Books & the Arts.

Grand Flattery

by Thomas Meaney and Stephen Wertheim

n 1909 a group of men met on an estate in Wales to save Western civi- ing them and therefore invigorate US global leadership with a new, singular purpose. lization. Troubled by the erosion of British world power, they believed Ten years on, grand strategy is flourishing. the decline could be reversed if statesmen turned away from the mun- Not only has the Yale seminar grown into a dane tasks of modern diplomacy and channeled the wisdom of ancient campus juggernaut, securing a $17.5 mil- lion, fifteen-year endowment in 2006, but Greece instead. The Greeks, in reconciling rulership with freedom, since 2008 it has inspired spinoffs in half a Ihad made the West great, and supplied a in response. This was the moment when dozen top US universities, funded in part model for their Anglo-Saxon heirs. No lon- liberal interventionism and neoconservatism by right-wing financier Roger Hertog. Ken- ger should the empire run itself; members ascended to the political mainstream and the nedy has likened the spinoffs to Benedictine of the group, including Lloyd George and grand narrative of “globalization” entered monasteries, “all doing their own versions Lord Milner, would train men of penetrat- into wide circulation. In New Haven, histo- of grand strategy but still belonging to the ing insight to direct imperial affairs more rians John Lewis Gaddis and Paul Kennedy Order of Saint Benedict.” For $4,448 you self-consciously than ever before. Drawing put forth a different response. Opposed to can even send your high school “scholar- protégés from Oxbridge, the Round Table, the Clinton administration’s ad hoc policy- leader” to Yale for a two-week Grand Strat- as the group called itself, aimed to impart the making, they conceived a series of “grand egy summit on the fine arts of “critical lessons of enlightened leadership to a new strategy” seminars at Yale that aspired to train and strategic thinking, social networking, generation. They produced countless articles the next generation of leaders. professional etiquette, financial and asset and monographs. Chapters of the society Joined by former diplomat Charles Hill, management” and more. Grand strategy is flourished all over the empire. Ten years later, a onetime adviser to Henry Kissinger, Gad- now a popular idea, too. A string of op-ed they had disappeared: nationalism had swept dis and Kennedy taught select students— writers, including Jackson Diehl, Niall Fer- away their plans to knit the colonies closer those lucky enough to be accepted into the guson and Fareed Zakaria, have criticized the together. British ascendancy ended sooner yearlong seminar—that lessons of leader- Obama administration for lacking one. The than any of them could have imagined. ship should be gleaned less from the so- charge was repeated during the Republican The mantle of world leadership soon cial sciences dominant in US policy circles primaries by Newt Gingrich and, in effect, passed to the United States, and it’s here, than from the humanities, beginning with answered by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs where the ruling class is now experiencing Thucydides and plunging forward through of Staff, who presented the administration’s its own crisis of confidence, that the Round the Romans, Machia­velli, Metternich and revised military posture as a new “American Table is having something of a second act. finally Ronald Reagan. Grand strategy, as grand strategy in an age of austerity.” Anxiety about America’s place in the world Gaddis has explained in a recent speech on intensified after 9/11 but first became acute in the subject, exposes students, “in a properly hough grand strategy went national the late 1990s, when the ills of the post–cold distilled form, to the accumulated wisdom of only recently, the term gained cur- war world no longer appeared transient and those who have gone before,” all of which is rency in the run-up to World War II. seemed to demand concerted US leadership supposed to instill in its recipients the sensi- Another Anglo-American duo, the bility to formulate the grand strategy that has military strategist Basil Liddell Hart Thomas Meaney and Stephen Wertheim are eluded Americans since their cold war enemy andT the historian Edward Mead Earle, rea- doctoral candidates in the history department at collapsed. Such a strategy would relate the soned that states needed strategies not just Columbia University. broadest possible ends to the means of achiev- during wars but also in peacetime. Through 28 The Nation. May 28, 2012

