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 Harry Halem (University of St. Andrews)
Published on H-Diplo (May, 2018)
Commissioned by Seth Offenbach (Bronx Community College, The City University of New York)
Printable Version:
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=51534
Winston Churchill’s
The World Crisis: 1911-1918 (1923), his
account of the Great War, is a unique writing on major warfare.
Churchill experienced the conflict at the strategic level, as both First
Lord of the Admiralty and Minister of Munitions, and in the physical
trenches, serving as a battalion commander on the western front. The
confusion and brutality of combat may have made others reconsider their
conception of warfare as an instrument of high policy; despite not
seeing significant frontline combat, Churchill personally made
thirty-six excursions into no man’s land. Nevertheless, Churchill
remained convinced of the unity between strategy and politics,
particularly at the apex of decision making. As he wrote in
The World Crisis, “at the summit, true politics and strategy are one.”[1]
Strategy, however, has multiple aspects. It can be defined as
a contest of wills. Therefore, any situation with counterpoising forces
involves strategy; each side attempts to force the other to conform to
its will. Strategy defines international politics in particular.
Nevertheless, one can distinguish between different levels of strategy,
from the technical through the operational, theater strategic, and at
the highest point, grand strategic.
This last, highest, and most elusive sort of strategy is Simon Reich and Peter Dombrowski’s topic in
The End of Grand Strategy: US Maritime Operations in the Twenty-First Century.
Their selection is particularly relevant, given the defining role of
debates over grand strategy in the US policy community. Grand strategy
can be understood as the relationship between all of a state’s potential
implements of power and its ultimate desired end state. Such a concept
demands a set of foundational principles about the world, nature of
politics, and a state’s role, and a set of deductive conclusions
following from those principles that link nearly every aspect of policy
into a cohesive whole.
Naturally, commanding personalities will define a field obsessed with
such a topic. Constructing policy despite the natural inconsistencies
of political interaction, the scope of issues a great power encounters,
and the range of threats policymakers must respond to demands a
confident articulation of organizing principles and resulting state
actions. The grand strategist must believe that a great power can force
the world to conform to its vision, provided policy is derived from the
proper assumptions and executed with sufficient political will. This
perspective explains the intensity of grand strategic debates in the
United States; proponents of each strategic paradigm are convinced of
the fundamental accuracy of their own approach, and by extension, must
conceive of pursuing an alternate path as foolhardy at best, and
suicidal at worst.
In the context of such discussion, Reich and Dombrowski advance a
provocative thesis that bluntly challenges the concept of grand strategy
itself. They contend that changes in the contemporary geopolitical
environment, in the form of “new threats, actors, and forms of
conflict,” combine to make American grand strategy “less than the sum of
its parts” (p. 2). If this is indeed true, the vigorous, often
acrimonious debate over grand strategy in the US policy community is not
only counterproductive but also dangerous; premised on the illusion
that America can manipulate the surrounding world with the right
policies and sufficient willpower, the pursuit of grand strategy blinds
policymakers to the actual facts on the ground that should dictate
American action.
Reich and Dombrowski’s project has a number of strengths. Challenging
conventional thinking is always beneficial in an innately conservative
community. At a minimum, it forces members of that community to
articulate their core premises more fully and develop their logic more
explicitly. Moreover, Reich and Dombrowski’s approach offers a
description of US grand strategic theory found in no other text and a
set of developed case studies that flesh out each identified strategic
approach. Nevertheless, upon examination, their argument falls short of
its ultimate goal of dismantling the grand strategic approach.
Two general understandings of grand strategy exist, the “narrow” and
the “broad.” The narrow conception restricts grand strategy to solely
traditional security issues. Barry Posen’s “theory of security” approach
serves as an example; he contends that a state’s grand strategy is its
conception of what makes itself secure against physical threats.[2] By
contrast, the broad approach integrates a number of nontraditional
issues and elements of power into its viewpoint: B. H. Liddell Hart’s
study is a form of this perspective.[3] Reich and Dombrowski avoid
asserting themselves on either side of the debate, instead developing
arguments using each criterion for grand strategy. Such an approach
strengthens their overall case, by avoiding the chronic disagreements
between narrow and broad views of grand strategy.
