Grand Strategy and Geography

Grand strategy is an evolution of strategy away from a narrow focus on victory in war towards a much broader, more long-term vision that is essentially political in nature (see Box 18.1). The strategist and historian Paul Kennedy sees the essence of grand strategy in deliberating the proper balance of priorities of a state by coordinating ends and means (Kennedy 1991).

Although security remains central, grand strategy is not limited to military strategy. Security, in the context of grand strategy, may be understood as securing and enhancing the state’s interests, and securing it against external threats and possible opponents. Grand strategy draws on all the military, diplomatic, cultural, and economic means and instruments at the state’s disposal. In the most basic terms, it refers to a long-term, multidimensional plan for securing and enhancing a state’s power and prosperity. It is associated with states that have a wide range of global interests and a number of resources that can be mobilized, includingp. 311↵

the use of force. As the historian and strategist Williamson Murray put it, ‘grand strategy is a matter involving great states and great states alone’ (Murray 2011: 1). However, it also implies a situation where resources are limited and where the leader of a powerful state has to make strategic, long-term choices about how to selectively invest resources and project its power.

In all of this, geography matters. Trade and communication routes are strategically important for large, economically powerful states, as is the location of natural resources. Any projection of power will have a geographical focus, since no state has the resources to be equally engaged everywhere at the same time. There is an important cultural component to this geographical factor—the outlooks of British and continental policymakers differ dramatically, partly because of Britain’s position as an island at the margin of the continent. Technological changes have significantly altered the significance of this geographic factor over the last century, but the image of Britain as an island remains powerful and is influential in Britain’s relations with Europe today (see Box 18.2).

Imperial Competition and the Invention of Geopolitics

Geopolitics and grand strategy are practical political concepts rather than academic theories. They do however share a focus on the politics of great powers and an emphasis on statecraft with classical realism (see Chapter 1). They also share the assumption that there are timeless patterns of state behaviour that can be uncovered and used as guidance for policymakers’ decisions—patterns that are at least in part determined by geography. In line with this p. 312↵anchoring in classical realist thought, grand strategy is often depicted as a way of thinking that applies across all times and all places. This is not the case. Grand strategy and geopolitics are distinctly modern and European concepts of statecraft, emerging as approaches to international politics only at a time when European and later US power acquired global reach. As the British geographer Halford Mackinder put it in 1904, by the turn of the twentieth century international politics had for the first time become a ‘closed political system … of world-wide scope’ (Mackinder 1904: 27). The development of geopolitics and grand strategy occurred in this context.

Mackinder’s observation described a genuinely new development that reflected the imperial expansion of the European powers. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Britain, France, the Russian empire, and a number of latecomers to the imperial game were mapping and reclaiming most parts of the globe, often in competition with each other. By this point, the development of the European system of states had produced a small number of particularly powerful states, the great powers, which claimed special responsibility for managing international affairs. The colonial expansion of European great powers ushered in a new global competition, as unmapped and unclaimed parts of the globe became increasingly scarce. The ‘scramble for Africa’ between Britain, France, and other European powers and the colonial ‘Great Game’ in Central Asia between the British and the Russian empire heightened international tensions.

Geography and the Management of Empire

Imperial expansion highlighted the importance of geographical factors. Increasingly far-flung supply and trade routes by land and sea needed to be secured to enable economic growth at home. Overseas territories rich in natural resources were seen as strategic necessities for enhancing the prosperity and power of colonial states. Colonial expansion fuelled capitalist development and enabled the British Empire to become a global hegemonic power. But by the last decades of the nineteenth century, both the newly unified German state and the United States were rapidly industrializing and beginning to challenge Britain’s economic dominance. Germany in particular was becoming a disruptive force in international political dynamics still dominated by the European powers. As a latecomer to the circle of European great powers, the German Reich had missed out on much of the colonial expansion, but its leaders set out to change that by aggressive global politics. This included investing heavily in naval rearmament—potentially challenging British naval power at the same time as Britain acquired ever more far-flung possessions in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific.

