What Is Grand Strategy?
What Is Grand Strategy?* by John Lewis Gaddis** Yale University
When my colleagues Paul Kennedy, Charlie Hill, and I first began talking about setting up a grand strategy course at Yale in the late 1990s, at least half the people to whom we tried to explain this thought we were talking about “grant” strategy: how do you get the next federal or foundation grant? This misunderstanding would not have occurred, I think, during the fifty years of insecurity that separated the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December, 1941, from the final collapse of the Soviet Union in December, 1991. We had a grand strategy for fighting World War II already in place at the time of Pearl Harbor – go after Germany first – and with adjustments we stuck to it throughout that conflict. We had, in containment, a grand strategy for fighting the Cold War worked out within the first five years of that conflict – some would say earlier. With adjustments, we held on to that strategy for the next four decades, despite the confusions generated by our domestic politics, our relations with allies, and at least one grievous miscalculation of fundamental interests, which was the war in Vietnam. We maintained purpose and direction during those dangerous years because we had to. For as Dr. Samuel Johnson once put it: “Depend on it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” Now, maybe historians of some distant future will conclude that the United States has been equally adept at framing and sustaining grand strategies during the two decades that have passed since the Cold War ended. Revisionist ingenuity is always surprising. But I have difficulty right now seeing how that argument is going to be made. Consider the record. The administration of George H. W. Bush, facing the most favorable prospects ever for the use of American power in the international arena, spoke grandly of building a
Prepared as the Karl Von Der Heyden Distinguished
When my colleagues Paul Kennedy, Charlie Hill, and I first began talking about setting up a grand strategy course at Yale in the late 1990s, at least half the people to whom we tried to explain this thought we were talking about “grant” strategy: how do you get the next federal or foundation grant? This misunderstanding would not have occurred, I think, during the fifty years of insecurity that separated the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December, 1941, from the final collapse of the Soviet Union in December, 1991. We had a grand strategy for fighting World War II already in place at the time of Pearl Harbor – go after Germany first – and with adjustments we stuck to it throughout that conflict. We had, in containment, a grand strategy for fighting the Cold War worked out within the first five years of that conflict – some would say earlier. With adjustments, we held on to that strategy for the next four decades, despite the confusions generated by our domestic politics, our relations with allies, and at least one grievous miscalculation of fundamental interests, which was the war in Vietnam. We maintained purpose and direction during those dangerous years because we had to. For as Dr. Samuel Johnson once put it: “Depend on it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” Now, maybe historians of some distant future will conclude that the United States has been equally adept at framing and sustaining grand strategies during the two decades that have passed since the Cold War ended. Revisionist ingenuity is always surprising. But I have difficulty right now seeing how that argument is going to be made. Consider the record. The administration of George H. W. Bush, facing the most favorable prospects ever for the use of American power in the international arena, spoke grandly of building a
Prepared as the Karl Von Der Heyden Distinguished