There is No Such Thing as Grand Strategy

The Continued Influence of a Bad Genre

“Grand strategy” is one of the most frequently invoked concepts in contemporary discussions of foreign policy and international relations, and one of the least clearly understood. It carries immense rhetorical weight, signaling seriousness, historical depth, and intellectual authority, yet it is rarely interrogated with the rigor that such prestige demands. Scholars write books about it, policymakers claim to be “grand strategists,” and elite institutions train future leaders in its supposed principles. And yet, beneath this confidence lies a striking ambiguity. The term is used constantly but defined inconsistently; praised for its wisdom but rarely specified in ways that allow meaningful evaluation. Grand strategy is not a coherent phenomenon states possess or execute, but a retrospective genre and institutional language that imposes order on political behavior that is, in practice, fragmented, contested, and improvised.

But what, exactly, is grand strategy? This is the crux of the problem, because no one seems to know, at least not in any way that survives sustained scrutiny. Definitions abound, yet they rarely converge. John Lewis Gaddis simply defines it as “the alignment of potentially unlimited aspirations with necessarily limited capabilities.” ¹ He also argued that the term has traditionally been the planning and fighting of wars. ² The British military historian B.H. Liddell Hart stated that grand strategy or “higher strategy” as he called it, was designed to “co-ordinate and direct all the resources of a nation, or band of nations, towards the attainment of the political object of the war.”³ In other accounts, grand strategy is the specified coordination of all instruments of national power toward long-term political objectives.⁴ In others, it is a theory of statecraft rooted in historical analogy, a mindset cultivated through the study of classics, or a form of strategic wisdom acquired by exposure to great statesmen and great books.⁵ At times, it is presented as an analytic framework; at others, as a normative ideal. Often, it is all of these at once, shifting meaning as the argument’s needs change.

I will admit to having once been quite enamored with “grand strategy” myself. As an undergraduate, the concept was quite interesting. It seemed to promise a sort of intellectual elevation above the boring details of policy and the messiness of politics, a vantage point from which military power, diplomacy, economics, and history could be surveyed and aligned into a single, elegant logic. Grand strategy offered not just explanation, but belonging: mastery of a language spoken by serious people, reinforced by the canonical texts, famous practitioners, and elite institutions. To think in terms of grand strategy felt like thinking correctly about the world, as though coherence were not something to be wrestled into existence, but something waiting to be discovered by those with sufficient historical insight and theoretical discipline.

What ultimately broke that spell was not cynicism but exposure, first to how policy is actually made, and then to how history actually unfolds when stripped of retrospective narration. The further one moves from seminar rooms and closer to institutions, budgets, bureaucracies, and political incentives, the harder it becomes to sustain the belief that coherence is the natural state of affairs. What had once appeared as strategic design began to look like post hoc storytelling; what had seemed like foresight revealed itself as survival filtered through hindsight. Grand strategy does not fail because it was poorly taught or insufficiently refined, but because it asked the wrong questions in the first place.

A quick selection from the “Grand Strategy” genre

Still, the “Grand Strategy” genre is quite popular both in culture, academia, and the media. Just to name a few. Edward Luttwak’s The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire and The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire.⁶ Former Trump National Security Official A. Wess Mitchell’s The Grand Strategy of the Habsburg Empire.⁷ John Lewis Gaddis, On Grand Strategy.⁸ Former Diplomat Charles Hill, Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order.⁹ Geoffrey Parker, The Grand Strategy of Philip II.¹⁰ A search of “Grand Strategy” on Foreign Policy will find more than 300 results, more than 1100 results on Foreign Affairs, another 2800 results on National Interest, and a whopping 160,000 results on JSTOR. The sheer breadth of cases, spanning ancient Rome, Byzantium, early modern Spain, the Habsburg monarchy, and the modern United States, creates the impression that grand strategy is not merely a concept, but a consistent feature of successful statecraft across time and space.

This impression is reinforced institutionally. Yale University hosts a flagship program in Grand Strategy, explicitly designed to train future policymakers by blending history, political theory, and strategic thought.¹¹ Over the years, the program has attracted a virtual who’s who of American foreign policy, including David Petraeus, Henry Kissinger, and Hillary Clinton. Put more bluntly, grand strategy is not merely an academic fashion—it is an elite credentialing system. If one is influential, prominent, or aspirationally serious in American foreign policy, there is a good chance one has passed through this program in some capacity, whether as a student, fellow, lecturer, or honored guest.

