Why Grand Strategy Still Matters in a World of Chaos

Hal Brands, Patrick Porter

Global Governance,

"Grand strategy is undeniably difficult to get right, but it beats the alternative, grand strategic nihilism, hands-down."

In their provocative recent essay in Foreign Affairs, David Edelstein and Ronald Krebs argue that Washington should quit its flawed pursuit of grand strategy and its obsession with planning. The world, they argue, is too unpredictable for master plans. Our capacity to interpret and predict international affairs is inevitably distorted by cognitive blinders. Government is bureaucratically fractured rather than a purposeful unitary actor. The very process of strategizing leads to threat inflation and overstretch. Grand strategy is thus a dangerous pipe dream, and America should act “pragmatically”—on a case-by-case basis—instead.

There are three crucial problems with this argument. First, it poses a narrow, reductionist view of grand strategy. Second, it underestimates the range and value of strategies that history suggests are possible. And third, its proposed alternative of mere “pragmatism” is deeply flawed, and in fact, oblivious to its own grand strategic design. As we argue, grand strategy is best understood not as a formal planning process, but as a guiding intellectual framework. When done well, it has helped America harmonize its power with its commitments, and both shape and react to its environment in purposeful ways. Grand strategy is undeniably difficult to get right, but it beats the alternative, grand strategic nihilism, hands-down.

The Concept of Grand Strategy

Edelstein and Krebs’ account of grand strategy is narrow and reductionist. To hear them tell it, grand strategy is little more than a process of formal state planning that must “look like” the elaborate process we see today, with intensive interagency activity and the crafting of documents like the National Security Strategy. Their conception reflects not some broad understanding of grand strategy across time and space, but an indictment of the particular habits of the current U.S. national security bureaucracy and its myriad planning efforts. In this respect, the authors fail to imagine beyond mandarins cloistered in a room, charting an elaborate, step-by-step program. They conflate their dislike of America’s current strategic process with a dislike of strategy itself.