“grand strategy” a state might prevent wars to produce a simpler range of outcomes “Solving for X,” November 14, 2011] elabo- from breaking out and prevail in any that than do most other areas of life. Kennedy, rates on his seminal Strategies of Containment did. The original concept of grand strat- following Liddell Hart, suggests that the (published in 1982) by casting its subject as the egy, then, despite extending temporally into Clausewitzian dictum that “war is a continu- Cassandra who in 1946 and 1947 foresaw the peacetime, remained centered on the prob- ation of politics” implies the opposite, but policies that the cold war would, and would lem of warfare. And it was pioneered in a grand strategy turns Clausewitz on its head, not, require. In Gaddis’s hands, Kennan pre- mid-century world where major threats were squeezing all of politics into an analytical scribed both sustained action to block Soviet readily identifiable, coming from large states method best suited for war. It assumes that expansion and restraint in picking which bat- able to amass industrial power and mobilize a grand strategy is necessary all the time, tles to fight. This prescription flowed from vast populations. The radical contribution of whatever the circumstances. That’s why not Kennan’s diagnosis that the Soviet Union was Yale’s program is to make a grand strategy having a grand strategy becomes a sin. Yet is driven to expand by purely internal forces. out of everything—from national security to there a single, overarching purpose, much If checked by outside resistance, however, it economics, the environment, even culture less strategy, around which a world power would desist and eventually implode. Gaddis and ideology. The Yale syllabus touts grand should orient everything it does? Certainly, thus positions Kennan between two unpalat- strategy’s use in “any future leadership role if an all-consuming threat truly exists, but able extremes: the timid isolationism of ced- in which you may be called upon to connect otherwise grand strategy becomes a recipe ing the world to Soviet domination and the desired ends with available means.” Gaddis for simplifying the world and magnifying crusading globalism of the Truman Doctrine says he regularly gets papers on “the grand threats—in which case the best “grand strat- and NSC-68, a classified report issued by strategy of falling in and out of love” and of egy” may be no grand strategy. the National Security Council in 1950 that “achieving success in soccer, football, and es- demanded action against Soviet-backed com- pecially rowing.” (The last sport “particularly munism wherever it advanced. Gaddis insists attracts the members of our class, probably it was those expansive interpretations of the because of its ancient echoes in Herodotus Books Discussed in This Essay containment strategy that led the United and Thucydides.”) States into disaster in Vietnam and beyond. The focus nevertheless remains on US George F. Kennan Kennan’s original version of containment, by foreign relations and the needs of the present. An American Life. contrast, was a sober grand strategy, carefully After romping through the great strategists By John Lewis Gaddis. calibrating means to ends. in history, the course turns to contemporary Penguin Press. 784 pp. $39.95. Except that it wasn’t, as Kennan very policy challenges for its second semester. At ­nearly came to see. Kennan’s initial idea of the end, students dress up like national se- Strategies of Containment containment, explained in his Long Telegram curity officials to brief their professors, who A Critical Appraisal of American ­National of 1946, rested on the breathtaking assump- play the president. Least conventional of all Security Policy During the Cold War. tion that the Soviet Union was implacably is the “summer school of surprise.” Gaddis By John Lewis Gaddis. driven to expand its power mainly because it encourages students to embark on a “Patrick Oxford. 484 pp. Paper $19.95. inherited a “traditional and instinctive Rus- Leigh Fermor experience” in obscure locales Grand Strategies sian sense of insecurity” dating back centu- around the world, “the great classical texts Literature, Statecraft, and World Order. ries to when Russians were agriculturalists still fresh in their mind.” “Why not go to By Charles Hill. surrounded by fierce nomadic tribes. Ken- China, speak only Chinese, and check out the Yale. 368 pp. Paper $18. nan mixed in other explanations, involving places they won’t let you see when you be- Marxist-Leninist­ ideology­ and the Kremlin’s come ambassador?” Gaddis says he tells stu- desire for internal stability, all to the same dents. “Why not go live in a yurt somewhere, effect: the United States was doing nothing— and teach your yurt-mates to sing songs from o one lays bare the pretensions of could do nothing—to stoke Soviet fears. ‘Oklahoma,’ or ‘Guys and Dolls’?” A cappella grand strategy better than its greatest Rather, the Soviet system was paranoid by as soft power, or maybe just for fun. practitioner in the history of US di- its very nature, and an enemy so childlike it Yale’s grand strategists openly long for plomacy, George Kennan. Author of could only be slapped around until it finally the intellectual