The New Makers of Modern Strategy

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The New Makers of Modern Strategy, edited by the prolific Hal Brands, is a monumental tome of 1,100-plus pages. Its readers may recall the 1986 version edited by Clausewitz scholar Peter Paret (itself an update of the original from 1943). Brands notes in the introduction that the church of strategy is broad, and as testimony in New Makers, a profusion of ideas, events, and facts tumble out in 45 essays, loosely connected by a handful of themes. “Foundations and Founders” starts with key historical strategic thinkers and then proceeds in a chronological sequence: “Strategy in an Age of Great- Power Rivalry” (roughly 1648–1914); “Strategy in an Age of Global War” (1914–1945); “Strategy in a Bipolar Era” (1945–1991); and “Strategy in the Post–Cold War World” (1991–present).

The volume is a major contribution to what could be called strategic studies or perhaps national security studies. Such studies are not quite military history, not quite diplomatic history, not quite political science or international relations theory, but an amalgam of all these intellectual fields. And so too is New Makers. Within it is an assortment of intellectual biographies, occasional leader sketches, and numerous recountings of various political and military maneuverings. Essays range from neo-mercantilist to nuclear strategies, from John Quincy Adams to Xi Jinping.

The volume is not only wide-ranging but also traditional. One will find little to no bottom-up social or identitarian history. Postmodern conceits are hard to find. The sole reference to Michel Foucault is in an essay on Francis Lieber and the origins of the law of armed conflict. Nor does the book spend a great deal of time on what has been variously called the second machine age or the fourth industrial revolution. There are few references to artificial intelligence, artificial general intelligence, quantum theory, Moore’s law, or ever-decreasing nanometer levels. There are some references to cyber in an essay near the end of the book, but the essay deals just as much with cyber’s limitations as it does with cyber as a war-winning wonder weapon.

What is present throughout the book, on the other hand, is the seeming omnipresence of governed territorial spaces, whether called empires, citystates, or—for the past four centuries or so—nation-states. New Makers is fundamentally oriented around them. Elite academia may not deal too much these days with the topics of strategic studies; it is noticeable that the essays in the book come predominantly from Beltway institutions, think tanks, and war colleges. Almost none are from Ivy League or other high-prestige U.S. universities. But the nation-state has not withered away. Great Powers act in competition as much as in cooperation. Wars—including brutal, attritional state-on-state wars—rage. And so hard thinking about strategy, more precisely termed grand strategy in its traditional and imperfect sense, seems as timely as ever.

Yet if Brands’s volume evoked only plus ça change musings, its value would be limited. It is more. It is also, fundamentally, a history of strategy, which has a contemporary purpose—to understand what strategy is, one must understand what strategy was. We see in New Makers how strategy emerges as a practice in city-states and empires, long before it becomes codified as an intellectual discipline. We see it in Walter Russell Mead’s essay on Thucydides and Polybius and their tellings of the Peloponnesian and Punic wars. Mead explains how those authors write of Athens and Rome practicing a kind of proto-strategy—statecraft that includes a certain degree of thought on how to make war. Domestic politics dominated these ancient polities, to be sure, but the Mediterranean world, with its trade and alliance politics, increasingly incorporated competitive interstate interactions, and strategic thinking emerged.

Subsequent essays track the rise of post-Westphalian nation-states. Those states developed thinking at the grand strategic level. It is exemplified in Iskander Rehman’s essay, where we read about the cunning Cardinal-advisors Richelieu and Mazarin, who skirt confessional lines and plot continental chess moves of intricacy and subtlety. Other essays show how throughout the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and afterward, statecraft interweaves with the speculations of Machiavelli, Kant, and of course, Clausewitz—and the foundations are seemingly set for a sophisticated, integrative grand strategy inextricably bound up with nation-state behavior.

Despite all this intellectual sophistication, grand strategic thinking among those who practice failed to develop— and perhaps even regressed—in the early 20th century. Margaret MacMillan points out that pre–World War I strategic thinking on both sides is viewed in nearexclusive military terms. Even questions that seem so fundamental to us now, such as ensuring there are sufficient resources for a long war, were neglected in the war plans of Germany, France, and Russia. “Strategy,” writes MacMillan, “was largely [the nations’ militaries’] business, and . . . once war started, entirely theirs.”

Full-blown grand strategic practice— the integration of instruments of national power for use in war, but also outside of war—came only later. It emerged during World War II, when unprecedented global conflict required massive economies of scale and full national mobilization. Afterward, strategy in the nuclear age, as Lawrence Freedman notes, became infused with enormous importance—far too important to be left simply to generals. After all, as Francis Gavin writes in his essay, the whole point of nuclear weapons is that the threat of their use must remain a threat only. This requires a special emphasis on dominance by civilian policy, which must harness and direct such a threat of weaponry as appropriate. What follows are the quintessential Cold War formulae: the connection of strategic “ends, ways, and means” and the coherent integration of various “instruments of national power.”

And then the Cold War ended. Grand strategy fell out of favor. Who needed such thinking when superpower rivalry was over? Wasn’t it the age of golden straitjackets when multinational corporate interests would limit nation-states’ behavior? And in the revolution in military affairs–dominated 1990s and even after, who needed Clausewitz when unmatched technological dominance made all this strategy talk something like fanciful literature? Except that the nation-state, competition, and the advantages sought in these competitions did not end but persisted into the new millennium.

Meanwhile, strategy persisted as well, and New Makers shows how mutable and multifaceted the meanings of strategy are. Strategy is often thought of as a noun, a referent to a mental artifact. To conceive of strategy this way is to think of a product: a proposal, plan, direction, or framework. Joshua Rovner offers a definition of this sort. Strategy is a “theory of victory, a logical story explaining how the use of force will help combatants achieve their political goals.” This may appear a bit narrowly militarized, so Rovner offers this broader definition: strategy is a “logical story about how states and non-state actors keep themselves safe.” Even this might seem predominantly focused on security. Thomas Mahnken defines strategy as how to “array limited resources in order to achieve one’s aims against a competitor.” This definition sounds economic-like, with its emphasis on scarcity and the implied tradeoffs that follow. In both, the notion of strategy as an artifact is predominant. Strategy is a story, a theory, and a coherent arrangement of resources. This artifact is directed somewhere—generally, against a rival or competitor. The implication, still, is that at least one of these rivals a nation-state.

These are indeed useful definitions. However, New Makers does not leave us with only those. The closing essay—by John Lewis Gaddis, the dean of American Cold War scholars and a significant strategic thinker in his own right—offers another meaning of strategy, sometimes associated with words like “process,” though such a term is highly inadequate. Gaddis relies both on Clausewitz and on the Chinese concept of shi to define strategy as being fundamentally present. Strategy is an awareness of the point where the grammar that informs one’s thinking—the inner guidance provided by methods, rules, laws, for example— and the logic of the experience—the actual behavior unfolding in the external world—meet. This does not mean action necessarily follows; the grammar may be inadequate to address the behavior. Awareness precedes action (even if such action is, essentially, to do nothing). But such awareness requires “breadth in identifying potentials, ingenuity in applying them, and the timing needed to slip them through windows of opportunity before they close.” Strategy, then, is also this constant, vigilant attention.

Of course, the preceding definitions do not exhaust the meaning of strategy, and the point of a work as broadly gauged as New Makers is to show that it is pointless to do so. To paraphrase Herbert Simon (with some modification), the right definition is not the point—the point is that any number of definitions permit functional strategic reasoning.

In the new millennium, strategists need both helpful definitions and usable pasts to manage if not solve contemporary strategic problems. New Makers amply provides both. JFQ