Grand Flattery

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, Machia velli, 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.

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