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Journal of Strategic Studies

ISSN: 0140-2390 (Print) 1743-937X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fjss20

Grand Strategy vs. Emergent Strategy in the conduct of foreign policy

Ionut C. Popescu

To cite this article: Ionut C. Popescu (2018) Grand Strategy vs. Emergent Strategy in the conduct of foreign policy, Journal of Strategic Studies, 41:3, 438-460, DOI: 10.1080/01402390.2017.1288109

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2017.1288109

Published online: 10 Feb 2017.

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Grand Strategy vs. Emergent Strategy in the conduct of foreign policy

Ionut C. Popescu

Clements Center for National Security, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

ABSTRACT Does a great power need to formulate a long-term Grand Strategy to guide its foreign policy actions? While some scholars continue to debate the competing merits of various grand strategies, a growing literature now emphasizes emergent learning and improvisation as the keys to success, as opposed to implementing a long-term design. In this article, I explore these scholarly arguments by framing the debate as one between two schools of thought, Grand Strategy and Emergent Strategy. After presenting the main arguments and the historical examples associated with each school, I evaluate the two approaches across four categories: the type of international security environment each of them is most suited for, the way each approach deals with short-term vs. long-term priorities, the domestic political conditions needed for each approach to be successful, and the type of presidential management qualities each school demands. Lastly, I discuss the implications of these arguments for the scholarship and the practice of foreign policy and national security strategy.

KEYWORDS Grand Strategy; US Foreign Policy; Strategic Planning; Leadership; National Security

President Donald Trump was sternly warned by two authors in Foreign Policy that he would ‘regret not having a grand strategy’.1 Similarly, when Barack Obama told a reporter that he does not need either a new Grand Strategy, or ‘even George Kennan’,2 Grand Strategy experts took the former president to task for denying the need for an overarching design for his foreign policy.3 The study of Grand Strategy in general, and American Grand Strategy in particular, is ‘very much in vogue’ these days, to borrow an expression from the description for Hal Brands’ book What Good Is Grand Strategy? But does a great power need to formulate a long-term Grand

CONTACT Ionut C. Popescu [email protected] This article is partly adapted from Ionut C. Popescu, Emergent Strategy and Grand Strategy: How American Presidents Succeed in Foreign Policy (Johns Hopkins, forthcoming 2017). 1Micah Zenko and Rebecca Friedman Lissner, ‘Trump Is Going to Regret Not Having a Grand Strategy’, ForeignPolicy.com, 13 Jan. 2017.

2David Remnick, ‘Going the Distance’, The New Yorker, 27 Jan. 2014. 3Niall Ferguson, ‘America’s Global Retreat’, The Wall Street Journal, (21 Feb. 2014); Frank Costigliola, ‘What Would Kennan Say to Obama’, The New York Times, 27 Feb. 2014.

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© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

Strategy to guide its foreign policy actions? Judging by the number of recent books and articles suggesting improvements to the formulation and implementation of Grand Strategy in the United States, one would think so.4 Having said that, a growing number of strategic studies experts and historians of this topic are now questioning the need to follow a grand strategic design, and instead emphasize emergent learning and improvisa- tion as the keys to foreign policy success.5 Therefore, even as there is still a lively debate comparing different grand strategic frameworks, a very inter- esting trend in the recent literature on foreign policy and national security

4Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth, America Abroad: The United States‘ Global Role in the 21st Century (New York: Oxford University Press 2016); Hal Brands,Making the Unipolar Moment: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Rise of the Post-Cold War Order (Ithaca NY: Cornell Unversity Press 2016); Paul Miller, American Power and Liberal Order: A Conservative Internationalist Grand Strategy (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press 2016); Christopher Hammer, American Pendulum: Recurring Debates in U.S. Grand Strategy (Cornell University Press 2015); Barry Posen, Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy (Cornell University Press 2014); William Martel, Grand Strategy in Theory and Practice: The Need for an Effective American Foreign Policy (Cambridge University Press 2015); Hal Brands, What Good Is Grand Strategy? Power and Purpose in American Statecraft from Harry S. Truman to George W. Bush (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press 2014); James Goldgeier and Jeremi Suri, ‘Revitalizing the U.S. National Security Strategy’, The Washington Quarterly, 38/4 (Winter 2016); Paul Miller, ‘On Strategy, Grand and Mundane’, Orbis, 60/2 (Spring 2016); Jordan Tama, ‘Does Strategic Planning Matter? The Outcome of U.S. National Security Reviews’, Political Science Quarterly, 30/4 (2016); Stephen Sestanovich, Maximalist: America in the World From Truman to Obama (New York: Knopf 2014); Bruce Jones, Still Ours to Lead: America, Rising Powers, and the Tension Between Rivalry and Restraint (Brookings Institution Press 2014); Frank G. Hoffman, ‘Forward Partnership: A Sustainable American Strategy’, Orbis 57/1 (2014); Stephen G. Brooks, G. John Ikenberry, and William C. Wohlforth, ‘Don’t Come Home, America: The Case against Retrenchment’, International Security, 37/3 (2013), 7–51; Stephen G. Brooks, G. John Ikenberry, andWilliam C.Wohlforth, ‘Lean Forward: In Defense of American Engagement’, Foreign Affairs 92/1 (2013), 130–142; Peter Feaver, ‘American Grand Strategy at the Crossroads: Leading From the Front, Leading From Behind, or Not Leading at All and Robert J. Art, Selective Engagement in the Era of Austerity’, in Richard Fontaine and Kristin M. Lord (eds.), America’s Path: Grand Strategy for the Next Administration (Washington DC: Center for a New American Security 2012); Colin Gray, The Strategy Bridge: Theory for Practice (New York: Oxford University Press 2010); Steve Weber and Bruce Jentleson, End of Arrogance (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press 2010); Andrew Krepinevich and Barry Watts, Regaining Strategic Competence: Strategy for the Long Haul (Washington DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments 2009)

