corporations might be directed in the service of really ambitious goals: European peace or the fiber-speed transformation of telecommunications or billion-user financial grids. It’s thin air up at this level, honestly, by which I mean that at these elevated heights you see the most ambitious athletes of human power at work: The maniacal CEO, the egotistical statesman, the mad dictator. Hundreds of millions of lives are in play; even more in some cases. By a “grand strategy” we mean the very peak of this sort of consideration. It represents, in the world of global affairs, the construction of a strategic idea that suggests how military, diplomacy, markets, and politics might be harnessed, firmly, in service of a singular aim. Grand strategy is a basic stance towards the world. If it works, it liberates creativity and national energy. It sets a clear direction*‘. It protects against the steep price of surprise. Grand strategy holds, in a single concept, the nature of their age and our plans to use that nature for the aims - security, prosperity - that gird a nation’s life and decide its future. Like it or not, we all live under the umbrella raised by grand strategic choices.
“Containment” of the Cold War period, “Balance of Power” from Europe’s 19 Century Age of Revolutions, or the “Tributary Alliances” that shaped a thousand years of Chinese power - these were all big, essential organizing grand strategic concepts. They shaped security decisions for durable empires. Each balanced ideal aims like freedom or the preservation of dynastic continuity against technological revolution, economic crisis, ideologies and the numberless other forces that can crack empires. Each idea reflected the demands of the age, and as a result each tells us something about power in those eras.
The Chinese strategist General Liu Yazhou observed a few years ago in a widely circulated essay, perhaps a bit too eagerly, “A major state can lose many battles, but the only loss that is always fatal is to be defeated in strategy.”5> There’s something a bit cold in that line, but it expresses a hard truth. Massiveness and deep commitment to a particular, flawed view of the world can turn strength to weakness in a heartbeat. In our connected age this sort of reversal can happen with a particularly devastating speed. In the past, traditional measures of power - tanks, airplanes, national wealth - declined or rose as a gradual process. It took years for Genoa to fund and build an expeditionary force to gut Venice’s Adriatic designs. Decades passed as Germany built her naval fleet. But in our age, such slower-moving measures are of limited use. Network systems rise and fall with astonishing speed. Once-successful firms in technology, companies like Wang or Fairchild Semiconductor or MySpace, found themselves unseated in months, after years of growth. New firms can emerge as if from nowhere and erase once cherished balances, demolish once strong names. Google unseats Britannica. Ride-sharing firms vaporize taxi medallion economics. “Change or die,” the old computer
54 If it works: Hal Brands, The Promise and Pitfalls of Grand Strategy, (U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute, August 2012); Jennifer Mitzen, “Illusion or Intention? Talking Grand Strategy into Existence”, Security Studies, 24:1(2015), 61- 94
55 The Chinese strategist: Liu Yazhou, “Da guoce” on aisixiang.com (2004)
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