What Is Grand Strategy?
*
by
John Lewis Gaddis
**
Yale University
When my colleagues Paul Kennedy, Charlie Hill, and I first began talking about
setting up a grand strategy course at Yale in the late 1990s, at least half the people to
whom we tried to explain this thought we were talking about “grant” strategy: how do
you get the next federal or foundation grant?
This misunderstanding would not have occurred, I think, during the fifty years of
insecurity that separated the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December, 1941, from
the final collapse of the Soviet Union in December, 1991. We had a grand strategy for
fighting World War II already in place at the time of Pearl Harbor – go after Germany
first – and with adjustments we stuck to it throughout that conflict. We had, in
containment, a grand strategy for fighting the Cold War worked out within the first five
years of that conflict – some would say earlier. With adjustments, we held on to that
strategy for the next four decades, despite the confusions generated by our domestic
politics, our relations with allies, and at least one grievous miscalculation of fundamental
interests, which was the war in Vietnam. We maintained purpose and direction during
those dangerous years because we had to. For as Dr. Samuel Johnson once put it:
“Depend on it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his
mind wonderfully.”
Now, maybe historians of some distant future will conclude that the United States
has been equally adept at framing and sustaining grand strategies during the two decades
that have passed since the Cold War ended. Revisionist ingenuity is always surprising.
But I have difficulty right now seeing how that argument is going to be made. Consider
the record.
The administration of George H. W. Bush, facing the most favorable prospects
ever for the use of American power in the international arena, spoke grandly of building a
*
Prepared as the Karl Von Der Heyden Distinguished Lecture, Duke University, February 26,
2009, the keynote address for a conference on “American Grand Strategy after War,” sponsored by the
Triangle Institute for Security Studies and the Duke University Program in American Grand Strategy.
**
John Lewis Gaddis is the Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History and Director
of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale University. He wishes to acknowledge the
generosity of Nicholas F. Brady ’52 and Charles B. Johnson ’54 in making that program possible, as well
as the support, over many years, of President Richard C. Levin and the Yale administration, the Smith
Richardson and John M. Olin Foundations, and the Friends of International Security Studies. Professor
Gaddis also wishes to thank Paul Kennedy and Charles Hill, his collaborators in teaching Grand Strategy at
Yale, who would nonetheless want him to emphasize – and who will find ways to remind him – that the
views contained herein are strictly his own.