The American strategic community can be separated into three
distinct, but overlapping, schools of thought. The first of Reich and
Dombrowski’s major analytical strengths is explicating the assumptions
that underpin each of these schools and indicating the specific
sub-variants of all three approaches. Two of the three strategic
perspectives will be well known to the informed reader. Hegemony is
contrasted with its traditional rival, retrenchment. While the former
entails unilaterally exercising American power or ensuring America’s
visible leadership role, the latter entails only selectively engaging in
relevant security issues and otherwise refusing to expend resources on
missions tangential to physical security. Reich and Dombrowski’s
sponsorship strategy, however, is both novel and coherently explains a
number of American policy decisions. It involves manipulating formal and
informal international institutions (used in a broad sense) to
encourage other actors to take the lead on issues important to American
security, but which the US lacks the resources to address.
Reich and Dombrowski’s second greatest analytical strength is their
explication of each grand strategy’s specific sub-variants in the
context of maritime operations. Maritime policy is a reasonable focus
for a discussion of strategy; issues ranging from traditional
warfighting to counterpiracy, counterterrorism, and humanitarian relief
all fall under the maritime domain, meaning American maritime and naval
policy is indicative of the United States’ approach to different
situations. The authors use their detailed descriptions of specific
situations to contrast the contexts in which different strategies are
applied. Of particular note are their detailed discussions of the US
Navy’s maritime exercises in the Pacific; American maritime
counterterrorism, counterpiracy, and counter-proliferation efforts; and
US lack of engagement in the Arctic. At a minimum,
The End of Grand Strategy presents highly comprehensible policy overviews and histories of each topic engaged with.
Third, Reich and Dombrowski demonstrate the degree to which civilian
policy choices have transformed the military’s role from a purely
warfighting arm to a humanitarian and law enforcement organization. The
authors avoid the pitfalls of biased discussions that castigate the
degradation of the military’s warfighting capabilities or praise the
growth in its ability to respond to nontraditional policy issues.
Instead, they remain objective, assessing the mechanical results of
American policy choices through the prism of naval operations. Their
evaluation reveals the precise effects of the policy insistence on
Military Operations Other Than War on the navy, specifically detailing
how the service is forced to use high-end platforms for what are
essentially maritime police actions.
The End of Grand Strategy’s three major strengths make it a
worthwhile text for those interested in contemporary American maritime
operations. However, the authors fail in their ultimate, more ambitious
goal of refuting the concept of grand strategy itself. Reich and
Dombrowski premise their argument on the assumption that a distinct
difference exists between the contemporary international environment and
its historical antecedents. New threats, new threat sources, and new
means of responding to these threats are thought to have modified the
international environment sufficiently to preclude traditional grand
strategy. Unlike other commentators, Reich and Dombrowski do not argue
that changes in the international environment entail a complete
abandonment of traditional paradigms. By contrast, each detailed case
study they present offers a scenario in which a specific grand strategy
applies to a certain context. However, they do contend that the changes
they identify in the international system make it impossible for any
specific grand strategy to respond to all issues facing the US. From
this statement, the authors derive the conclusion that the employment of
multiple, contradictory strategies tailored to each threat and
situation is not probable but “inevitable” (p. 31). Grand strategy, by
contrast, never evolves with these threats. Instead, strategists employ
the same deductive approach, prioritizing certain issues (state or
nonstate, traditional or nontraditional) and producing largely static
frameworks that are increasingly divorced from reality.
However, the new trends they identify—the diffusion of capabilities,
increasing creativity of American adversaries, growing strength of
non-state groups, and rise of nontraditional hybrid conflicts—are not
necessarily new, nor relevant. Technological diffusion may be a greater
issue over time, but the resource base of the nation-state seems likely
to preclude a challenge from substate actors in the foreseeable future.
