Simon Reich, Peter Dombrowski. The End of Grand Strategy: US Maritime Operations in the Twenty-First Century. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018. 252 pp. $30.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-5017-1462-7.
Reviewed by Elliott Hurwitz (World Bank)
Published on H-War (June, 2022)
Commissioned by Margaret Sankey (Air University)
“Grand strategy” is difficult to define. In the 1991 book Grand Strategies in War and Peace, Yale historian Paul Kennedy presented a classical definition of “grand strategy” as a way to relate means to ends: “The crux of grand strategy lies therefore in policy, that is, in the capacity of the nation’s leaders to bring together all the elements, both military and non-military, for the preservation and enhancement of the nation’s long-term (that is, in wartime and peacetime) best interests. ‘All of the elements’ include the full use and assessment of diplomacy; questions of national will, morale, and political culture; and the full range of economic resources, including industry, finance, manpower, and wealth.”[1]
Simon Reich and Peter Dombrowski’s book offers a broad variety of definitions of “grand strategy” without embracing one. They include those by John Lewis Gaddis, Barry Posen, B. H. Liddell Hart, Stephen Brooks, William Wohlforth, and John Ikenberry. While some of these authorities deal with the range of nonmilitary elements addressed by Kennedy, others do not. And Reich and Dombrowski state that “definitions of grand strategy that emphasize military threats are in vogue amongst Realist scholars,” to which school of thought the authors belong. They also argue that “Liddell Hart is widely regarded as the doyen of grand strategy” (p. 15). Liddell Hart’s concept of grand strategy, however, has a number of flaws: following the Second World War, Liddell Hart wrote that the Wehrmacht adopted theories developed from those of J. F. C. Fuller and from his own, and then used them against the Allies in Blitzkrieg warfare. But scholars such as John Mearsheimer and Shimon Naveh have questioned the extent to which British officers—in particular Liddell Hart—had an influence on the development of the methods of war practiced by the Panzerwaffe in 1939–41.[2]
As the book’s theme, the authors describe how grand strategy is now gone: “We can look back nostalgically at American grand strategy during the Cold War [containment], but its reputed coherence has been replaced by a new series of challenges in the twenty-first century. Those new challenges are not susceptible to treatment with a one-size-fits-all grand strategy” (pp. ix-x). A brief summary of the scope, purpose, and significance of the work is below.
The book states that the attempt to impose a single overarching strategy is no longer feasible: “America faces a novel geostrategic environment with, notably, new threats, actors, and forms of conflict.... The very multiplicity of challenges generates a sense of chaos among national security specialists, in sharp contrast to the reputed stability of the one-dimensional, but truly existential, threat posed by the Soviet Union to an earlier generation” (p. 2). The authors use a descriptive narrative to present six strategies of American foreign policy: hegemony/primacy, hegemony/leadership, sponsorship/formal, sponsorship/informal, retrenchment/restraint, and retrenchment/isolationism. They also provide six maritime case studies as evidence that the United States is already using these strategies. The book’s organization and presentation follows this framework.
The intellectual sources on which the authors draw are prominent international relations realists, such as Stephen Walt, John Mearsheimer, and Christopher Layne. These scholars argue—as do the authors—that Washington should retreat from the ambitious strategy it has followed since World War II and embrace a far more austere approach to world affairs. They contend that America should pursue a minimalist approach known as “offshore balancing.” Reich and Dombrowski neglect to take into account the nonmilitary elements of grand strategy as stated by Kennedy, which are considered by many scholars as critical to its successful implementation. The omission of these elements is the most salient of the shortcomings of the book, which outweigh its contributions.
The authors state that strategies must be flexible and fully cognizant of operational needs. Conventional nostrums of grand strategy are often ill-suited to meeting global, regional, and local security challenges: “Scholars and policymakers can devise fundamental principles, coherent rules, or looser guidelines under the rubric of a grand strategy. They can develop reassuring concepts such as commanding or securing the [global] commons, predicated on America’s enviable technological capabilities and seemingly unbridled military budget” (p. 5). This statement does not take into account the considerable recent technological progress made by US adversaries (especially the People’s Republic of China, the PRC) as well as macroeconomic and budgetary constraints on the US military and on other levers of grand strategy.[3] To state that the US military budget is seemingly unbridled is incorrect.
