A 90 minute talk by Dr. Rich Hooker on American Grand Strategy with students from Georgetown University's Security Studies Program.  It is based on his monograph published at NDU last fall.  It is at this link and I commend it.  http://inss.ndu.edu/Portals/68/Documents/Books/grand-strategy-us.pdf

However, his talk goes beyond it and in the Q&A he discusses Grand Strategy in today's context to include in Syria and Iraq.  He makes some very thought provoking remarks on a wide range of strategic issues.

"American Grand Strategy" with Dr. Richard Hooker

Georgetown University Center for Security Studies

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axJMO6UX6hA&feature=youtu.be

Published on Jan 16, 2015

Dr. Richard Hooker, Director of the Institute for National Security Studies at the National Defense University discusses the grand strategy of the United States at the CSS lunchtime series.

TWE Remembers: NSC-68

Here is an interesting interpretation of events in 1950:

The debate over NSC-68 might have sputtered out and the memo might have become nothing more than a historical footnote if not for North Korea’s invasion of South Korea on June 25, 1950. The attack by Moscow’s ally seemed to confirm what NSC-68 had argued, the Soviet slave state was on the march and only American military might could stop it. Truman’s nearly immediate decision to order U.S. troops to come to South Korea’s aid guaranteed a major jump in U.S. defense spending. (Truman had proposed a $13 billion defense budget for FY 1951; it ended up ballooning to $58 billion.) With cost no longer an obstacle, NSC-68 became official policy. As Acheson later observed, “Korea saved us.”

Historians might debate Acheson’s claim—and some have. They might also debate whether NSC-68 correctly gauged Soviet intentions and actions, or exaggerated the Soviet threat and exposed the United States and the rest of the Free World to needless conflicts and crises. What isn’t in dispute is that the blandly named “United States Objectives and Programs for National Security” set the basic guidelines that would govern U.S. national security policy for four decades.

TWE Remembers: NSC-68

by James M. Lindsay
April 14, 2012

http://blogs.cfr.org/lindsay/2012/04/14/twe-remembers-nsc-68/

The cover of NSC-68. (Harry S. Truman Library and Museum)

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“United States Objectives and Programs for National Security” is a rather bland title for a report. Especially one that turns out to help drive history. But that’s the formal name given to NSC-68, the foundational document for America’s Cold War strategy. It was issued by President Harry Truman’s National Security Council for review on April 14, 1950.*

To understand the origins of NSC-68, it helps first to know some background. The second half of 1949 had been a tough time for the Truman administration on the foreign policy front. In August, the Soviet Union detonated an atomic device for the first time, ending the U.S. nuclear monopoly far sooner than Washington thought would be the case. Then, in October, Mao Zedong declared the establishment of the communist People’s Republic of China. That set off a bitter debate in the United States over who “lost” China, a debate that helped set the stage for Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s famed Wheeling, West Virginia speech alleging that communists were running rampant at the State Department.

The Soviet A-bomb test and the victory of the Chinese communists helped prompt Truman to order a reevaluation of the country’s national security policy on January 31, 1950. The task of leading the review was handed over to a group of officials known officially as the State-Defense Policy Review Group. They were led by Paul Nitze, the director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, and supported by Secretary of State Dean Acheson.

The participants in the review believed that the United States needed a tougher foreign policy, and they set out to use their report to convince the rest of government that they were right. Robert Lovett, a consultant to the project, said that the memo should use “Hemingway sentences” to make its points. “If we can sell every useless article known to man in large quantities,” Lovett argued, “we should be able to sell our very fine story in larger quantities.” Acheson thought along the same lines. “The purpose of NSC-68,” he later wrote, “was to so bludgeon the mass mind of ‘top government’ that not only could the President make a decision but that the decision could be carried out.”

NSC-68’s authors took Lovett’s and Acheson’s advice. The report came packed with more rhetorical ammunition than most other government memos. The dramatic tone started in the introduction:

The issues that face us are momentous, involving the fulfillment or destruction not only of this Republic but of civilization itself. They are issues which will not await our deliberations. With conscience and resolution this Government and the people it represents must now take new and fateful decisions.

So what were the momentous issues? The Soviet Union (and its satellites) stood diametrically opposed to everything that the United States (and by extension the rest of the “free world”) stood for:

(Continued at the link below)

http://blogs.cfr.org/lindsay/2012/04/14/twe-remembers-nsc-68/

Op-Ed: Is Strategy Really A Lost Art? by Dr. Antulio J. Echevarria, II

Very much worth the read.  I was a young captain with Antulio when we were plans officers in 1st brigade of the 3d Infantry Division in Schweinfurt, Germany back in the early 1980's.  He was brilliant then and is even more brilliant now.

