Meet the New Makers of Modern Strategy….
…any better than the old makers of modern strategy?
By Daniel W. Drezner, Professor of International Politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy
The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has been pretty busy eating as many fries as possible sampling the local cuisines of Northwest Europe. That is a polite way of saying that I have been too busy playing the important role of “Tourist on Extended Family Vacation” to devote the necessary time to write anything of substance for this here newsletter.
I will try to offer something up for tomorrow, but no promises — it’s not easy being a rootless cosmopolitan staying in one of the most cosmopolitan capitals in the world!
Until then, however, please check out my latest for Foreign Policy — a quasi-review of The New Makers of Modern Strategy, edited by Hal Brands. I say “quasi-review” because a proper review necessitates reading the entire book. The New Makers of Modern Strategy is over 1200 pages long and I most certainly did not read the whole damn thing. But it is interesting to compare Brands’ latest edition with the previous iteration, edited by Peter Paret in 1986. As I noted in FP:
There are multiple reasons why Paret’s edition is acknowledged but not beloved within the strategic studies community. Although both Zhou dynasty-era Chinese general Sun Tzu and Clausewitz warned against viewing strategy through a strictly military lens, Paret’s definition of strategy was incredibly narrow: “the use of armed force to achieve the military objectives and, by extension, the political purpose of the war.” Even the security studies community viewed this as far too restrictive. As FP’s Stephen M. Walt lamented in his 1987 review for International Security: “Paret and company passed up a golden opportunity to show how a broader conception of strategy might yield important new insights.”
Brands learned well from his predecessor’s mistake; the definition of strategy he provides—“the craft of summoning and using power to achieve our central purposes, amid the friction of global affairs and the resistance of rivals and enemies”—is far more capacious. That description enables Brands to note in his introductory essay that “some of the greatest American strategists, such as John Quincy Adams and Franklin Roosevelt, have been diplomats and politicians rather than soldiers.” The New Makers of Modern Strategy includes numerous entries devoted to the nonmilitary pillars of strategy. One chapter by James Lacey and another by Eric Helleiner and Jonathan Kirshner tackle the economic foundations of strategy. Tanvi Madan explores strategies of nonalignment; Priya Satia writes about anti-imperial strategies ranging from Mahatma Gandhi to Frantz Fanon.
Brands also corrects for the other principal way that Paret’s volume fell short: Of the 28 chapters in the 1986 volume, 27.5 were devoted to Western concepts and practices of strategy (Japan’s World War II strategy made the cut). Not even Sun Tzu merited a chapter. Brands does not neglect the Western canon in The New Makers of Modern Strategy; Walter Russell Mead writes about Thucydides, John Maurer explores U.S. naval officer Alfred Thayer Mahan, and Michael Leggiere covers Napoleon Bonaparte. But there are plenty of chapters about non-Western strategies, ranging from Toshi Yoshihara’s analysis of Sun Tzu to Kori Schake’s take on Shawnee chief Tecumseh to Seth Jones on Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani and Gerasimov’s reliance on irregular warfare.
Brands is the Steven Soderbergh of strategy, taking an old chestnut that is more noted than liked and pumping new life into it.
My beef with the effort is whether even its best iteration of such a project can really work. Is possible to craft a book on the science of strategy that has a half-life of more than a few years? As noted in my review:
I have contributed to edited volumes on grand strategy and written repeatedlyabout the futility of such an exercise, so I have my doubts. Call it the Clausewitz Trap, in honor of the author of On War and one of the most widely cited strategists in history, the Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz: Anyone who acquires celebrity from their strategic acumen inexorably believes in their own strategic genius and makes ego-driven mistakes. The best strategic advice is humility in the face of success—but the very exaltation of strategists makes this very difficult to do in practice….
The Clausewitz Trap suggests that there are inherent limits to any exercise to develop a timeless science of strategy. Perhaps analysts need to consider the possibility that the best strategic innovations wind up being self-defeating. Today’s brilliant strategist will often prove to be tomorrow’s cautionary tale.
(This post is republished from Drezner’s World.)