5Lawrence Freedman, Strategy: A History (New York: Oxford University Press 2013); Ionut C. Popescu, Emergent Strategy and Grand Strategy: How American Presidents Succeed in Foreign Policy(Johns Hopkins University Press forthcoming 2017); David M. Edelstein and Ronald R. Krebs, ‘Delusions of Grand Strategy: The Problem With Washington’s Planning Obsession’, Foreign Affairs 94/6 (Nov–Dec 2015), Richard Danzig, Driving in the Dark: Ten Propositions about Prediction and National Security (Washington DC: Center for A New American Security 2011); Richard Fontaine and Brian Burton, Eye to the Future: Refocusing State Department Policy Planning (Washington DC: Center for a New American Security 2010); Andrew Erdmann, ‘Planning through a Private Sector Lens,’ in Daniel W., Drezner (ed.), Avoiding Trivia: The Role of Strategic Planning in American Foreign Policy (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press 2009); For similar skepticism about strategy and grand strategy expressed more than a decade ago, see Richard Betts, ‘Is strategy an illusion?’ International Security 25/2 (2000), 5–50; For recent historical studies in this vein, see James Wilson, The Triumph of Improvisation: Gorbachev’s Adaptability, Reagan’s Engagement, and the End of the Cold War (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press 2014); Edward Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press 2009); Richard Sinnreich, ‘“Patterns of Grand Strategy” and “Victory by trial and error: Britain’s struggle against Napoleon”’, in Williamson Murray and Richard Hart Sinnreich (eds.), Successful Strategies: Triumphing in War and Peace from Antiquity to the Present (New York: Cambridge University Press 2014); Williamson Murray, ‘Thoughts on Grand Strategy’, Richard Sinnreich, ‘Patterns of Grand Strategy’, and Marcus Jones, ‘Strategy as character: Bismarck and the Prusso-German question, 1862–1878’ in Williamson Murray, Richard Hart Sinnreich, and James Lacey (eds.), The Shaping of Grand Strategy: Policy, Diplomacy and War (New York: Cambridge University Press 2011).

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strategy revolves around arguments about the style of decision-making process that leads to successful strategic outcomes; more specifically, do policy decisions shaped by a long-term strategic plan lead to more success- ful outcomes than those adopted in a more improvised and emergent manner?

In this article, I explore these scholarly arguments by framing the debate as one between two schools of thought: Grand Strategy and Emergent Strategy. After presenting the main arguments and the historical examples associated with each school, I evaluate the two approaches across four categories: the type of international security environment each of them is most suited for, the way each approach deals with short-term vs. long-term priorities, the domestic political conditions needed for each approach to be successful, and the type of presidential management qualities each school demands. In the final section of the paper, I briefly discuss the implications of these arguments for the future of scholarship on strategy-making, and also for how senior policymakers could improve the conduct of foreign policy and national security strategy.

The Grand Strategy school

Scholars and commentators criticized the former Obama administration for seemingly relying more on improvisation than on a grand design, and this chorus of criticisms is likely to get louder in the future given the Trump administration’s improvisational style.6 As Josef Joffe summarized the view of the Grand Strategy school, ‘Great powers … don’t formulate strategy on the fly. They must have a strategy beforehand, one based on power and purpose that tells challengers what to expect’.7 James Goldgeier and Jeremi Suri issued a similar call for the formulation of a new grand design to guide America’s role in the world: ‘The irony is that in this moment of rapidly shifting international conditions and growing policy uncertainty, a cohesive strategy document is more necessary than ever before’.8 As these pleas for the administration to formulate a grand design imply, most experts in the academic world of political science and in the Washington policymaking community explicitly or implicitly contend that pursuing a long-term Grand Strategy is conducive to foreign policy success. The role of such a grand design is to guide the president’s foreign policy actions and resource allocation decisions in the pursuit of specific long-term objectives. Such a farsighted framework is therefore meant to help set priorities and provide

6See, among others, Niall Ferguson, ‘Wanted: A Grand Strategy for America’, Newsweek,14 Feb. 2011; Peggy Noonan, ‘America’s Strategy Deficit’, The Wall Street Journal (1 Feb. 2015); Anne Marie Slaughter, ‘Does Obama have a Grand Strategy for the Second Term?’ Washington Post, 18 Jan. 2013.

7Josef Joffe, ‘The Unreality of Obama’s Realpolitik’, The Wall Street Journal (3 Feb. 2015). 8Goldgeier and Suri, ‘Revitalizing the U.S. National Security Strategy’, 40.

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coherence to the balancing of ends, ways, and means. Colin Dueck empha- sizes the importance of planning when he argues that grand strategy ‘… involves the prioritization of foreign policy goals, the identification of exist- ing and potential resources, and the selection of a plan or road map that uses those resources to meet those goals’.9 Similarly, Barry Posen contends that a Grand Strategy ‘enumerates and prioritizes threats and potential political and military remedies to threats’; [Grand Strategy] also ‘contains explanations for why threats enjoy a certain priority, and why and how the proposed remedies would work’.10 Posen’s goal in his latest book, therefore, is to ‘generate an appropriate grand strategy’ that can guide current and future presidents.11 Building on this view of Grand Strategy, Christopher Hammer expresses another common theme of this school when he warns policymakers that ‘Grand strategy should also have a long-term focus. It should not just be a plan for today or tomorrow, but a plan that looks to the future’.12

The Grand Strategy school also dominates the Washington think tank community’s conceptualization of successful strategy-making. Andrew Krepinevich and Barry Watts of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments began their monograph Regaining Strategic Competence from the following premise: ‘The ability of the US national security establishment to craft, implement, and adapt effective long-term strategies against intelli- gent adversaries at acceptable costs has been declining for some decades’.13

In the early years of the War on Terror, Center for a New American Security (CNAS)’s scholars Michele Flournoy and Shawn Brimley also deplored the lack of a more organized effort to design a Grand Strategy for the post-9/11 world: ‘More than four years after 11 September 2001, there is no estab- lished interagency process for assessing the full spectrum of threats and opportunities endemic to the new security environment and identifying priorities for policy development, execution, and resource allocation … There is still no systematic effort at strategic planning for national security that is inclusive, deliberative, and integrative’.14

Therefore, for the Grand Strategy school, the expectation is that strategic success follows from efficiently implementing an overarching grand strate- gic design. As William Martel put it in language common across the field, the purpose of his recent book, Grand Strategy in Theory and Practice: The Need

9Colin Dueck, Reluctant Crusaders: Power, Culture and Change in American Grand Strategy (Princeton University Press 2007), 1.

10Barry Posen, ‘A Grand Strategy of Restraint’, in Michele Flournoy, Shawn Brimley, and Vikram J. Singh (eds.), Finding Our Way (Washington DC: Center for a New American Security 2008), 84. See more definitions in Miller, ‘On Strategy’.

11Posen, Restraint, 3. 12Hammer, American Pendulum, 3. 13Krepinevich and Watts, Regaining Strategic Competence, 4. 14Michele Flournoy and Shawn Brimley, ‘Strategic Planning for National Security’, Joint Force Quarterly 41 (2006), 80–81.

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for an Effective American Foreign Policy is ‘to provide a framework that helps guide scholars and policy makers as they articulate and implement a grand strategy’. In the view of Grand Strategy proponents like Martel, ‘for grand strategy to be effective, it is imperative for the state to clearly articulate the goals it intends to accomplish and how these will be achieved’.15 If success in foreign policy comes from following a Grand Strategy, then the two most important tasks for policymakers are to carefully delineate the elements of a Grand Strategy, and to subsequently implement those concepts via policy actions.