The increasingly tense international situation at the turn of the twentieth century was reflected in attempts by various European and American thinkers to systematically explain international affairs by reference to geography. The American naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan argued that sea power was of crucial strategic importance and advocated that the US join the imperial scramble. Partly due to his influence, the US entered the naval arms race and became engaged in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. In contrast, Mackinder, a geographer and politician, was worried about Britain’s long-term decline. He believed that new technologies such as the railways were increasing the strategic significance of land over sea, increasing the power of Germany and the Russian empire and threatening the global dominance of Britain, which largely relied on sea power. He declared one area in particular top. 313↵

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Figure 18.1 Mackinder’s view of the Heartland

Source: H. J. Mackinder, ‘The Geographical Pivot of History’, The Geographical Journal, vol. 23, no. 4, 1904, p. 435.

be central to global dominance: the Eurasian Heartland, comprising large parts of Russia and Central Asia (see Figure 18.1).

Mackinder condensed his theory into a famous, and still influential, quote: ‘Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland: Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island: Who rules the World Island commands the World’ (Mackinder 1919). The size of countries and the importance of population growth was the main concern of German geographers, most notoriously Friedrich Ratzel, who developed the concept of Lebensraum (‘living space’) which later became central in Hitler’s geopolitical thinking. Ratzel posited a historical difference between the settled Aryan races populating German territory and the marauding tribes to the east that threatened them. He proposed that modern Germany should secure additional land and resources to counter an ever-present threat from Russia. Rudolph Kiellen, the Swedish geographer who first coined the term Geopolitik (geopolitics) combined elements of these theories in his claim that states have to face two strategic imperatives to survive and thrive: demography, or the management of people (ethnopolitik), and the management of territorial expansion (geopolitik).

Geopolitical Competition for Survival

These classical geopolitical theories reflected prevalent ideas of their time. They grew out of a belief that everything, including international politics, could be understood scientifically by uncovering the causal factors that drive the behaviour of human beings and states. Geography was seen as one of these objective factors in world politics. By virtue of natural resources, climate, location, and size, strategic advantages were bestowed on some states, p. 314↵while others were trapped in unfavourable conditions. However, this was also a time of rapid technological change fuelled by scientific discovery, which was reflected in the concern of Mackinder and others with technology and its interaction with geography. Importantly, these thinkers saw competition as the essence of world politics, pitting states against each other in a race for global dominance. What was at stake was survival—the idea that only the strongest, most resourceful states would continue to exist. This vision was influenced by a popular pseudo-scientific theory of the time, Social Darwinism. It revolved around the idea that there is a process of natural selection, a fight for the survival of the fittest and strongest, not just among species but also between peoples and states. Germany and the United States in particular were cast as vigorous and rapidly growing, while established powers such as Britain and France were seen as exhausted and in decline.

The Revival of Geopolitical Thinking After the Second World War

Given the global scope of the cold war and its long-term strategic horizon, it may seem surprising that the actual concepts of geopolitics and grand strategy were by no means central tenets of strategic thinking during the cold war and fell out of use for decades, to be revived only in the 1970s and 1980s. In part, this reflected the way that geopolitical ideas had become thoroughly delegitimized by their association with Nazi Germany. Another factor was the start of the nuclear arms race between the Soviet Union and the United States, which seemed to obliterate the geographical factor in world politics. As both sides developed intercontinental ballistic missile systems capable of destroying each other’s cities in a matter of hours, a grand strategy based on geopolitical considerations—such as the difference between land power and sea power—seemed obsolete. In fact, deterrence, the foundation of US military strategy during the cold war, had no connection to geopolitical reasoning; it was purely based on out-arming and out-spending the Soviet Union, expanding nuclear and conventional capabilities to deter the Soviet Union from using its own nuclear weapons.

By the 1970s, as the economic burden of the nuclear arms race began to be felt in the US, and it seemed for a while that the Soviet Union would become the dominant military power, geopolitics began to be re-evaluated in US policy circles. This revival was associated in p. 316↵particular with two influential figures, Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski. Kissinger, as national security advisor to President Nixon, was the architect of warmer relations with communist China, a policy that was later expanded by Brzezinski. Kissinger’s understanding of geopolitics as great power politics was influenced by a deep knowledge of European history and the varying ways in which the balance of power between the European great powers had played out over the centuries. He believed in the continuing relevance of power balancing as a principle of international politics. Brzezinski’s understanding of geopolitics drew more explicitly on Mackinder’s heartland theory. Like Mackinder, he saw control over the Eurasian land mass as central to world domination and eventual victory in the cold war. Both Kissinger and Brzezinski advocated a move away from the bipolar stalemate between the United States and the Soviet Union towards a more dynamic multipolar order by engaging with communist China, which a decade earlier had fallen out with the Soviet Union over questions of communist doctrine. A US–Chinese rapprochement was aimed at weakening the grip of the Soviet Union over the Eurasian land mass, and above all at preventing a mending of relations between the two communist countries which would have led to absolute Soviet dominance of the Eurasian continent.