certainties they associate with the cold war doctrine of containment, changed its ways. “Impervious to [the] logic the cold war, when the Soviet threat made NKennan achieved mythical status in policy of reason,” Kennan wrote, the Soviet Union strategy seem indispensable. Grand strat- circles long before his death in 2005, at age “is highly sensitive to [the] logic of force.” egy is “endangered,” Gaddis laments, “for 101, but Gaddis, his authorized biographer, Kennan had conjured up the sort of threat in the absence of sufficiently grave threats has done the most to secure Kennan’s reputa- most amenable to grand strategizing: a foe to concentrate our minds, there are insuf- tion as a grand strategist. If Kennan’s example bent on conquest, for reasons entirely its own, ficient incentives to think in these terms.” looms large in American discussions of grand that nonetheless would be brought to heel But then why think in those terms if the strategy, it’s because containment is the most and even defeated by outside pressure. That conditions that seem to have called for them inarguably grand strategy the United States cultural stereotypes underpinned Kennan’s no longer exist? Gaddis and company are has ever pursued. America scarcely needed a framework should have raised more doubts remarkably untroubled by the possibility grand strategy as a rising power, and after the at the time. In any case, Gaddis’s uncritical that the incessant push to strategize grandly cold war it had something resembling a grand stance toward Kennan’s characterization of might construct the threats it seeks to meet. strategy only in the handful of years when Soviet conduct, long after most scholars per- Strategy likes enemies. It has traditionally terrorism appeared to supplant the Soviet ceived its crudeness, is no less breathtaking. addressed military affairs because war is an Union as an encompassing threat. Almost as soon as Kennan realized what inherently adversarial condition and tends Gaddis’s recent biography of Kennan [see he had helped to unleash, he recanted. By 30 The Nation. May 28, 2012

1948 Soviet behavior appeared to him a When in March 1947 President Harry Tru- made him act like any old cold warrior. He predictable response to American provoca- man requested $400 million to aid Greece supported the coup against Salvador Al- tions. Cold war antagonism now seemed to and Turkey, Kennan famously objected that lende even though the Chilean president’s come less from the nature of Soviet society whereas the stakes in Greece were high, Soviet ties were scant. He resisted Euro- than from the interaction between the two Turkey did not warrant help. Less known pean attempts to practice détente and gain superpowers. From then on, Kennan called is that two weeks later, Kennan changed his independence­ in world affairs, because pull- for precisely what he once proscribed: ne- mind—even though he saw little danger of ing back the iron curtain might weaken gotiations with the Soviet Union, aimed at Turkey coming under Soviet sway. “The America’s grip on its alliance and thus upend securing the mutual withdrawal of forces reason was psychological,” Gaddis writes. Kissinger’s bipolar framework. He held from central Europe and thus the end of in- “A failure to act might convey the impres- arms-limitation talks with the Soviet Union tense conflict. He opposed creating NATO sion that ‘the Western Powers were on the hostage to concessions by a North Viet- on the grounds that it would ossify Europe’s run and that international communism was namese government over which the Soviets bipolar division. He criticized US wars in on the make.’ Such a ‘bandwagon’ mentality had little control. Kissinger’s handling of Vietnam and, just before his death, Iraq. could cause Europeans to choose commu- Vietnam was telling in another way. Despite In his memoir, Kennan wrote of rereading nism, in the belief that they had better climb investing the country with little intrinsic im- his Long Telegram with “horrified amuse- on board while there was still time. That portance, and despite resigning himself to an ment.” It sounded, he admitted, “like one could shatter American prestige in the Near American withdrawal, Kissinger prolonged of those primers put out by alarmed con- East, East Asia, and elsewhere.” Kennan’s the war for three years because “confidence gressional committees or by the Daughters statements foreshadowed the obsession with in American promises” was at stake. By being of the American Revolution, designed to “credibility” that drove the presidents Ken- in Vietnam, he reasoned, the United States arouse the citizenry to the dangers of the nan later condemned to send soldiers and had created an interest there. Grand strategy ­Communist conspiracy.” spies into jungles and deserts remote from again produced an amplified enemy and a Kennan, however, never appreciated, let US interests. His inability to set