In light of such demanding tasks, how should the US government go about achieving grand strategic success? One segment of the Grand Strategy literature focuses on recommending alternative designs to be implemented. Recent books by Brooks and Wohlforth, Posen, Martel, and Miller, among others, make the case for specific overarching frameworks for American Grand Strategy.16 The logical assumption underpinning the heated debates between advocates of various paradigm such as Restraint, Conservative Internationalism, or Liberal Internationalism, is that the content of the grand strategic plans formulated by an administration matters greatly for the shape of the Grand Strategy followed by that administration.

Another part of the literature focuses on bringing more conceptual clarity to the ‘definition’ of Grand Strategy and to how it should be conducted.17

Brands writes that Grand Strategy represents ‘an integrated scheme of interests, threats, resources and policies’, and it forms a ‘conceptual frame- work that helps nations determine where they want to go and how they ought to get there’.18 Deibel’s recent elaboration of a ‘Linear Design Model’ is an excellent example of such a scholarly effort to improve the strategic planning process by highlighting the sequence of steps needed to formu- late and implement a long-term, coherent framework. Pithily incorporating the approach of the Grand Strategy school, he outlines three principles for strategy formation: (1) Assess the international and domestic environments, (2) Analyze threats, opportunities, national interests, and the means of power and influence, and (3) Plan on how to use the available instruments of power to achieve the objectives.19 Once the grand designs are in place, grand strategic success depends on a president’s ability to impose its strategic priorities on the bureaucracy; as Martel states, ‘In all cases, grand strategy should govern all the decisions that operate at the lower levels of strategy, and it should likewise be the case that the lower levels never

15Martel, Grand Strategy in Theory and Practice, 339, 353. 16Brooks and Wohlforth, America Abroad; Posen, Restraint; Art, Grand Strategy for America; Martel, Grand Strategy in Theory and Practice.

17In addition to Martel and Brands, see also Colin Gray, The Strategy Bridge: Theory for Practice. 18Brands, What Good is Grand Strategy, 3 19Terry Deibel, Foreign Affairs Strategy: Logic for American Statecraft (New York: Cambridge University Press 2007), 24–32.

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determine or directly influence the state’s grand strategy’.20 Therefore, strategy-making should be primarily a top-down process.

Achieving ‘coherence’ among the ends, ways, and means is another major theme of the Grand Strategy school. Military strategist Frank Hoffman echoes much of this scholarship when he claims that a Grand Strategy

… ensures that policy and strategic machinery are aligned and in good working order. Strategy should purposely link policy aims to competitive ways, with sustainable means… If a strategy employs a way that is inconsistent with policy, or if policymakers provide too little means, then it lacks coherence. The pro- spects for success are very suspect if coherence is not sustained.21

Similarly, Gaddis’s defines Grand Strategy as essentially being about ‘the calculated relationship of means to large ends’, and ‘about how one uses whatever one has to get to wherever it is one wants to go’.22

The first step to achieving this better balancing of means and ends, Brands argues, is better planning: ‘grand strategy should start with systema- tic planning, the setting of goals and priorities, and the outlining of a realistic course of action for realizing these objectives’.23 While he acknowl- edges that plans may need to be adapted later on in the face of unexpected developments, Brands nevertheless warns that ‘if grand strategy is to have any value, planning – the effort to look beyond the current crisis and think rigorously about the future – will be extremely important’.24 Therefore, Grand Strategy scholars rely on the ability to usefully predict future threats and design realistic courses of action through rigorous analysis and plan- ning; at the same time, in the aftermath of such planning, they call for tactical adaptation in the means used to implement one’s initial ends.

Despite the demanding requirements mentioned above, the Grand Strategy scholars are nevertheless able to offer a few concrete examples of farsighted leaders who, the narrative goes, successfully followed this model and achieved great results. In the American context, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Grand Strategy during World War II to deal with Germany first and the Pacific theater second is widely considered the classic example of a successfully designed and implemented Grand Strategy.25 In fact, the common use of the term ‘grand strategy’ in Washington originated around that time to describe FDR’s overarching

20Martel, Grand Strategy in Theory and Practice, 339. 21Frank Hoffman, ‘Grand Strategy: The Fundamental Considerations’,Orbis, 58/4 (2014), 472–485. 22Gaddis, ‘What is Grand Strategy?’ Lecture delievered at Duke University. 26 Feb. 2009. 23Brands, What Good is Grand Strategy, 199. 24Ibid., 197. 25Walter A. McDougall, ‘Can the United States do Grand Strategy?’ Orbis (Spring 2010). See also Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won (New York: Norton 1995); Tami Davis Biddle, ‘Leveraging Strength: The Pillars of American Grand Strategy in World War II’, Orbis (Winter 2011); Krepinevich and Watts, Regaining Strategic Competence.

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framework. Peter Mansoor’s recent study of Roosevelt’s grand strategic planning confirms the conventional view of the World War II strategy as the paradigmatic example of design. He particularly highlights the role of Plan Dog, an early memorandum that guided the shaping of wartime Grand Strategy:

It would be difficult to overstate the impact of the Plan Dog memorandum on US strategy in the Second World War. The Plan Dog memo was the only piece of written strategic guidance that Roosevelt kept in his office during the war. It also crystallized the minds of the joint planning committee on the necessity of defeating Germany first in the event of war … The guidance went as far as to state that, even if the United States were forced into the war against Japan, it should immediately enter the war against Germany and Italy as well.26

While many US actions during the war certainly followed a more sinuous path than the early designs could have anticipated, FDR’s approach never- theless represents as close to an ideal-type Grand Strategy as it is reasonable to expect in the real world.

Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, similarly enjoys a reputation as a master grand strategist. Two of Truman aides in particular, George Kennan and Paul Nitze, have been credited with designing the Containment Grand Strategy that guided the US actions during the Cold War. Influential histor- ians credit Kennan’s most famous planning documents, the X Article and the Long Telegram, with laying out the early foundation for Containment.27

Kennan served as the first director of the State Department Policy Planning Staff (1947–1950), essentially the chief strategic planning position inside the government at the time. His reputation as the ‘father of Containment’ was solidified in the academic world when Gaddis, in the most authoritative study of the US Cold War Grand Strategy, called Kennan ‘its chief architect’.28 And on the dust jacket of Kennan’s authorized biography, also written by Gaddis, former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft restates this Washington conventional wisdom: ‘George Kennan was the great architect of the Cold War strategy of containment’.29

The Eisenhower administration also receives high marks from adherents of the Grand Strategy school for conducting ‘Project Solarium’, a formal strategic planning exercise designed to foster debate between three com- peting grand strategic frameworks. Perhaps few scholars would go so far as to agree with Raymond Millen in claiming that ‘the only time the United States has had a formal grand strategy was during the Dwight D.