Challenges to US Dominance

Unlike Germany in the 1890s, neither China nor Russia is directly challenging the US in military terms, and would not be in a position to do so. US defence spending is in decline, but the United States remains the world’s largest military power by far, accounting for more than a third of total global military expenditure in 2016 (International Institute for Strategic Studies 2017). Yet both China and Russia are rearming. Russia is currently embarking on an ambitious programme of military modernization, while China is increasing its defence spending by double digits each year. And, as Russia’s stand-off with the West over Syria and Ukraine and China’s stance in the South China Sea demonstrate, both are increasingly willing to challenge regional security orders sustained by the United States. In addition, as the territorial order imposed by Western colonial powers is breaking down in the Middle East, Iran is seizing its p. 318↵chance to extend its regional influence and challenge the dominance of US allies such as Saudi Arabia. In all these regions, new security issues are becoming intertwined with more traditional geopolitical challenges to US primacy.

In this complex strategic environment, a number of commentators have argued that the United States suffers from ‘imperial overstretch’, a term coined by Paul Kennedy for a situation where excessive defence budgets undermine the prosperity of a country and weaken it internationally as a result (Kennedy 1988). While the proportion of US defence spending in relation to GDP is still less than that of many smaller states, stagnant economic growth since the global economic crisis means that bloated defence budgets are becoming a problem. At the same time, the diverging nature of the actual and potential threats presented by transnational terrorism and other non-state actors and the revival of geopolitical competition mean that there are increasingly hard choices to be made about how to invest limited resources.

Evolving Understandings of Great Power Competition

The emphasis on peacetime development reflects shifting understandings of great power competition and great power war since 1945. Before the First World War, wars between great powers were frequent but limited in scale, and often used to effect power transitions. However, the First and Second World Wars showed that military technology had developed to a point where war between major industrialized states involved exorbitant social and economic costs. This was exacerbated by the arrival of atomic weapons at the onset of the cold war. A highly interdependent global economy has further diminished the returns and increased the costs of great power war. Partly as a result of these developments, there has been no direct war between major powers since 1945. It is therefore not surprising that the current discourse on rising powers has foregrounded relative economic development over simple rankings of military capabilities. The broader aim of securing the prosperity and power of the polity may or may not mean a major role for defence and the armed forces—it depends on the nature of the strategic environment, which determines how these aims can be achieved.

Contextualizing Grand Strategy

A grand strategy is a guiding framework that allows policymakers to steer through the uncertainties of a complex international environment. Finding such a framework becomes more difficult the more uncertain this environment is and the more it presents different and sometimes mutually incompatible strategic challenges. It is not a coincidence that conceptions of grand strategy first emerged at a time when the range of actors posing a potential threat to Britain and the United States was limited and the threat was clear. The idea of a grand strategy bears the imprint of its time, in particular in implicit assumptions about just how clear and consensual the interests and goals of a state really are. The current revival of thinking about grand strategy faces a very different scenario from that of the cold war—in fact, calls for a new grand strategy for the United States have arisen precisely because of this new complexity (see Critical Thinking). Moreover, the ends of a grand strategy, in the most general sense of defining the national interest, have also become more difficult to formulate in the absence of a single overarching threat. While there is a connection between primacy and prosperity, the p. 320↵precise balance is ultimately a political decision and open to political contestation, especially where competing demands are made on finite resources.