limits shows simplified world. alone articulated, the full extent of his re- that containment was itself uncontainable. The realism prized by Kennan and Kiss- versal. This has made it easy for Gaddis to Grand strategy, despite having posited a inger foundered on their ambitions to strate- present Kennan as a master grand strategist. clear, single enemy, could not resolve the gize grandly. That’s why Kennan, in a White Gaddis does so by suppressing contradic- central conundrum of the cold war. In the House meeting in 1994, told senior diplo- tions within the containment doctrine de- end, the United States needed fewer grand mats to stop trying to sum up US foreign vised by the Kennan of 1946 and 1947 and strategists, not better ones. It needed more policy in a single word. Containment had by yoking the initial doctrine to the critique people willing to question whether the So- been a mistake, Kennan said. It had produced of its implementation that Kennan delivered viets were bent on world domination and “great and misleading oversimplification of soon after. American excesses therefore look fewer people predisposed to view the world analysis and policy.” The president should like unnecessary deviations from the origi- in adversarial terms. Rather than straight- state American foreign policy in a “thought- nal strategy, corruptions of the good cold forwardly demanding a grand strategy, the ful paragraph or more, rather than trying to war. But neither Kennan nor anyone else cold war was in part created and sustained come up with a bumper sticker.” ever developed a truly limited strategy that by the American desire for one. The more the output of grand strategists would have prevented the cold war from be- is examined, the more the enterprise comes coming a global military competition. One bsent the overriding threat of the kind down to a desire by statesmen, and their way Kennan tried to restrict US interven- attributed to the Soviet Union, what would-be tutors, not so much to understand tion was by emphasizing the need to secure would grand strategy consist of? An the world as to stake their place in it. What only the major industrial centers of the indication may be found in the diplo- Kennan, Kissinger and Yale’s grand strate- world, namely the United States, Britain, matic conduct of a frequent visitor to gists share is a deep respect for the exercise of Western Europe and Japan, but American Athe Yale seminar, Henry Kissinger. Kissinger human judgment at the highest echelons of policy-makers soon discovered that keeping operated as a grand strategist par excellence, power, along with a faith that far-seeing in- those centers free of communism seemed even though he saw the Soviets not as emo- dividuals can rise above structural forces and to require securing the flow of oil from tional zealots intent on world domination but political exigencies to shape history. In this the Middle East and raw materials from rather as rational power-seekers like everyone regard, grand strategy is nostalgic less for the Southeast Asia. Why accept spatial restric- else. Thanks to this “realism,” his project of cold war than for a fabled earlier age when tions anyway if Soviet penetration into new détente had the potential to be vastly differ- citizens trusted their leaders and ­leaders land, however trivial in and of itself, would ent from the cold war foreign policies that heeded their intuition. The grand strategists provide a base from which to launch the next preceded it. Yet that is not how it turned out. prefer to quote The Art of War or The Seven inevitable conquest? Why wait until vitally Seeking to be one of history’s great states- Pillars of Wisdom than to busy themselves important territory was under immediate men, Kissinger continued to subordinate all with policy briefs. Refreshingly, they speak threat? Against nonstop expansionism, Ken- priorities to bipolar competition. He needed the language of neither social science nor nan’s limitless prescription of 1947 made to believe everything that happened in the wonkery, but they shrink their hallowed sense: “confront the Russians with unalter- world was deeply connected to everything humanities down to a repository of “accumu- able counter-force at every point where they else—lest he be rendered unable to leverage lated wisdom,” in Gaddis’s phrase. Starting show signs of encroaching upon the interests local events in Latin America, the Middle with the Greeks and Romans, culminat- of a peaceful and stable world.” East or Asia in the larger game of power ing with policy presentations on national Small wonder that Kennan struggled to maximization against the Soviets. security and finance, the seminar invites apply containment in any restrained fashion. “Linkage,” as Kissinger called his ­method, its members to become the latest bearers May 28, 2012 The Nation. 