The growing creativity, and strength, of terrorist groups does present a
challenge to state security. But it is increasingly apparent that these
non-state groups are typically connected to, or facilitated by, a state
benefactor. Even when fully independent of state control, in the case
of ISIS and its franchises, one cannot help but think that these
non-state groups lack independent relevance. ISIS’s graphic beheadings
remain a distinct moral crime and a marker of the group’s innate
savagery. However, now that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s self-proclaimed
caliphate lies in ruins, it is clear that ISIS’s primary effect was in
facilitating the growth of Russo-Iranian power. Absent the collapse of
the Iraqi state, Iran would still struggle to link its Lebanese proxy
territories with its Persian heartland. Iran therefore owes its position
in the Near East today to ISIS’s rise and fall. Similarly, Russia has
gained a significant foothold in the Mediterranean for arguably the
first time in its history. Vladimir Putin used ISIS, along with the
existence of radical elements of the Syrian opposition, to insert
Russian forces into the Near East. Despite ISIS’s high profile, it seems
that the group’s main aftereffects will be related to state action. The
fundamental changes predicted in the international system, therefore,
are likely not as fundamental as Reich and Dombrowski predict. In such
an environment, strategy remains critical.
Moreover, Reich and Dombrowski ultimately make a normative argument
that does not follow from their positive evidence. They may be correct
that strategic debate in the US has stagnated. As they note, military
bureaucracies tend to suppress innovation and prioritize institutional
replication absent vigorous efforts to the contrary. However, judging
the relative importance of the changes in the international system Reich
and Dombrowski identify should not be contingent on policy attention.
As they repeatedly argue, not only are US legislative objectives
drastically different from the military’s preferences, but policymakers
also create policy based on internal domestic pressure, often vice
actual strategic thinking. Reich and Dombrowski explicitly attempt to
avoid “normative prescription” (p. 5). But their contention, that grand
strategy is impossible in the present age, rests on the unequivocal,
uncritical acceptance of American policy priorities. The US clearly
employs a number of distinct strategies depending on the policy issue
and uses high-end naval assets for low-end missions. This does not mean
that it should act as such. The US military primarily used F/A-18s,
F-16s, and F-15s for air support missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. It
would obviously be absurd to argue that, because the US employed such
high-end platforms for low-end missions, the traditional concept of
strategy is dead. If anything, Reich and Dombrowski’s text indicates the
need to refocus policy discussions on strategy and avoid whittling away
the US military’s combat power by employing multi-billion-dollar
surface warships as glorified Coast Guard cutters. Simply because
American policymakers demand that the military respond to a whole
spectrum of threats does not mean that such a policy is wise. Reich and
Dombrowski’s book has relevance in prompting discussion over the
structure and shape of grand strategy, but not its end altogether.
All strategy is inexact. By definition, it involves an adversary
unwilling to submit to one’s will. The randomness of events and
multiplicity of issues any nation must face makes strategy creation a
difficult task. Even during the strategically idealized Cold War, the US
selected several different grand strategies to counter the Soviet
Union, shifting between aggressive and defensive approaches depending on
the overall balance of forces and specific contexts. Absent a unifying
principle around which to collect strategy, the US has drifted from
crisis to crisis without a broader direction in foreign policy. The
result of this disunified policy has been the deterioration of America’s
strategic position over the past three decades. Russia is poised to
replace the US as the predominate foreign power in the Near East,
facilitated by contradictory American policy
apropos Iran and
ISIS. A theatrical, totalitarian cult-of-personality dictatorship holds a
global superpower’s undivided attention, after decades of failed
negotiations and policy neglect. A kleptocracy with a GDP less than half
of the United States’ dictates the pace and intensity of events from
the Baltics to the Black Sea, a situation enabled by vacillation between
faux firmness and reset attempts with the Kremlin.
The United States’ inability to articulate a unified, coherent
response to these issues does not indicate the futility of grand
strategy but the inadequacy of the Washington policymaking apparatus.
The question therefore becomes, can America’s leaders articulate a grand
strategy in an increasingly unstable world and meet the challenges that
the Republic faces? Reich and Dombrowski unintentionally offer an
answer. It provides no cause for optimism.
Notes
[1]. Winston S. Churchill,
The World Crisis: 1911-1918, abridged and rev. ed. (New York: Free Press, 2005), 294.
[2]. Barry Posen,
Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), 1.
[3]. B. H. Liddell Hart,
Strategy, 2nd rev. ed. (London: Faber & Faber, 1967), 322.
Citation:
Harry Halem. Review of Reich, Simon; Dombrowski, Peter,
The End of Grand Strategy: US Maritime Operations in the Twenty-First Century.
H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews.
May, 2018.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=51534
