Design and Emergence in the Making of American Grand Strategy by Ionut C. Popescu Department of Political Science Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Peter Feaver, Supervisor ___________________________ Bruce Jentleson ___________________________ David Rohde ___________________________ Alex Roland Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Political Science in the Graduate School of Duke University 2013 ABSTRACT Design and Emergence in the Making of American Grand Strategy by Ionut C. Popescu Department of Political Science Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Peter Feaver, Supervisor ___________________________ Bruce Jentleson ___________________________ David Rohde ___________________________ Alex Roland An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Political Science in the Graduate School of Duke University 2013 Copyright by Ionut C. Popescu 2013 Abstract The main research question of this thesis is how do grand strategies form. Grand strategy is defined as a state’s coherent and consistent pattern of behavior over a long period of time in search of an overarching goal. The political science literature usually explains the formation of grand strategies by using a planning (or design) model. In this dissertation, I use primary sources, interviews with former government officials, and historical scholarship to show that the formation of grand strategy is better understood using a model of emergent learning imported from the business world. My two case studies examine the formation of American grand strategy during the Cold War and the post-Cold War eras. The dissertation concludes that in both these strategic eras the dominating grand strategies were formed primarily by emergent learning rather than flowing from advanced designs. iv Contents Abstract .........................................................................................................................................................................iv List of Tables ...............................................................................................................................................................vi Chapter 1: How Does Grand Strategy Get Made? .........................................................................................1 Defining Grand Strategy..................................................................................................................................3 The Making of American Grand Strategy: Design vs. Emergence ..............................................14 Research Design and Methodology .........................................................................................................30 Chapter 2: Design and Emergence in the Making of Containment ....................................................40 Kennan and Nitze as the Architects of Containment .......................................................................43 The Truman Doctrine....................................................................................................................................66 Marshall Plan and NATO ..............................................................................................................................76 NSC-68 and the Korean War.......................................................................................................................86 Eisenhower and Project Solarium ...........................................................................................................98 Rethinking Containment: Kissinger’s Grand Strategy of Détente........................................... 113 Ronald Reagan and the Culmination of Containment .................................................................. 123 Chapter 3: The Formation of a New American Grand Strategy – 1991-2008............................ 136 George H. W. Bush and the Origins of the AGL Grand Strategy................................................ 146 Bill Clinton and AGL in the 1990s ......................................................................................................... 174 AGL after 9/11: George W. Bush and the War on Terror........................................................... 204 Chapter 4: Conclusions ...................................................................................................................................... 230 The Interplay of Design and Emergence in American Grand Strategy ................................. 231 The Question of Success: Tentative Conclusions and Implications........................................ 238 References............................................................................................................................................................... 253 v List of Tables Table 1: Summary of Cold War....................................................................................................................... 234 Table 2: Summary of Post-Cold War Era.................................................................................................... 237 vi Chapter 1: How Does Grand Strategy Get Made? This is a thesis about the theory and practice of grand strategy in general, and American grand strategy in particular. Since the end of the Cold War, debates on American grand strategy have increased in prominence in both the scholarly and the policy-making communities. A general sense that a successor needs to be found for the Containment grand strategy that dominated America’s foreign policy in the Cold War led many scholars and commentators to propose new frameworks and master plans for guiding Washington’s actions on the world scene. Despite a significant literature on American grand strategy in both the scholarly and the policy worlds, however, most political scientists and policy analysts debate the merits of particular grand strategic plans and options without paying much attention to the process of formulating grand strategy. There is instead a fairly widespread implicit assumption that coherent grand strategies should be the product of strategic planning and design.1 This idea that grand strategies must be planned is based mainly on the Cold War experience, an era when the United States was generally regarded as following a Containment design laid out in the late 1940s. But what if this argument does not hold 1 There is a large body of literature on American Grand Strategy in the past two decades, mostly dedicated to debates about the merits of competing choices for the United States. Most scholars generally assume that strategies are planned in advance, and therefore they focus on determining what the right plans or frameworks should be. Some of the most influential works over the past twenty years include: Joffe, “Bismark or Britain”; Posen and Ross, “Competing Visions”; Gaddis, “ Grand Strategy of Transformation”; Art, Grand Strategy for America; Biddle "Grand Strategy after 9/11"; Layne, Peace of Illusions; Dueck, Reluctant Crusaders; Kupchan and Trubowitz, ”Dead Center”; Zakaria, “Future of American Power”; Drezner, “Obama Grand Strategy?”; Flournoy and Brimley, Finding our Way and America’s Path. A separate category includes policymakers and scholars who doubt the existence of American grand strategy, and believe such explanations are provided after the fact to assign more coherence to what was generally ad-hoc behavior. For example, see McDougall, “Grand Strategy?”; Gray, Irregular Enemies, and Betts, “Is Strategy an Illusion?” 1 under more careful scrutiny? What if the principles of the actual Containment grand strategy, as more and more historians now hold, were different from the planned designs of George Kennan and strategic thinkers who followed him? Conversely, after the Cold War, the lack of a widely accepted Kennan-esque master plan led many commentators to believe that US leaders have not had a grand strategy that was coherent and consistent. But what if the post-Cold War American foreign policy, despite lacking a grand design, nevertheless followed a number of key principles in much the same way as Containment did? In order to explain such outcomes, this dissertation argues that a different theoretical model of grand strategy formation would be required to replace—or at least complement—the design and bureaucratic politics paradigms that dominate the political science literature. I import and adapt such a model from the business world. The emergent strategy model, as described in the business-theory literature primarily by Henry Mintzberg, offers an alternative view of how grand strategies can form. This thesis argues that grand strategies are actually best understood as being formed by the interplay of design and emergence, rather than being either fully deliberate plans or ex-post-facto rationalizations of ad-hoc, non-strategic behavior. The dissertation will examine the two broad strategic eras in modern US foreign policy: the Cold War period (1945-1989), and the post-Cold War era (1990-2008), including the so-called “War on Terror.” In each of the case studies, the project will analyze the formation of the grand strategies that eventually came to shape American foreign policy in order to test the relative explanatory power of the emergence model compared to a planning model and an ad-hoc model. 2 Defining