V/R
Dave

Op-Ed: Is Strategy Really A Lost Art?

http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/index.cfm/articles/Is-Strategy-Really-A-Lost-Art/2013/09/13

September 13, 2013 | Dr. Antulio J. Echevarria, II

Have we really lost the art of strategy? One has to wonder. Critics have told us the American way of war is “astrategic.” Or that the “bridge” that links military actions to policy aims is failing. We have also heard that strategy has been consumed by operational art. Apparently, a black hole now exists where American strategy should be. Strategic incompetence is hardly unique to Americans; but it would seem we have few peers in this regard.

 

      Fortunately, history suggests a different view. For one thing, the American way of war has never been truly astrategic. Over the years, American military practice has used at least half a dozen types of strategies: annihilation, attrition, exhaustion, decapitation, graduated pressure, and terror and intimidation. If frequency is any indicator, then decapitation—not attrition—has been our strategy of choice; and it has worked for us more often than not. Second, instead of consuming military strategy, American operational practice has facilitated it, enabling theater commanders to parse out missions and responsibilities over broad areas. By World War II, American military strategy was “tiered” or “nested” in practice. The overall strategy in that war was one of attrition, while subordinate commands followed a combination of Jominian strategies of position and Clausewitzian strategies oriented on battle. The downside of such tiering is that, without strong coordination at the top (or sometimes because of it), military strategy can become disjointed, with individuals or entire services attempting to pursue their own agendas or validate their own strategic theories. That has happened more than any American would like; but it makes the American way of war more political, not less strategic.

 

      In 1957, President Eisenhower famously said that “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” If only it were true. Eisenhower, of course, meant that planning had to be continuous because situations change, and the plan itself rarely survives contact with the enemy. However, by the middle of the 20th century, the importance of the war plan had grown in a sense altogether obscured by Eisenhower’s well-traveled comment. For better or worse, the war plan—not strategy—did the real bridging between policy aims and the use of force to achieve those aims. The war plan identified the “devil in the details”—it analyzed the situation and established specific military objectives, as well as tasks and sub-tasks pursuant to accomplishing the lofty aims of policy. In a word, the war plan became the practical face of strategy. Without it, no military strategy could achieve anything. If we believe the old saw that amateurs debate tactics while professionals discuss logistics; then our strategic corollary must be that amateurs debate theories while professionals discuss plans.

 

      Third, we could, without stretching our poetic license too much, revise Eisenhower’s remarks, and claim that: “Strategies are worthless, but strategizing is everything.” A glance at American grand strategy through the Cold War—the last time we got it right, according to the critics—reveals just how many strategies of containment made up the “Strategy of Containment.” Those that worked did so for just a few years, until the conditions that gave rise to them changed. If we buy the rhetoric (not all of us do) that the current strategic environment is more uncertain and more volatile than any previous one, then the useful lifespan of our strategies is bound to be shorter. Indeed, we would be naïve to expect we could develop an enduring, one-size-fits-all grand strategy that would oblige successive administrations to follow. Our inability to accomplish that should be neither a black hole, nor grist for the critics.

 

      Instead, we need to rediscover the value of strategizing relative to the outcome, the product, an individual strategy. The hard truth is that policy does not always need strategy to get what it wants. We have used military force plenty of times in our history without the guiding logic of strategy, and—though critics do not like to admit it—we have made it work often enough for it to be taken seriously. Sometimes what policy wants most is not to be tied to something inflexible, particularly something as inflexible as our strategic process. It is the proverbial machine that goes of itself, and it takes, or almost does, the preparation for and direction of war out of policy’s hands. The question modern-day Clausewitzians really have to answer is whether war has its own logic after all, a logic provided by the dictates, the processes, and the dynamics of making strategy.

(Continued at the link below)

http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/index.cfm/articles/Is-Strategy-Really-A-Lost-Art/2013/09/13

The U.S. Needs Less, Not More, Grand Strategy

A counterintuitive argument.  Conclusion:

Grand strategy cannot be adjusted easily, a serious liability in a fast-changing world. Washington should instead pursue a doctrine of flexible response, developing tailored plans on a case-by-case basis and assuring that they can be changed quickly if the need arises. Doing so requires greater flexibility in policymaking and coordination, and a healthy appreciation for the need to have a plan B and even a plan C. Of course, some grand strategic thinking does not hurt, and some planning is vital to advancing American interests, but grand strategies are largely a counterproductive illusion in this complicated world of ours.