26Peter Mansoor, ‘US Grand Strategy in the Second World War’, in Williamson Murray and Richard Hart Sinnreich (eds.), Successful Strategies: Triumphing in War and Peace from Antiquity to the Present (New York: Cambridge University Press 2014), Kindle version, loc 9619.

27Murray, ‘Thoughts on Grand Strategy’, in The Shaping of Grand Strategy, 32. 28John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy During the Cold War(New York: Oxford University Press 2005), 23.

29John Lewis Gaddis, Kennan: An American Life (New York: W.W. Norton & Co 2011), dust jacket.

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Eisenhower administration’, but clearly Solarium has enjoyed a surge in reputation in the last decade.30 Grand Strategy proponents regard this exercise as one of the prominent examples of a strategic planning exercise worthy of emulation. Former top Obama Pentagon strategists Flournoy and Brimley have called for a new Project-Solarium-style exercise, arguing that ‘an example of a truly inclusive and integrated process of long-term strate- gic planning in the executive branch does exist, although one must look back more than 50 years to find it’.31 Watts and Krepinevich concur with this assessment: ‘The Eisenhower approach to national strategy offers useful insights concerning how the United States might improve its strategic performance’.32 Eisenhower himself was famously fond of repeating the maxim he learned from his days in the Army about the value of planning: ‘Plans are worthless, but planning is everything’.33

More controversially in the academic world, some scholars recently ele- vated Ronald Reagan as well to the rank of a master designer. Reagan’s initial Grand Strategy design is captured in two National Security Decision Directives (NSDD) adopted in May 1982 and January 1983, respectively: NSDD 32, ‘U.S. National Security Strategy,’ and NSDD 75, ‘U.S. Relations with the USSR’. Paul Lettow described these two documents as ‘the funda- mental, authoritative statements of U.S. national security policy during the Reagan administration’.34 Adopted midway through the first term of his presidency, these strategic plans offered a comprehensive account of the administration’s planned Grand Strategy. NSDD-32 was specifically designed to establish ‘a definitive strategic rationale and agenda to guide all aspects of national security policy’,35 while NSDD-75 was a follow-up report focused on the USSR, the main target of Reagan’s global Grand Strategy. Grand Strategy proponents contend that Reagan followed through on the initial plans he laid out early in his presidency, and that he successfully implemen- ted the Grand Strategy outlined in these documents throughout his tenure. As Tom Mahnken pithily states this position, ‘Reagan and a handful of his close advisors formulated a coherent strategy toward the Soviet Union

30Raymond Millen, ‘Eisenhower and US Grand Strategy’, Parameters 44/2 (Summer 2014), 35; Thomas Mahnken and Paul Lettow similarly conclude that ‘The Eisenhower Administration is now generally seen as the gold standard in national security strategic planning’; Paul Lettow and Tom Mahnken. ‘Toolbox: Getting serious about strategic planning’, The American Interest 5/1 (2009), 73. See also Paul Miller, ‘Organizing the National Security Council: I Like Ike’s’, Presidential Studies Quarterly 43/3 (Sep. 2013).

31Flournoy and Brimley, ‘Strategic Planning for National Security’, 80–81. 32Krepinvich and Watts, Regaining Strategic Competence, 7. 33Dwight D. Eisenhower, ‘Remarks at the National Defense Executive Reserve Conference’, 14 Nov. 1957. Available at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=10951

34Paul Lettow, Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (New York: Random House 2006), 56.

35Ibid., 63.

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between 1981 and 1983 and implemented that strategy consistently throughout the remainder of his eight years in office’.36

The Emergent Strategy school

Despite its long-standing influence in the strategic studies community, the Grand Strategy school came under increasing scrutiny over the past several years from skeptics of strategic planning. In Foreign Affairs, David Edelstein and Ronald Krebs offered a powerful critique of the concept of Grand Strategy itself, echoing some of the kind of arguments made by Richard Betts over a decade ago.37 Their recommendation to abandon strategy-making altogether and rely on purely case-by-case decision-making, however, represents one extreme end of the spectrum of opinion among skeptics of grand strategic planning. This view risks throwing out the proverbial baby (i.e., strategic decision-making) with the bathwater (the formal planning process leading to a grand plan). A more moderate critique and alternative to Grand Strategy can be found in the Emergent Strategy paradigm initially developed in the corporate world by Henry Mintzberg, and later adopted by others in both the business world and also in the national security arena. This school of thought provides an explana- tion and a set of recommendations for the making of successful strategy that is distinctive from both the Grand Strategy paradigm and also from the purely ad hoc approach advocated by Edelestein and Krebs. In short, Emergent Strategy scholars regard successful strategy as a process of navigating through an unpre- dictable world by improvisation and continuous learning.

Emergent Strategy scholars believe that successful strategies can form without being fully formulated in advance. The advocates of this school of thought are skeptical about the real-world applicability of the Grand Strategy model of strategic planning, but they suggest that organizations can learn over time, thus allowing for coherent, consistent, and successful strategies to emerge. Mintzberg describes this difference as follows: ‘Deliberate strategy focuses on control – making sure that managerial intentions are realized in action – while emergent strategy emphasizes learning – coming to understand through the taking of actions what those intentions should be in the first place’.38 In other words, one’s later goals could change during the strategy-making process based on the lessons

36Thomas Mahnken, ‘The Reagan administration’s strategy toward the Soviet Union’, in Successful Strategies, 12, 186, Kindle Edition, loc. See also Francis Marlo, Planning Reagan’s War: Conservative Strategists and America’s Cold War Victory (Washington DC: Potomac Books 2012).

37David and Krebs, ‘Delusions of Grand Strategy’. Unlike Betts, who identified why strategy is very difficult to execute but nevertheless found the concept useful and necessary when done well, Edelstein and Krebs doubt that American policymakers have the ability to successfully design and implement a strategy. See Richard Betts, ‘Is strategy an illusion?’ International Security 25/2 (2000), 5–50.

38Henry Mintzberg, Bruce Ahlstrand, and Joseph Lampel, Strategy Safari: A Guided Tour through the Wilds of Strategic Management (New York: The Free Press 1998), 189.

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learned while pursuing the initial goals. Crucially for the distinction between Grand and Emergent Strategy advocates, this flexibility on ends is different than merely advocating tactical flexibility at the level of means in the implementation of the initial Grand Strategy.39 Mintzberg describes a ‘craft- ing’ image as the more effective path to success: the strategist should be more of ‘a pattern recognizer’ and ‘a learner’, as opposed to a ‘designer’.40

Therefore, unlike the top-down approach of the Grand Strategy school, the Emergent Strategy school adopts a bottom-up view of successful stra- tegizing, with strategic learning occurring at all levels of the organization. In military jargon, this indicates that tactical lessons need to be pushed up to the operational and eventually to the strategic level, and that these lessons could eventually lead to a change in the means to achieve the goals, or even a modification of the goals themselves.

