Grand Strategy

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Juris Doctor

This class is meant to help students think critically about the grand strategies of nations in peace and war. Grand strategies are meant to weave the military, political, diplomatic, economic, and other threads of national power into a coherent plan to achieve a country’s goals by a well-defined means-ends chain. Inevitably, reality diverges from that theoretical concept. Many countries fail to achieve such integration. Often that results in their defeat in war or other forms of strategic failure. Other countries succeed despite similar failings. Likewise, while the successful pursuit of a grand strategy has often produced victory, history is littered with policy gambits that failed despite being driven by well-oiled grand strategies. Still, since policymakers should not embark on major undertakings in expectation that they will just get lucky, a well-reasoned, well-executed grand strategy is vital when nations seek to accomplish important foreign policy goals. Indeed, the best judge of the soundness of any foreign policy endeavor should be whether it is backed by a reasonable, feasible grand strategy—or if it is part of such an overarching conception. For these reasons, the course will focus on the conception, integration, and implementation of the strands of a grand strategy. The key to any grand strategy is how well its many dimensions work in unison in pursuit of a common theory of victory, and ultimately toward the national goal. Of course, ensuring that the many components of a government implement the various aspects of a grand strategy for which each is responsible is enormously difficult. It is hard enough for many leaders and governments to articulate a rational, coherent grand strategy; it is harder still for them to see that all of the agencies, bureaucracies, parties, and people of their government actually execute it. The course is meant to help students recognize both strengths and flaws in grand strategies. In turn, this will allow students to assess and analyze a grand strategy and so provide the tools to formulate their own conceptions of what a workable grand strategy might look like for any nation attempting to achieve any kind of foreign policy goal.