True, grand strategy cannot be adjusted easily but then again maybe it should not.  The call for a doctrine of "flexible response" seems to me to be a call to forgo they intellectual rigor required to develop and execute a grand strategy and instead just be reactive to events.  But I think there is a middle ground between being reactive and having a grand strategy that allows for flexibility and agility of action.

The U.S. Needs Less, Not More, Grand Strategy

By Steve Yetiv, on 15 Feb 2013, Briefing

http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/12721/the-u-s-needs-less-not-more-grand-strategy?utm_source=Weekly+Headlines&utm_campaign=79796a84aa-WPR_Weekly_020813&utm_medium=email

Critics of U.S. foreign policy often argue that the United States lacks a grand strategy -- a set of principles, norms and goals applied consistently to foreign policy. Many have argued, for example, that Washington's reluctance to take strong action to help overthrow Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, or its failure to support protesters in places like Bahrain, results from a grand strategy deficit. In fact, the critics have it wrong in this age-old debate. What Washington needs, whether under a Democratic or a Republican administration, is actually less grand strategic thinking.

Political pundits and scholars alike love to talk about grand strategy as if it were an aristocratic sport. Scholars often interpret how major states behave in terms of two basic grand strategies: “balance of power” strategy, which requires action chiefly to prevent any one country from becoming too strong and which largely ignores moral considerations; or “hegemonic” strategy, which calls for dominating others as a means of creating stability either regionally or globally. Washington, the argument often runs, should embrace one or the other of these grand strategies, or else formulate some other type of approach. Advocates appear to believe that a grand strategy, whatever it is, can help organize America's foreign policy, allow it to plan and prioritize, link its means and ends, deter or dragoon its enemies and enhance U.S. credibility.

Perhaps grand strategy can accomplish some of these goals sometimes, and all foreign policy has some grand strategic characteristics. But thinking in strictly grand strategic terms is no longer the best approach for U.S. foreign policy in a complex, globalizing world whose power structure is unlike that of previous centuries, when just a handful states dominated global affairs.

The Middle East, in particular, illustrates how grand strategies, or even mini-strategies, often crash into events and disintegrate. For example, the 1979 Iranian revolution, Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait and the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington were all unexpected, and each derailed American plans. The idea that broad foreign policy plans can survive most contingencies is a chimera. Unexpected events usually shape outcomes.

Second, grand strategies, or even minor ones, are hard to execute because U.S. goals shift over time in response to individual, domestic and international factors. My book “The Absence of Grand Strategy” showed that America pursued neither balance of power nor hegemonic grand strategy in the Persian Gulf over the past several decades as scholars have argued. Rather, it reacted in improvised ways to events in what I call "reactive engagement." Washington's goals shifted dramatically from one event to another. For instance, the U.S. engaged Tehran and even sold it arms in the 1985-1986 Iran-Contra affair, but afterward went back to trying to undermine and contain Iran. 

(Continued at the link below)

http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/12721/the-u-s-needs-less-not-more-grand-strategy?utm_source=Weekly+Headlines&utm_campaign=79796a84aa-WPR_Weekly_020813&utm_medium=email

A New U.S. Grand Strategy: Why walkable communities, sustainable economics, and multilateral diplomacy are the future of American power.

Mr. Doherty takes his shot at being the 2013 "Mr. X."  

Throughout U.S. history, grand strategy has navigated between two unacceptable extremes: Empire America and Fortress America. Being an empire -- governing other lands and peoples outside the U.S. Constitution -- is an affront to America's core principles of democracy and self-government. Isolationism, in turn, risks the certain rise of unacceptable threats to commerce, security, and basic American values.

Here I think is the essence of his concept:

In the face of the present danger and in the best tradition of the republic, America's response must be to lead. The country must put its own house in order and, with willing partners, author a prosperous, secure, and sustainable future. The task is clear: The United States must lead the global transition to sustainability. 

While some great powers and world capitals have been warning of these dangers for some time, it is clear that the effort ultimately requires an upgrade to the current international system. This will require the kind of principled, consistent leadership and hard-nosed geopolitics that only America, at its best, is able to deliver. 