The top strategy-consulting firm Boston Consulting Group (BCG) advances a concept of ‘adaptive strategy’ as the key to strategic success. The role of leadership should not be to dictate a strategy based on ‘analysis, prediction, and deduction’, contrary to the Grand Strategy school, but rather to set ‘optimal conditions for the continuous emergence of superior strategies through an adaptive – or evolutionary – process’.41 According to BCG, this emergent adaptive approach ‘largely erases the distinction between planning and implementation, since successful strategies emerge from practice rather than from analysis and design’.42 This statement is essential for understanding the difference in focus between an approach focused on learning vs. one focused on design and implementation. Certainly all real-world strategies have both deliberate and emergent elements to some extent, it is the emphasis given to each approach that distinguishes an Emergent Strategy process from one based on strategic planning and designs. ‘The most impor- tant thing a government can do is learn’,43 BCG concludes, thus setting up a contrast with the Grand Strategy school’s focus on deliberate strategy articu- lation and implementation as the keys to success.

Echoing the arguments of the Emergent Strategy literature, former State Department Policy Planning official and McKinsey&Co. consultant Drew Erdmann advocates for broadening the traditional view of successful strat- egy-making: ‘Strategy is made from decisions and actions, not plans …

39Grand Strategy advocates such as Martel and Brands do acknowledge the need for tactical flexibility to implementing one’s designed goals, but they nevertheless emphasize that such adjustments are at the level of tactics or policies, in contrast to the grand strategic level of overarching goals and principles. Martel, Grand Strategy in Theory and Practice, 340; Brands, What Good Is Grand Strategy, 199.

40Henry Mintzberg, Tracking Strategies: Towards A General Theory of Strategy Formation (New York: Oxford University Press 2008), 376.

41Walter Kiechel, The Lords of Strategy: The Intellectual History of the New Corporate World. (Boston MA: Harvard Business School Press 2010), 321.

42Boston Consulting Group, Perspectives: Adaptive Advantage (2010), 2. 43Boston Consulting Group, Adaptive Strategy in Government (2012), 8.

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Strategies evolve over time and involve both deliberate and emergent elements … Strategic planning should be about learning and adapting, not about the plans themselves’.44 Along the same lines, CNAS’s Richard Fontaine and Brian Burton urged senior government leaders to recognize the existence of Emergent Strategy in the course of foreign policymaking:

Rather than adhering to strategies developed in a cyclical process by planners isolated from implementation, operators (from senior executives to field employees) make decisions with strategic implications during the course of everyday acts of initiative and reaction. These decisions add up to an emer- gent strategy, which often looks very different from that which a dedicated planner might develop, but nevertheless consists of actual actions taken rather than simply actions planned.45

In the same vein, Sir Lawrence Freedman’s magnum opus, Strategy – A History, concludes that the common view of strategy as grand design should change in favor of strategy as process, a view that fits much better with the arguments of Emergent Strategy scholars than with those of the Grand Strategy school: ‘Strategy is often expected to start with a description of a desired end state, but in practice there is rarely an orderly movement to goals set in advance. Instead, the process evolves through a series of states, each not quite what was anticipated or hoped for, requiring a reappraisal and modification of the original strategy, including ultimate objectives’.46Lastly, rather than being a ‘coherent story about the world and what you want to achieve in it’, as Grand Strategy proponents contend, Bruce Jentleson and Steve Weber argue that Grand Strategy is about ‘adapt- ing in the face of what you don’t know and what you don’t control and learning as you go’.47

Just like the Grand Strategy scholars provide examples of instances where the influence of a grand design led to successful outcomes, Emergent Strategy scholars similarly present their own case studies that show how successful strategic outcomes came about as a result of an emergent learn- ing process even in the absence of a long-term plan. In a recent historical study sponsored by the Department of Defense to tease out the keys to successful strategy-making, the contributors found little support for the Grand Strategy paradigm. In the introduction to this volume, Williamson Murray takes issue with the contention that successful Grand Strategy requires ‘an enunciated set of goals and principles to which statesmen and military leaders adhere in a consistent fashion’.48 Even for a famous

44Erdmann, ‘Lessons from the Private Sector’, 151. 45Fontaine and Burton, Eye to the Future, 7. 46Freedman, Strategy, xi. 47Steve Weber and Bruce Jentleson, The End of Arrogance (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press 2010), 155–56.

48Murray, ‘Thoughts on Grand Strategy’, 8.

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master strategist such as Otto von Bismarck, the role of adaptation seemed to be more important in the formation of his Grand Strategy than that of his designs: ‘To the extent that one can apply such an anachronistic concept to him, grand strategy was an ongoing process of adaptation to shifting circumstances instead of a formula or handful of trite maxims’.49 This sup- ports a previous study of Bismarck’s Grand Strategy, which credited his success to his uncanny adaptability rather than to his foresight or designs: ‘Bismarck’s great genius … lay not in his adherence to a systematic program or plan but in his expert navigation of uncertain events through intuition and broad experience’.50

The experience of ancient great powers also fits with an Emergent Strategy explanation more so than with a Grand Strategy one. Studies of the Roman Empire’s strategy conducted by Edward Luttwak and Jim Lacey showed how successful strategy-making was based on learning and adapta- tion, not on the shaping influence of a long-term grand design.51 This emergent strategic approach was later described by Paul Kennedy as ‘per- haps the most successful (if subconsciously) sustained “grand” strategies in history’.52 Luttwak’s history of the Byzantine Empire’s ‘grand strategy’ tells a similar story of emergence and adaptation leading to strategic success in the absence of a purposeful grand strategic design. The Byzantines ‘had no central planning staff to produce documents in the modern manner’.53

Instead, they owed their long-term strategic successes to their capacity to ‘learn from experience’,54 just as the Emergent Strategy school would expect.

Lastly, some historians are now even contesting the extent to which some of the most successful and long-lasting successes of the Truman and Reagan administrations are owed to the Grand Strategy adopted by these two leaders early in their tenures, as opposed to their emergent shifts that occurred later in their tenures. For example, some scholars have increasingly questioned the dominant Grand Strategy narrative of the origins of Containment in the 1940s: The most vocal historian of this school of thought

49Jones, ‘Bismarckian Strategic Policy’, in Succesful Strategies, loc 1685. Similarly, the case studies of the grand strategies of Abraham Lincoln and of the British Empire’s fight against Napoleon in that volume similarly emphasized the roles of learning, adaptation and contingency in their ultimate successes. Wayne Hsieh, ‘The Strategy of Lincoln and Grant’, and Richard Hart Sinnreich, ‘Victory by Trial and Error: Britain’s Struggle against Napoleon,’ in Murray and Sinnreich, Successful Strategies: Triumphing in War and Peace.