31 of civilization’s torch—a presumption not ing decline. Grand strategy flatters the egos with no major adversaries. The administra- made any prettier by its overt instrumental- of politicians and policy-makers who hold tion’s recent pivot toward China entails not ization of the humanities. The Round Table, their nation responsible for the fate of the a grand strategy but a prosaic posture in at least, counted dedicated classicists in its world. It presumes the persistence of a global East Asia that neither guides every action of ranks and cogitated on the ethics of rule. dominance, the future of which no longer the United States nor defines its existential Yale’s seminar impresses everything into the seems assured. Grand strategy’s influence purpose in the world. But grand strategy is service of strategy. might not, in fact, be merely potential. After becoming a more popular idea regardless of This is the treatment Charles Hill gives Gaddis, writing in Foreign Policy in 2002, Obama’s coolness toward it. Superpowers the literary canon in his Grand Strategies hailed George W. Bush’s national security crave sweeping simplifications of the societies (2010), the reductio ad absurdum of the grand strategy as a sophisticated plan for bring- they act upon and have little incentive to learn strategy project. Hill has inspired a cult ing the Middle East, “once and for all, into more; they shape the rest of the world more following among Yale undergraduates, one the modern world,” he went to the White profoundly than the rest of the world shapes of whom scribbled “Charles Hill is God” House to help draft Bush’s second inaugural them. This is part of the reason that the social on her freshman notepad and later wrote address. Gaddis even suggested that the sciences, with their policy-ready formulas for a book to explore the insight. In his book, president speak of “ending tyranny,” which slicing and dicing human relations, ascended Hill fishes for grand strategies throughout Bush then made “the ultimate goal” of the to prominence as America gained the power the centuries and catches them everywhere. United States. Gaddis’s fellow professors to remake the world in its image. What exactly is it that unites all the great were rankled, but more telling than his col- Grand strategy, despite its intentions, is strategists across history? Hill calls it a laboration with power was that he served little different. Promising synoptic knowl- “sixth sense.” He might not be speaking an administration singularly bad at relating edge, it is less likely to respond to real metaphorically. “Even Tolstoy,” Hill writes, ends and means. When push came to shove, problems than to enlarge them to “grand” “portrays Marshall Kutuzov as making aspirations of grandeur proved stronger than ­proportions. “To remain broad,” Gaddis says, sound strategic decisions because he senses the labors of strategy. “you’ve got to retain a certain shallowness.” the course of history. This is Clausewitz’s Those hoping for a new American grand He may be right to think that grand strategy coup d’oeil. If you have that sixth sense, you strategy will have to wait out the Obama depends on seeing superficiality as something can size up the situation at one glance and presidency. The president seems unmoved by to cling to rather than overcome. If you know decide how to incorporate it, or not, into the grand-strategic ethos, recognizing per- a bit about your yurt-mates, you might think your grand strategy.” With grand strategy haps that taking things more or less as they twice before belting out “Guys and Dolls” in reduced to ineffable instinct, there’s not come is a logical course for a world leader the middle of the night. n much left to say about it. Instead Hill strings together free associations inspired by the great books, forcing almost any author to speak to present-day quandaries. The blood feud in Aeschylus’ Oresteia leads Hill to a discussion of the family feud in Huckleberry Finn, which in turn reminds Hill of a recent discussion “at the bar in the country club of Rochester late one evening” when an old hand from the Middle East delivered this nugget of wisdom about the region: “It’s all clans.” Those not blessed with the Clause- witzian coup d’oeil might get the impression that Hill has distilled classic literature into a series of chauvinistic clichés—“Only a novel in English can encompass all Indian reality,” he comments at one point—except that by the end Hill turns away from the classics in favor of a speech by Pope John Paul II, whom he presents as a prophet of world order before pronouncing on the need for the international system to make more of its foundations in the divine.

ostalgia this mawkish will not reso- nate widely. Grand strategy, however, already has. Its proponents are cor- rect about one thing: sometimes a handful of well-positioned men can Nchange history, especially when they are backed by millions of dollars and peddling an alluring message to a superpower fear-