America must once again start at home. For a limited time, it will be able to transition its economy to generate sustainable prosperity from deep pools of demand and underutilized capital. Once America commits, with its credibility on the mend and its economy as a wind at its back, it must then lead a new global partnership of major economies to adapt the international order. The halting logic of unwieldy climate negotiations will be supplanted by harnessing the greater force of economic self-interest: The United States will have to work with its partners to forge, implement, and verify a durable transition framework among the world's major economies.

V/R
Dave 

A New U.S. Grand Strategy

Why walkable communities, sustainable economics, and multilateral diplomacy are the future of American power.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/01/09/a_new_US_grand_strategy?page=full

BY PATRICK DOHERTY | JANUARY 9, 2013

The strategic landscape of the 21st century has finally come into focus. The great global project is no longer to stop communism, counter terrorists, or promote a superficial notion of freedom. Rather, the world must accommodate 3 billion additional middle-class aspirants in two short decades -- without provoking resource wars, insurgencies, and the devastation of our planet's ecosystem. For this we need a strategy.

The status quo is untenable. In the United States, the country's economic engine is misaligned to the threats and opportunities of the 21st century. Designed explicitly to exploit postwar demand for suburban housing, consumer goods, and reconstruction materials for Europe and Japan, the conditions that allowed it to succeed expired by the early 1970s. Its shelf life has since been extended by accommodative monetary policy and the accumulation of household, corporate, and federal debt. But with Federal Reserve interest rates effectively zero, Americans' debt exceeding their income, and storms lashing U.S. cities, the country is at the end of the road.

Abroad, Washington's post-Cold War pattern of episodic adventurism and incremental crisis management only creates further uncertainty, and rising powers will not lead. Other major economies have little appetite for altering the global order and hence are doubling down on the old system, exacerbating trade imbalances and driving record resource extraction. As commodity prices rise, global powers are hedging ever more aggressively -- stockpiling resources and increasingly becoming entangled in conflicts in resource-rich areas. As the global economy falters, unrest rises and the great unresolved conflicts of the 20th century -- the Middle East, South Asia, North Korea, Taiwan -- grow increasingly enmeshed in the power dynamics of this new era.

Simply put, the current U.S. and international order is unsustainable, and myriad disruptions signal that it is now in a process of collapse. Until the United States implements a new grand strategy, the country will face even more rapid degradation of domestic and global conditions.

This is not an over-the-horizon danger. The interplay of four strategic antagonists is causing Americans daily harm.

(Continued at the link below)

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/01/09/a_new_US_grand_strategy?page=full

More or less: The debate on U.S. grand strategy

This is a good conversation starter for all thinkers and practitioners.  What is the right way ahead from a grand strategy perspective?

V/R
Dave

More or less: The debate on U.S. grand strategy

Posted By Stephen M. Walt  Wednesday, January 2, 2013 - 5:34 PM   Share

http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/01/02/more_or_less_the_debate_on_us_grand_strategy

If you'd like to start 2013 by sinking your teeth into the debate on U.S. grand strategy, I recommend you start with two pieces in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs. Both are by good friends of mine, and together they nicely limn the contours of a useful debate on America's global role. It's also worth noting that there are realists on both sides of this particular exchange, which reminds us that agreement on fundamental principles doesn't necessarily yield agreement on policy conclusions.

The first piece is Barry Posen's "Pull Back: The Case for a Less Activist Foreign Policy," and the second is Stephen Brooks, John Ikenberry, and William Wohlforth's "Lean Forward: In Defense of American Engagement." (A longer version of the B, I & W argument can be found in the latest issue of International Security; Posen's argument is outlined at length in a forthcoming book.)

Dedicated readers of this blog know that I am largely in agreement with Posen's position, so I'm going to focus today on what I find lacking in B, I & W. Like all of their work, it's vigorously argued and the longer version is richly documented. But all those footnotes cannot save it from some serious weaknesses.

First, B, I, & W straw-man their target by lumping together a group of strategic thinkers whose differences are at least as significant as their points of agreement. The "proponents of retrenchment" that they criticize range from libertarian isolationists who want to bring virtually all US forces home to "offshore balancers" like Posen who support a robust but less extravagant defense budget and favor not isolationism but merely more limited forms of international engagement. Needless to say, there is a world of difference in these views (even if both are broadly in favor of doing less), and so many of B, I & W's broad-brush charges miss their mark.