50Jones, ‘Strategy as character: Bismarck and the Prusso-German question, 1862–1878’, 80. 51Edward Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire: From the First Century A.D. to the Third (Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press 1979); James Lacey, ‘Grand Strategy of Roman Empire,’ in Murray and Sinnreich, Successful Strategies.

52Paul Kennedy (ed.), Grand Strategies In War and Peace (New Haven CT: Yale University Press 1991), 7. 53Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire, 408. 54Luttwak, Byzantine Empire, 418.

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is Wilson Miscamble, the author of a book-length treatment of Kennan’s role in the early Cold War that ends with the following conclusion:

The structure of American foreign policy was built stone by stone, as it were, in reaction to pressing needs and challenges. Through addressing these various situations a foreign policy emerged …. It developed functionally and through being called forth by circumstances more so than being imposed upon them …. This point deserves emphasis and might well be appreciated by those who campaign for more long-term planning by romanticizing the Truman period as some kind of golden age for such.55

Similarly, other historians contend that Reagan did not implement a Grand Strategy to successfully bring about a successful outcome in the final stages of the Cold War. Perhaps the starkest articulation of this view is offered in a new book by James Graham Wilson suggestively titled The Triumph of Improvisation: ‘No master plan explains either the developments in Eastern Europe and East Germany or the response to those developments in the West … Adaptation, improvisation, and engagement by individuals in power ended almost a half century of cold war and the specter of a nuclear holocaust … In the last years of the conflict, improvisation mattered more than any master plan’.56 This echoes the conclusions of an important seg- ment of the historiography on the role of grand strategic planning during the Reagan era; as highlighted by Jeremi Suri in a review of this literature, an emerging conclusion among historians is that ‘Reagan did not have a “plan” of any sort to end the Cold War. Instead, he had grown apprehensive, like his Soviet counterparts, that superpower tensions were spiraling out of control’.57

Evaluating the two paradigms

Given that both the Grand Strategy and the Emergent Strategy paradigms have contributed to foreign policy successes at different times according to their proponents, one logical way to assess their comparative merits is to analyze a large number of cases and attempt to determine which model consistently led to more successful strategic outcomes.58 In light of the space constraints of this article, however, another useful way to analytically compare the two schools of thought is to organize the following discussion around four of the key external and internal variables that might explain the conditions under which one approach is preferable to the other. These

55Wilson Miscamble, George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, 1947–1950 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 348.

56Wilson, The Triumph of Improvisation, 3, 198. 57Jeremi Suri, ‘Explaining the End of the Cold War: A New Historical Consensus?’ Journal of Cold War Studies 4/4 (2002), 71.

58For such an analysis, see Popescu, Emergent Strategy and Grand Strategy: How American Presidents Succeed in Foreign Policy.

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variables have been selected based on the types of factors that the political science and security studies literature identified as likely to affect the strategy-making process: the external environment (a key variable for struc- tural realism), the domestic political environment and the bureaucracy (key variables for the bureaucratic politics school), and the time-horizon outlook and personal leadership style of decision-makers (key variables for so-called first image international relations theories.)

The predictability of the external environment

One of the major reasons why the Emergent Strategy school gained promi- nence in recent years as an alternative to the Grand Strategy approach is the disillusionment among many scholars and practitioners with even the most sophisticated efforts to forecast the future of the international security system. When proponents of the Grand Strategy model such as Brands or Posen advise leaders to articulate and implement a Grand Strategy that sets realistic objectives and then match required means to the desired ends, they implicitly assume that policymakers are capable of making good enough predictions about the future to know what kind of goals are achievable and at approximately what cost. However, when it comes to long-range strategic planning, policymakers are often ‘driving in the dark’, as former Navy Secretary Richard Danzig put it. In his study of the Pentagon’s strategic planning efforts, Danzig lists a daunting number of challenges facing long- range forecasts of the grand strategic environment:

Accurate prediction would need to anticipate changes in, among other things, technologies, economies, institutions, domestic and international politics and, of course, the nature of warfare. Each of these alone would be imponderable. Getting them all right at once is wildly improbable. Worse still, the evolution of these variables is complex and nonlinear.59

Therefore, the more uncertain the external environment, the more likely it is for an Emergent Strategy approach to achieve better results than the pursuit of a Grand Strategy, and vice versa.60 For example, the conceptual idea of containing Soviet expansion was based on the prediction that Moscow’s ideology and interests will drive it to pursue an aggressive and hostile foreign policy toward the West. Based on Moscow’s actions in the late 1940s, and on George Kennan’s insightful analysis of Russian/Soviet psyche, the Truman administration felt relatively confident in proclaiming Soviet expansionism to be the overarching threat to the US national security for

59Danzig, Driving in the Dark, 15. 60As business theorist Richard Rumelt put it, ‘The proximate objective is guided by forecasts of the future, but the more uncertain the future, the more its essential logic is that of ’taking a strong position and creating options‘, not looking far ahead’. Richard Rumelt, Good Strategy, Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters (New York: Crown Business 2013), 111.

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the foreseeable future. As a result, they established a successful Grand Strategy of Containment aimed at countering the spread of USSR’s influence for the rest of that strategic era, as Gaddis and others have persuasively shown.61 Conversely, in times of higher uncertainty and rapid change, such as the 1990s or the 2000s, efforts to implement a new long-term grand strategic design were bound to fail partly because accurately predicting the future challenges for the US national security proved to be nearly impossible.62 During such periods of high uncertainty, the more successful US foreign policy results came from relying on emergent learning, improvi- sation, and adaptation, as was the case with George H. W. Bush’s decision to reverse Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait by launching the Gulf War and with Bill Clinton’s halting but ultimately successful intervention in ending the Bosnian War.63

The time horizon: short-term goals vs. long-term goals

In strategic affairs, alas, policymakers often face a difficult trade-off between pursuing short-term objectives and long-term ones. As Hammer’s study of the recurring US Grand Strategy debate argues, the ‘question of whether time is working for or against the United States’ represented a perennial dilemma for American presidents: this dilemma led statesmen to errors of both ‘commission’, driven by unwarranted short-term pessimism, and also of ‘omission’, driven by misguided long-term optimism.64 Moreover, policies that achieve short-term goals may invite backlash in the longer term, while policies that are highly controversial at the time can lead to positive out- comes later on.