Even looking at the current program, this trend continues unabated. For example, Rebecca Lissner, former deputy national security advisor to Kamala Harris, is currently a “Distinguished Practitioner in Grand Strategy.”¹² Rory Stewart, Professor in the Practice of Grand Strategy, previously the UK Secretary of State for International Development, a member of the National Security Council, and Minister of State for Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. The program thus functions not simply as a site of study, but as a gatekeeping institution, where the language of grand strategy is simultaneously taught, legitimized, and recycled—ensuring that successive generations of policymakers inherit not only similar networks and assumptions, but the same confidence that coherence exists where politics, in practice, rarely provides it.

Grand Strategy is also quite popular in the gaming space, particularly in titles from Paradox Studios and Sega.¹³ Paradox has made the incredibly popular Hearts of Iron series, as well as a bunch of other spinoffs, including Imperator Rome, Crusader Kings, Stellaris, and Victoria. Sega is responsible for the Total War games, which, over a 20-year period, have released titles covering everything from ancient Greece, Rome, and Egypt to the Napoleonic era. It is even releasing a game set in the Warhammer 40K universe (which I must confess I am excited about). Players assume the role of a kind of all-seeing state manager, responsible for simultaneously directing diplomacy, economic development, military force, technological progress, and internal politics over long spans of time. They are expected to balance resources, plan campaigns years or decades in advance, and align short-term decisions with long-term objectives to pursue national success or survival. In other words, these games invite players to do precisely what grand strategy promises in theory: to impose coherence, intentionality, and rational design on the life of a state, free from the frictions of domestic politics, bureaucratic rivalry, and “friction” that make such coherence so elusive in the real world.

However, there is no such thing as grand strategy. What exists instead is a persistent desire among scholars, policymakers, and commentators to believe that states can consciously design and sustain a coherent, integrated plan linking military power, diplomacy, economics, and ideology over decades and even centuries. The appeal of the term lies precisely in its vagueness. “Grand strategy” sounds profound because it implies control over complexity, foresight over uncertainty, and unity over politics. Yet as an analytical concept, it explains remarkably little about how states actually behave.

That does not mean that states act randomly or that coordination among different policy tools never occurs. States very often do correlate economic, domestic, and military policies in pursuit of specific ends. They consider tradeoffs between guns and butter, manpower and money, growth and security. They ask whether objectives can be achieved through tariffs rather than troops, subsidies rather than sanctions, alliances rather than invasions. If one insists on a minimal definition, this is all “grand strategy” amounts to: asking what happens when the toolbox contains instruments beyond soldiers and diplomats.

But this activity is neither mysterious nor elevated. It is conducted not by philosopher-kings operating above politics, but by politicians operating squarely within it. These choices are shaped by budgets, electoral incentives, coalition management, and institutional constraints. They emerge through argument, compromise, and sequencing, not through the revelation of some higher strategic logic. What the grand strategy genre does is take this fundamentally ordinary process and inflate it into something grander than it is.

The real problem, then, is not that the underlying questions are illegitimate, but that the label distorts them. “Grand strategy” sounds far more impressive than it deserves to be. It encourages the belief that there exists some type of higher plane of strategic reasoning beyond the mundane work of policymaking, when in reality the core of the exercise is exactly what happens at the end of any competent strategy discussion: listening to the plan, then asking how it will be paid for, where the manpower will come from, which constituencies will bear the costs, and what tradeoffs will be imposed elsewhere.

Almost all invocations of grand strategy rely on hindsight. Analysts look backward at the Cold War, British imperial management, American postwar dominance, or whatever historical case you want to use and infer an overarching design where none existed in real time. What appears coherent after the fact was experienced as improvisation, bureaucratic conflict, and political compromise. The United States did not execute a single, settled strategy of “containment” over forty years; it lurched through competing interpretations of what containment even meant, fought wars that contradicted its stated objectives in Korea and South Vietnam, and routinely subordinated long-term goals to short-term domestic pressures. The coherence attributed to these actions is imposed after the fact, smoothing over contradictions and failures to produce a usable narrative. This is not a minor historiographical quibble. It is the central flaw of grand-strategy thinking. The ability to tell a story backward does not imply the existence of a guiding design forward. Yet entire schools of thought depend on precisely this sleight of hand.

So this all begs the question, if not grand strategy, then what? If we discard the idea that states possess a coherent, elevated ideological and philosophical design integrating all instruments of power across time, what replaces it? I would simply say that doing so would provide a far clearer view of what strategy actually is. If we return to Gaddis’s original definition, “the alignment of potentially unlimited aspirations with necessarily limited capabilities,” strategy appears not as a grand design, but as a continual exercise in discipline, prioritization, and adjustment.