The authors state: “The form of conflict of greatest interest to American strategists has shifted from the conventional, symmetric war that dominated Cold War thinking [as well as that of earlier conflicts] to more varied forms ... and back again. These alternative forms of warfare include ‘asymmetric conflict’ and ‘irregular warfare,’ tactics that recognize and offset the greater strengths of an adversary. Both are employed by nationalist, ethnic, and now religious insurgencies, involving the kind of guerrilla tactics used against American forces in Vietnam and later in Afghanistan and Iraq” (p. 26). The assertion that the form of conflict on which strategists focus has shifted from conventional symmetric warfare to more varied forms—and then has come back again—is incorrect. (Footnote 66 on page 26 states, “Indeed, the current irregular forms of warfare and conflict that dominate today’s strategic debates such as terrorism and insurgencies had Cold War analogues (e.g., PLO, MPLA).”)
In his paper, “American Grand Strategy—Lessons from the Cold War,” Hal Brands cites three important elements of grand strategy that to a large extent are not dealt with in the book. First, grand strategy ultimately begins and ends with macroeconomics, and perhaps the central insight from the Cold War is that geopolitical success is a function of economic vitality. Second, grand strategy is not simply about the future, however; it is also about the past. As new scholarship reminds us, policy decisions are indelibly influenced by perceptions of what happened before and what we ought to learn from it (learning from history is critical to policymakers’ decision-making).[4] Third, American engagement is the bedrock of international stability.[5]
The authors make a positive contribution when they describe Iranian use of asymmetric warfare. They note that Iran “has concentrated on acquiring anti-access capabilities that use the U.S. Navy's [USN] own high-tech, large-platform approach to naval warfare against it. Iran deploys relatively low-technology, low-cost naval systems from small craft to undersea mines and [land-based] antiship missiles” (p. 61).
Considering that they use six case studies of maritime operations, Reich and Dombrowski make a serious error with their reference to overseas US naval facilities: “At the opposite ends of the sea line of communication [SLOC] between China and the Persian Gulf lie the American bases in Bahrain and Singapore” (p. 64). However, according to MilitaryBases.US, “There is not a U.S. Military Base in Singapore.”[6] The Singaporean Changi Naval Base (CNB) is used by visiting ships of the Royal Navy as part of the Five Power Defence Arrangements and by the USN for resupply and refueling according to the addendum to the 1990 United States-Singapore Memorandum of Understanding signed on November 10, 1990. CNB is also used by the Indian, Japanese, South Korean, and other Anglo-Saxon navies.
In their case studies of maritime operations, the authors make a positive contribution by describing a series of Indo-Pacific coalition exercises with Thailand, India, Japan, Korea, and Anglo-Saxon allies and partners that strengthened regional military and political cooperation (and inter-operability) from 1975 to 1995. They describe military operations other than war (MOOTW). With that transition, they state, the use of miliary forces has become an increasingly political activity, demanding the formation (and maintenance) of international coalitions.
Regarding the participation of the USN in the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), an unfunded multilateral mandate, the book makes an important contribution by pointing out that for the United States, this is a curious policy area, one where it uses massive, expensive warships to conduct constabulary functions on the high seas. The primary “weapons” are domestic and international law, which is carried out by legal officials on USN and Coast Guard vessels. The authors state, “American proponents of PSI have been hampered by fundamental disagreements between a minority of U.S. senators and their very vocal supporters in the House of Representatives and outside Congress and the Senate majority over whether the United States should support international agreements that legalize interdiction” (p. 116). They identify important issues in American foreign policy—sovereignty and the realist versus idealist schools of thought—which they do not adequately evaluate. (The current school of idealism has roots in the administration of Woodrow Wilson and in many ways was a precursor of such multilateral organizations as the International Monetary Fund and United Nations.)
The authors also state that both the US Air Force (USAF) and USN “specialize in high-intensity conflict, their missions require surveillance and intelligence collection [as well as analysis and distribution], and neither requires large ‘footprints’ on the ground” (p. 175). To state that the USAF does not require a large footprint on the ground is incorrect, and the USN has a large worldwide network of bases that occupy a great deal of real estate.