On this question of the time horizon, the two paradigms point in differ- ent directions: leaders focused more on Grand Strategy tend to adopt the long-term view, while those who adopt an Emergent Strategy style are more likely to adopt short-term, incremental policies that respond to the immedi- ate crisis without as much concern for long-term consequences. Hence, two of the hardest challenges for leaders are deciding when to persist with unpopular decisions in the hope of being ‘vindicated by history’, and, conversely, when to adopt a short-term response that addresses the more immediate problem without worrying too much about the potential long- term negative consequences. For example, George W. Bush’s emergent approach to the war in Afghanistan was successful in the short run in

61John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (New York: Oxford University Press 2007).

62Hal Brands, From Berlin to Baghdad: America’s Search for Purpose in the Post-Cold War World (Lexington KY: University of Kentucky Press 2008).

63For more such examples of emergent strategy successes, see Popescu, Emergent Strategy and Grand Strategy.

64Hammer, American Pendulum, 16, 182–184.

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routing al-Qaeda, but the consequences of the ‘light footprint’ improvisa- tional approach arguably contributed to higher long-term costs than might have been the case otherwise; however, Reagan’s improvisational approach to Gorbachev’s rise in the late 1980s probably worked much better than an approach based on an elaborated grand strategic plan. Conversely, a strong commitment to the long-term Grand Strategy of Containment led the Truman administration to persevere in its military commitment to the Korean War in its later years despite the loss of domestic support for the conflict, a successful decision vindicated by history, while the same commit- ment to Containment later on arguably led future American presidents to a military commitment to South Vietnam, a decision that turned out to have been a mistake in both the short and the long run. It is ultimately up to the policymakers to use their judgment in weighing the relative importance of short- vs. long-term goals, and to choose between Grand Strategy and Emergent Strategy, but whatever choice they make they must also under- stand the downsides of their decision and look to mitigate its potential perils.

The domestic political environment

Another major factor affecting the viability of a long-term grand strategy is the volatility of the domestic political environment in general and the degree of partisan discord in foreign policy in particular. As recent scholar- ship highlighted, rather than ‘stopping at the water’s edge’, internal political debates influenced by factors such as partisan ideology and special eco- nomic interests clearly affect US foreign policy.65 Consequently, the US presidents have routinely defined the ‘national interest’ by filtering the objective external conditions through their subjective internal partisan ideo- logical lenses.66 Therefore, the pursuit of a long-term Grand Strategy across different administration from opposing political parties requires a certain level of agreement among the foreign policy elites on what are the greatest threats and opportunities present in the international system. Even if there may be debates on some of the ways to achieve them, the Grand Strategy paradigm depends on broadly accepted definitions of the ends of a state for a particular strategic era.

During the Cold War, for example, presidential administrations from both political parties more or less agreed with the ultimate goal of containing the spread of Soviet communism as the key long-term objective of American strategy. Therefore, despite occasional heated debates on how best to

65Helen Milner and Dustin Tingley, Sailing the Water’s Edge: The Domestic Politics of American Foreign Policy (Princeton University Press, 2015), 18–19.

66Peter Trubowitz, Politics and Strategy: Partisan Ambition and American Statecraft (Princeton University Press 2011), 8.

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achieve this goal, both major parties pursued a foreign policy agenda aimed at the same overarching goal and hence provided a degree of continuity and coherence to American statecraft.67 However, in the absence of such a commonly agreed upon overarching threat to a nation’s security, the pursuit of a long-term Grand Strategy is potentially counterproductive. If presidents sacrifice potential short-term gains in order to embark on the pursuit of partisan and highly polarizing long-term foreign policy goals, they run the risk of having their most cherished decisions reversed by a future president from the other party. Consequently, during times of intense political polar- ization in matters of foreign policy, a flexible emergent approach focused on short-term incremental goals is more likely to succeed.

Presidential leadership style and the management of bureaucracy

In addition to the external circumstances listed above, there is also an important internal consideration that influences which approach a president should take: quite simply, some presidential administrations are better suited intellectually and in terms of their bureaucratic management skills to design a Grand Strategy and push it through the lower levels of govern- ment from the top-down, while others are clearly more comfortable with a decentralized approach based on adaptation, experimentation, and emer- gent learning from the bottom-up. In some ways, Sun Tzu’s famous advice to leaders to know not only the enemy but also themselves is equally relevant for deciding what type of decision-making process is most likely to lead them to strategic success.

On the one hand, the Grand Strategy school requires leaders to act as bureaucratic masterminds, and therefore foreign policy outcomes depend on how well leaders implement their farsighted plans in the face of potential opposition and ‘foot-dragging’ from the bureaucracy. The exemplar of this type of statesman is former National Security Adviser and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who not only saw the need to design a Grand Strategy (‘We will never be able to contribute to a stable and creative world order unless we first form some conception of it’.68) but also centralized control of foreign policy once in office. As his former senior aide Peter Rodman recollected in a widely acclaimed book on presidential leadership:

I remember his saying during the transition that he wanted to focus on basic strategy and long-range planning, and not get dragged into the ‘cable- clearing’ business … Yet, Kissinger soon learned that this operational activity was our foreign policy. ‘Tactics turn into strategy,’ as he later told Haldeman. If Kissinger and his staff did not exert themselves to insure that outgoing

67Gaddis, Strategies of Containment. 68Quoted in Brands, What Good is Grand Strategy?, 66.

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instructions reflected the president’s policies, all the brilliant strategizing in the West Wing would be overtaken by the reality of the policy made by the State Department in its cables.69

Leaving aside the many controversies associated with the substance of Kissinger’s Grand Strategy, his highly centralized decision-making undoubt- edly helped him and President Nixon implement their initial plans.70 Future presidential administrations are unlikely to ever be able to achieve the level of centralization of the Nixon White House, but if they want to implement a long-term design they will nevertheless have to find other ways to steer the vast government bureaucracy along their chosen grand strategic path.

On the other hand, some leaders may find the pursuit of a long-term Grand Strategy too intellectually constraining or too difficult to implement from the top-down, and therefore they prefer to adopt a more flexible style to foreign policy decision-making. For example, Bill Clinton’s second National Security Adviser, Sandy Berger, explained that: ‘We tried to estab- lish common law rather than canon law. We set to build out a new role for the U.S. in the world by experience rather than doctrine’.71 His predecessor, Tony Lake, echoed the same argument: ‘I believe that you best promote general goals not through absolute doctrines, but through a determined pragmatism that then can give substance to the general principles’.72Rather than being part of an overall design, some of the most significant foreign policy accomplishments during the Clinton era, such as the intervention in Bosnia and the enlargement of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), came as a result of an incremental process and were spurred more by entrepreneurial mid-level officials such as the Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Richard Holbrooke than by the upper echelons of the White House.73 The Clinton team, therefore, consciously eschewed the prevalent Grand Strategy paradigm and instead opted to rely on what I refer to in this article as Emergent Strategy. In conclusion, while they adopted different governing styles, both Nixon and Clinton achieved impor- tant strategic successes in part because they tailored their leadership styles to their internal strengths.