A useful illustration is the Allied “Germany First” approach during World War II. On paper, this was an admirably simple strategic priority: defeat Germany before turning fully to Japan. It is often cited as evidence of a successful grand strategy.¹⁴ In practice, however, the Allies rarely followed it cleanly. Resources were diverted to the Pacific after Pearl Harbor, major operations in North Africa and Italy consumed men and materiel that did not directly shorten the war in Europe, strategic bombing priorities shifted repeatedly, and political pressures, including British imperial concerns, Soviet demands, and American public opinion, constantly reshaped execution. None of this reflected the absence of a strategy. It reflected friction, uncertainty, logistical limits, alliance politics, and the need to respond to events as they unfolded. “Germany First” functioned less as an integrated master plan than as a rough ordering principle that was repeatedly bent by circumstance.

This is precisely the point. Even in the most favorable case, an existential war, a limited number of allies, and an unusually high degree of political consensus, strategy operated as a guide rather than a blueprint. It set direction, not design. The Allies imperfectly and iteratively aligned aspirations with capabilities, revising priorities as costs, risks, and opportunities became clearer. What made the approach effective was not its coherence on paper, but the willingness to adapt it under pressure. Seen this way, strategy is not the elimination of friction but its management, a reality that the language of grand strategy consistently obscures.

What this example highlights is that strategy is best understood not as an integrated design, but as a process of continual reconciliation between ambition and limitation. States do not move from vision to execution in a straight line. They grope forward, revise assumptions, abandon plans, and accept second-best outcomes. Strategy emerges from this process unevenly, often retrospectively, and frequently in contradiction to stated intentions. What coherence exists is usually temporary and fragile, sustained only so long as circumstances allow.

This also suggests that much of what is labeled strategic failure is, in fact, the normal operation of politics. Democratic states especially are not built to sustain singular, long-term designs insulated from domestic pressure. Electoral cycles, interest groups, legislative bargaining, and public opinion constantly intrude. Strategy must survive these forces, not transcend them. Treating politics as a contaminant to strategy rather than its operating environment leads analysts to misdiagnose routine adjustment as drift and compromise as incoherence.

A more realistic approach, then, is to focus on decision points rather than designs. Instead of asking whether a state has a grand strategy, we should ask how it resolves specific tradeoffs at specific moments. Where does it allocate marginal resources? Which risks does it accept, and which does it avoid? Which commitments does it reinforce, and which does it quietly allow to erode? These choices, taken together, tell us far more about strategy than any post hoc narrative of alignment ever could. This reframing also forces greater intellectual honesty about failure. When strategy is imagined as a grand design, failure is attributed to incompetence or moral weakness. When strategy is understood as constraint management, failure is often tragic but explicable. States misjudge adversaries, overestimate capacities, underestimate costs, and act on incomplete information. These are not deviations from strategy; they are the conditions under which strategy exists.

Finally, abandoning the grand strategy genre clarifies what strategic skill actually looks like. It is not the ability to synthesize everything into a single vision, but the capacity to say no, to sequence objectives, and to recognize when ambition has outrun means. It is judgment exercised under uncertainty, not mastery imposed from above. This kind of strategic thinking is less glamorous and far harder to narrate, which is precisely why it is so often displaced by grander abstractions.

There is no higher plane of statecraft waiting to be discovered beyond politics, budgets, institutions, and tradeoffs. What exists instead is the ordinary, difficult work of governance under constraint—choosing among competing priorities, allocating scarce resources, managing risk, and accepting imperfection. Abandoning the language of grand strategy does not mean abandoning strategic thought. It means stripping away a genre that flatters elites and replacing it with analysis that takes politics seriously. Strategy need not be grand to be real. It needs only to be honest.

1. John Lewis Gaddis, On Grand Strategy (New York: Penguin Press, 2018), 21.

2. Ibid., 4.

3. B. H. Liddell Hart, Strategy (London: Faber & Faber, 1967), 322.

4. Hal Brands, “THE PROMISE AND PITFALLS OF GRAND STRATEGY.” (Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College, 2012), 3.

5. Brands, 22.

6. Edward Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire: From the First Century A.D. to the Third (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976) and The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

7. A. Wess Mitchell, The Grand Strategy of the Habsburg Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018).

8. Gaddis.

9. Charles Hill, Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).

10. Geoffrey Parker, The Grand Strategy of Philip II (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).

11. Jim Sleeper has written an interesting critique of the program, “Yale’s Grand Strategy Program Has Always Been Broken,” Foreign Policy, October 15, 2021.

12. Source.

13. I have clocked an ungodly amount of hours on these games, so I suppose I am a hypocrite, but alas.

14. See Stephen Ambrose and Ernest J. King, “GRAND STRATEGY OF WORLD WAR II.” Naval War College Review 22, no. 8 (1970): 20–28, and David Reynolds, “Churchill and Allied Grand Strategy in Europe, 1944–1945: The Erosion of British Influence,” From World War to Cold War: Churchill, Roosevelt, and the International History of the 1940s (Oxford, 1997).