with an explosion of use of the term in 1936 reaching a peak in 1944. That there appears to have been a dramatic rise in references, debates, and discussions of grand strategy from 1936 to 1949, with the greatest usage in