69Peter Rodman, Presidential Command: Power, Leadership, And The Making of Foreign Policy from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush (New York: Random House 2009), 45–46.

70For example, Goldgeier and Suri express a common view among Grand Strategy experts when they recently wrote that ‘Nixon and Kissinger’s strategy was a model in its coherence, consistency, and clarity.’ Goldgeier and Suri, ‘Revitalizing the U.S. National Security Strategy,’ 43.

71Derek Chollet and James M Goldgeier, America between the Wars: From 11/9 to 9/11: The Misunderstood Years between the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the Start of the War on Terror (New York: PublicAffairs 2008), 219.

72Thomas Friedman, ‘Clinton’s Foreign Policy: Top Adviser Speaks Up’, The New York Times 31 Oct. 1993. 73James Goldgeier, Not Whether but When: The U.S. Decision to Enlarge NATO (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press 1999); Richard Holbrooke, To End A War (New York: Random House 2011).

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Implications for the study and practice of strategy

The distinction between Grand Strategy and Emergent Strategy has implica- tions for both the scholarly analysis of strategic success and also for the practice of strategy-making. The possibility of strategic success coming from either a Grand Strategy or from an Emergent Strategy means that scholars should not judge strategic performance based primarily on the substance of the national strategy documents or on how well these plans were imple- mented. The perennial debates on whether a strategy was poorly conceived or poorly implemented in practice are intellectually stimulating, but this is not the best way to judge strategic success. Success (or failure) could come from either Grand Strategy or Emergent Strategy, and therefore an admin- istration’s successes and failures must be judged primarily by analyzing the results of its actions, not its plans, and by analyzing how well they adapted to unforeseen circumstances and how well they learned from their mistakes.

For Grand Strategy historians such as Gaddis, determining competent strategy requires analyzing whether an administration laid out a coherent and realistic plan to achieve its goals, and subsequently whether it properly matched the available means with the initial objectives.74 Yet, this approach is incomplete because it ignores the possibility that the policymakers pur- sued an emergent learning approach that led to foreign policy successes even if they had clearly deviated from their initial plans. Consequently, if successful strategies sometimes come from an emergent learning process, then understanding how leaders learn from their experiences and actions, particularly in terms of how they change their strategies based on this learning, is an area that should receive more scholarly attention. Will Inboden’s recent article in this journal makes a useful contribution to what should be a more vibrant literature on strategic learning, and one hopes future scholarship will examine more systematically when and how leaders change their strategy for the better by adapting to unforeseen circumstances.75

When it comes to the implications of the recent literature for policy- makers, the possibility of a successful Emergent Strategy challenges at least two of strategy-making recommendations of the Grand Strategy school dominant in Washington circles. First, if strategic success comes from learn- ing on the job at least as much as it does from advanced planning, then leaders should come into office almost expecting that their initial strategic plans will have to be changed, sometimes dramatically; therefore, how well they adapt to the unexpected events to come will largely determine their

74Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 308. See a similar argument in Brands, What Good is Grand Strategy?

75William Inboden, ‘Statecraft, Decision-Making, and the Varieties of Historical Experience: A Taxonomy’, Journal of Strategic Studies 37/2 (2014).

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foreign policy legacy, as opposed to how successfully they implement their initial designs.76 Therefore, as much effort in both time and resources needs to be devoted to institutionalizing a recurrent learning process throughout the government as it is currently devoted to policy design, planning, and implementation efforts.

And second, instead of heeding the calls of many foreign policy experts and set about designing a new Grand Strategy when they first come into office, presidents should instead begin by analyzing the four variables suggested in this article, and the interactions between them, in order to decide whether a Grand Strategy or an Emergent Strategy paradigm ought to dominate their decision-making. For example, even if Grand Strategy-minded leaders are confident that they can manipulate both the domestic political situation and the bureaucracy to implement a new design, they still need to decide whether the uncertainty level in the external environment is low enough to give them confidence in the wisdom of pursuing a farsighted design. If that’s not the case, as business theorist Richard Rumelt argues, it is safer to focus on short-term incre- mental objectives rather than the pursuit of a long-term goal. Conversely, even if a new administration believes that a farsighted Grand Strategy is needed, its members also ought to seriously consider whether the poten- tial opposition from their domestic political adversaries in Congress or from the bureaucracy would make the successful implementation of a long-term design impossible to achieve.

All in all, the vibrant recent literature exploring the making of American Grand Strategy, as well as the formation of Grand Strategy in other great powers, provides some important and counterintuitive insights on the connections between the success of foreign policy and the type of strategic decision-making that contributed to such fortunate outcomes. Both scholars and policymakers should reconsider the preva- lent view that the gold standard of statecraft is to articulate a Grand Strategy and then implement it. The possibility of Emergent Strategy success does not simply mean that one should be flexible in the means and ways employed to pursue one’s predetermined strategic ends, as Grand Strategy scholars recommend. In certain situations, the initial ends and the grand design itself might have to be wholly modified, and foreign policy success becomes dependent in those cases on how well decision-makers learn from their experiences and adapt to the unpredictability of the international system.

76This conclusion resembles a judgement reached as well in Eliot Cohen, The Big Stick: The Limits of Soft Power and the Necessity of Military Force (New York: Basic Books, 2017).

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Acknowledgments

I greatly benefitted from the excellent insights received from many friends and colleagues with expertise on this topic, including: Quay Barnett, Andrew Bell, Nora Bensahel, Hal Brands, Seth Cantey, Aaron Chatterji, Joe Collins, Colin Dueck, Peter Feaver, Matthew Fehrs, James Goldgeier, Richard Hooker, William Inboden, Bruce Jentleson, John Joseph, Charles Miller, Henry Nau, Alex Roland, Nina Silove, Kiron Skinner, Jeremi Suri, Jordan Tama, Barry Watts, Thomas Wright and Steve Yetiv. I would like to especially thank the following former US government officials for taking the time to be interviewed for this project: Elliott Abrams, Lt. Gen. David W. Barno, Shawn Brimley, Richard Danzig, Amb. Eric Edelman, Andrew Erdmann, Douglas Feith, Stephen Hadley, Andrew Hoehn, Thomas Mahnken, Jeremy Rosner, James Steinberg, Jim Thomas, Col. Troy Thomas, and Paul Wolfowitz. Lastly, I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their excellent comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding

This work was supported by the Smith Richardson Foundation under: [Grant Number 2015-0952], Shape or Adapt: The Planning of American Grand Strategy.

Notes on contributor

Ionut C. Popescu Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin.

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