Second, there is something deeply puzzling about B, I & W's devotion to what Ikenberry used to called "liberal hegemony," and what he and his co-authors now prefer to call "deep engagement." B, I & W argue that deep engagement has been America's grand strategy since World War II and they believe it was the optimal strategy for the bipolar Cold War, when the United States faced a global threat from a major great-power rival. Not only was the USSR a formidable military power, but it was also an ideological rival whose Marxist-Leninist principles once commanded millions of loyal followers around the world.

Here's the puzzle: the Soviet Union disappeared in 1992, and no rival of equal capacity has yet emerged. Yet somehow "deep engagement" is still the optimal strategy in these radically different geopolitical circumstances. It's possible that U.S. leaders in the late 1940s hit on the ideal grand strategy for any and all structural conditions, but it is surely odd that an event as significant as the Soviet collapse can have so few implications for how America deals with the other 190-plus countries around the globe.

(Continued at the link below)

http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/01/02/more_or_less_the_debate_on_us_grand_strategy

World Order in the Age of Obama by Charles Hill

As an aside, the biography of Charles Hill is a fascinating story and diplomatic history (The Man on Whom Nothing was Lost).  His book on Grand Strategy (Grand Strategy, Literature, and Statecraft) is also a unique read as he traces the literature of Grand Strategy and international relations (much of it classical literature that some might not associate with Grand Strategy).  Here is his conclusion:

In this maelstrom lie opportunities not for idealism but for the cold, austere use of power, soft and hard, in order to, as Augustus was advised, teach the arts of peace to all. The old platforms for the region, including the “peace process,” are gone. New structures must be built and only the US can lead the construction job. Peace is not at hand, but statesmen can see the possibility of laying foundations for a new Middle East in Syria-Lebanon, Egypt-Gaza, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, and even, should we finally get serious, in Iran.

V/R
Dave 

World Order in the Age of Obama

CHARLES HILL | NOVEMBER 30, 2012 | 2:30 AM

HTTP://WWW.ADVANCINGAFREESOCIETY.ORG/THE-CARAVAN/WORLD-ORDER-IN-THE-AGE-OF-OBAMA/

The mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler prophesied that “We shall not get through this time without difficulty, for all the factors are prepared” Kepler was predicting the Thirty Years’ War of 1618-1648, that would launch the modern international state system in which America and the nations of the world still operate.

What ominous factors caused Kepler to shiver? Disturbances, uphealvals and conflicts. Merchants moaned about untrustworthy bankers. Diplomats strutted even as they wavered. The masses sullenly made deals they needed to survive when the gathering storm broke. Varieties of religious fervor caused many to prepare to be slain rather than submit to rule by others.

The 1648 settlement at Westphalia, though setbacks were many and vicious, enabled procedures fostering what eventually would be called “the international community,” a term that curled many a lip in the midst of twentieth-century world wars. Those wars were attempts to overthrow the established world order. Those wars failed, but in recent decades have become seemingly interminable, and have required the stewards of world order to confront what George Shultz labels “asymmetrical” warfare in which professional standards have been turned into self-imposed liabilities by enemies who reject civilized international conduct.

No international order has proved immortal. Kepler today might note that the world order shaped by the war he predicted, might now fail to survive to celebrate its 375^th anniversary. As President Obama ponders his Second Inaugural Address, what Keplerian factors are now “prepared” for war?

The causes of war as discerned ever since Thucydides’ time are three: wars of ideology, of fear, and of gain.

The ideology of Islamism has been on the rise for generations and now aims to expropriate the Arab Spring. The ambitions of the 1979 Iranian Revolution and Sunni fanaticism are transmogrifying into the kind of major religious war that the Treaty of Westphalia sought to forestall.

Thucydides traced the war that ruined ancient Greece to Sparta’s fear that Athens’ growing power was crossing the line where it would be impossible to contain. Israel faces that threat from Iran, as today’s international structures for the maintenance of international security have failed to halt Iran’s drive, propelled by religious ideology, to possess nuclear weapons. Israel, bereft of its traditional sense of American support, is making ready to act against Iran’s menace to its existence. President Obama’s priority must repair relations with Israel by visiting the Jewish state and convincing its leaders that the U.S. understands Israel’s uniquely dangerous position.

(Continued at this link)

HTTP://WWW.ADVANCINGAFREESOCIETY.ORG/THE-CARAVAN/WORLD-ORDER-IN-THE-AGE-OF-OBAMA/