Even where ends are reasonably clear, the long-term nature of grand strategy and the complexity of the global environment make it difficult to employ adequate means and formulate concrete policies. In a complex system, there will be contingencies and unpredictable events with multiple interdependent causes, sometimes the future unintended consequences of strategic decisions taken today. These contingencies may escalate into ‘black swan’ events: improbable, large-scale events that have transformative effects and are largely unpredictable to a given set of observers (Taleb and Blyth 2011). In fact, contingent events are commonplace in international history and are often the cause of major upheavals. The collapse of the Soviet Union and 9/11 both fall into this category; informed observers failed to predict them, and their consequences changed the dynamics of international politics. By definition, there can be no planning for the surprising and unexpected, though grand strategies should provide guiding principles for making sense of and responding to these kinds of large-scale events. However, there is a real danger that the interpretative ‘lenses’ provided by a grand strategy may blind the decision-maker to the transformative consequences of a contingent event and thus prevent rather than enable an adequate reaction. The line between a clear guiding principle and rigidity is thin, and can have far-reaching consequences when crossed. A grand strategy that fails to grasp how a contingent event changes the dynamics of international interaction, or that has identified trends in world politics wrongly from the outset, may trigger the very kind of development it set out to avoid. Strategic decisions are applied in context, in a highly dynamic international environment populated by other actors that inevitably react to policy moves directed at them (see Box 18.4).

Strategic Horizons in the Modern World

Policymakers are well aware of the uncertainties of their decision-making environment. Since the end of the cold war, strategic documents make habitual reference to the complexity of the international environment and stress the need for adaptability and flexibility in strategic planning. Given its extended time horizon, grand strategy must be able to adapt to changing contexts in a complex and always evolving international system. However, if flexibility and adaptability are key, is the formulation of long-term holistic frameworks a useful endeavour? Critics of the idea of grand strategy have pointed out that it is too general and the international environment too complex for it to be of much use in concrete situations facing the decision-maker (Krasner 2010; Strachan 2011; Dombrowski and Reich 2017). And yet, while the difficulties inherent in grand strategic thinking are immense, in a modern state the lack of an overall strategic direction can be even more detrimental. This remains true above all for great powers, which will by definition have a wide variety of divergent and sometimes contradictory interests in far-flung locations, but rarely enough resources to cover all of them.

In the absence of a grand strategic framework, strategic decisions will still be made, but the risk that they will be based on short-term pressures or on unexamined bias increases. Frequently, the result may be non-decisions, ‘muddling through’ as a result of bureaucratic inertia, or policies formulated on the basis of past approaches that are wholly inadequate for a changing strategic context (Lindblom 1959). This kind of non-decision can have far-reaching consequences. The failure to formulate a new European security architecture that could p. 321↵bind in a newly democratic Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union is a case in point. Instead, NATO, the cold war institution that had been created explicitly to defend Western Europe against the Soviet Union, reformulated its mission statement and was enlarged eastwards. The unintended consequence of NATO enlargement and further NATO actions in Europe, especially the bombardment of Serbia over Kosovo in 1999, was a strengthening of nationalist and anti-Western forces in Russia and an increasingly fraught relationship with the West. William Clinton, the US president endorsing these decisions, did not believe in the idea of grand strategy (Brands 2014). The initial decision to enlarge seems to have been driven mainly by persistent lobbying by the smaller East European states and a vague sense that this would help consolidate a liberal community of values in Europe (Schimmelfennig 2000). Somewhat ironically, given what has been said about the pitfalls of grand strategy, its long-term horizon and holistic approach may be necessary to recognize the dangerous implications of short-term decisions responding to past contexts.

p. 323Geopolitics and Identity

The role played by interpretation and identity complicates the uses of geography for making grand strategy. Yet the effects of geography are inescapable in international politics, whether they are the ‘brute force’ of geographical constraints in a given strategic context, or the role played by interpretations of geography. There clearly is value in reflecting on the way that decision-makers’ interpretations of geography may affect their formulation of strategy, as well as in understanding the meaning particular geographic factors have for an adversary. As the persistent identity of Britain as an island nation illustrates, specific interpretations of geography in a narrative of collective identity are remarkably long-lived (see Box 18.2). However, this comes with a caveat—it is all too easy to assume that interpretations of geography in identity narratives are fixed, leading to the kind of rigidity that undermines the aims of a grand strategy. Instead, collective meanings and identities are fluid and often politically contested, and are always reinterpreted in particular contexts. Classical geopolitics conceptualized the geographic factor as timeless and universal. However, the basic meaning of geopolitics, the political uses of geography, draws attention to context, which is always situated and specific. Interpretations of geographical factors, just like objective geographic constraints, may be long-lived, but it is the task of the grand strategist to assess how they play out in any given situation.