In chapter 7, “Racing for the Arctic with a Strategy of Restraint,” the authors make a positive contribution in perhaps their most salient maritime case study, in which they present considerable evidence and make significant contributions. The important points are the following. First, aside from missile defense installations, even during the Cold War the Arctic receded in significance for US national security. Second, the United States, Russia, and China are the primary nations competing for control of Arctic mineral and energy resources and trade routes. Third, the Obama administration emphasized ensuring rights of access and freedom of navigation (FONOPS). FONOPs are an important USN function in ensuring access to both the global commons and navigable sea lanes (e.g., the South China Sea). Fourth, there is, however, a substantial constraint on USN ability to implement or enforce FONOPS—lack of sufficient icebreakers or surface vessels. Fifth, commercial firms are lobbying both the Canadian and Russian governments for exploration and transit rights in their territories. Sixth, in a February 2020 hearing before the Transportation and Maritime Security Subcommittee, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian affairs Michael Murphy testified that Russia’s military buildup in the Arctic threatens the northern flank of the United States and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Murphy said that “Russia's restrictions on the freedom of navigation in the Northern Sea Route are inconsistent with international law.”[7]
In the preface and acknowledgments, the authors describe the genesis of the book over the last two decades and to whom they were indebted in its writing. They identify themselves as academics and members of the think tank/national security policy community. As stated on the publisher's website, the book is addressed to this group: “The End of Grand Strategy is essential reading for policymakers, military strategists, and analysts and critics at advocacy groups and think tanks.” While the book does not have a bibliography, the sources cited in the footnotes are sound and well-regarded. But readers would have benefited from a more detailed index. Notwithstanding its shortcomings, the book is useful to the reader because of the information it conveys: in particular, six strategies of American foreign policy; case studies of inter-allied maritime operations that strengthened regional military and political cooperation and enhanced US alliances (this is also important in the context of the increased use of military forces as a political instrument); case study on racing for the Arctic with a strategy of restraint; and adversary use of asymmetric warfare.
What is the book’s significance in terms of recent developments in the literature on grand strategy? As stated in a 2019 paper, "Is Grand Strategy a Research Program? A Review Essay," by Thierry Balzacq, Peter Dombrowski, and Simon Reich, the scholarly literature tends to fuse around two traditions: the classicist and international relations traditions of grand strategy.[8] The book uses the classicist tradition focused on the use of military as opposed to nonmilitary instruments. As noted elsewhere in the literature, with the end of the Cold War and in the context of the 2003 Iraq War, strategic debate coalesced into a strategy of primacy. The aftershocks of this war (and that in Afghanistan), along with an economic downturn, rising national debt, and deepening political gridlock, have led to a renewed strategic debate centered on two major schools of thought, primacy and restraint, which are addressed in the book.
Notes
[1]. Paul Kennedy, ed., Grand Strategies in War and Peace (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 5.
[2]. John Mearsheimer, Liddell Hart and the Weight of History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988); Shimon Naveh, In Pursuit of Military Excellence: The Evolution of Operational Theory (London: Routledge, 1997); Sir Michael Howard, "The Forgotten Dimensions of Strategy," Foreign Affairs 57, no. 5 (1979): 975-86; and Stephen G. Brooks, G. John Ikenberry, and William C. Wohlforth, “Don’t Come Home, America: The Case against Retrenchment,” International Security 13 (Winter 2012): 7-51.
[3]. Julian Baird Gewirtz, “China’s Long March to Technological Supremacy: The Roots of Xi Jinping’s Ambition to ‘Catch Up and Surpass,’” Foreign Affairs, August 27, 2019, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2019-08-27/chinas-long-march-technological-supremacy.
[4]. H. R. McMaster, Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World (New York: HarperCollins, 2020). McMaster intimates that the United States could benefit from self-reflection. See also Kennedy, Grand Strategies in War and Peace, 7, “The second purpose is to use these case studies [in his book], as Churchill himself used history, for instruction.”
[5]. Hal Brands, “American Grand Strategy: Lessons from the Cold War,” Foreign Policy Research Institute e-Notes, August 26, 2015, https://www.fpri.org/article/2015/08/american-grand-strategy-lessons-from-the-cold-war/.
[6]. “Sembawang Naval Base,” accessed March 8, 2022, http://www.militarybases.us/navy/sembawang-naval-base/. See also “There Is No U.S. Base in Singapore,” Navy Installations Command (CNIC), accessed March 8, 2022. https://www.cnic.navy.mil/.
[7]. See David Lartner, “The US Navy Returns to an Increasingly Militarized Arctic,” Defense News, May 12, 2020.
[8]. Thierry Balzacq, Peter Dombrowski, and Simon Reich, "Is Grand Strategy a Research Program? A Review Essay," Security Studies 28, no. 1 (2019): 58-86.
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Citation:
Elliott Hurwitz. Review of Reich, Simon; Dombrowski, Peter, The End of Grand Strategy: US Maritime Operations in the Twenty-First Century.
H-War, H-Net Reviews.
June, 2022.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=57315
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