Chapter 8: Grand Strategy of the United States

Grand strategy starts where policy makers end. Let’s assume for a moment that Franklin Roosevelt had not run for a third term in 1940. Would Japan and Germany have behaved differently? Could the United States have accepted Japanese domination of the Western Pacific? Could the United States have accepted the defeat of Britain and its fleet in German hands? The details might have changed, but it is hard to imagine the United States not getting into the war and the war not ending in an allied victory. A thousand details might have changed, but the broadest outlines, the grand strategy would not have changed.

Could there have been an American strategy during the Cold War other than containment of the Soviet Union? The United States couldn’t invade Eastern Europe. The Soviet Army was simply too large and too strong. On the other hand, the United States couldn’t allow the Soviet Union to seize Western Europe because if it controlled Western Europe’s industrial plant, it could overwhelm the United States in the long run. Containment was not a policy; it was the only possible American response to the Soviet Union.

The grand strategies of World War II and the Cold War were dictated by reality. No President, no policy maker would, in the end, have acted differently. Strategically, many things might have changed. Strategically, the United States might have emphasized defeating Japan before it defeated Hitler. It might not have invaded France or it might have lost the Battle of Midway and the war in the Pacific might have lasted another two years. But in the end, it would have fought Japan and Japan, lacking America’s industrial base, would have lost. The United States would have fought Germany and Germany, trapped between the United States and the Soviet Union was not going to win the war. During the Cold War, the United States might not have fought in Vietnam, but invaded Cuba. It might have negotiated away Berlin, or intervened in Hungary. But in the end, geography and economic reality dictated how the Cold War ended.

Grand strategy is the realm in which there are no choices, where the fundamental realities of geography, demography, technology and culture dictate the broad outlines of what must be done. Leaders are left with the task of succeeding at the task or failing, usually because while the task must be achieved, the resources for achieving them just aren’t there. Great leaders are those who accept the tasks laid down by the grand strategic reality, and squeeze out an extra bit of power or cunning in pursuing them. The Cold War would have been won without Vietnam. But it was won in spite of Vietnam as well. In the broadest sense, Lyndon Johnson’s decision to go to war in Vietnam really didn’t matter.
All nations have grand strategies. That does not mean all nations can achieve their strategic goals. Lithuania’s goal is to be free of foreign occupation, particularly Russian. Its economy, demography and geography make it unlikely that Lithuania will ever achieve its goals more than occasionally and temporarily. Spain’s goals were supported by its economic position in the 16^th century, but undermined by its military position. The United States, unlike most countries in the world, has achieved four out of five of its strategic goals, and is working on its fifth. Its economy and society is shaped toward this effort.
The grand strategy of a country is so deeply embedded in a nation’s reality and appears so natural and obvious, that politicians and generals are not always aware of it. They are so constrained by it, their logic is so constrained by it, that it is an almost un-thought of reality. Yet, when you step back and consider it, both the grand strategy of a country and logic driving a country’s leaders become obvious.

Grand strategy is not only about war. It is about all of the processes that constitute national power. But in the case of the United States, perhaps more than with other countries, grand strategy is about war, and the interaction of war with economic life. The United States is, historically, a warlike country.

Since its founding, the United States has been at war for about 10 percent of the time. These are major wars -- War of 1812, Mexican-American War, Civil War, World Wars I and II, Korean War, Vietnam.  It does not include minor conflicts like the Spanish American War or Desert Storm.  During the 20th century, the United States was at war 15 percent of the time. In the second half of the 20th century, the U.S was at war 22 percent of the time. And since the 21st century began in 2001, the United States has been constantly at war.  War is central to the American experience and its frequency is constantly increasing.  It is built into the American culture and is rooted in American geopolitics. Its purpose must be clearly understood

America was born in battle and it has continued to fight to this day at an ever increasing pace. Norway’s grand strategy might be more about economics than warfare, but to understand American grand strategy, war is at the center. It is where American prosperity starts.

The United States has five geopolitical goals which constitutes its grand strategic goals. Note that these goals increase in magnitude, ambition and difficulty as you go down the list:

1. 
   The complete domination of North America by the United States Army
   
2. 
   The elimination of any threat to the United States by any power in the Western Hemisphere.
   
3. 
   Complete control of the maritime approaches to the United States by the Navy in order to preclude any possibility of invasion
   
4. 
   Complete domination of the world’s oceans to further secure U.S. physical safety, and guarantee control over the international trading system.
   
5. 
   Preventing any other nation from even threatening to challenge U.S. global naval power
   

U.S. strategic goals, and U.S. grand strategy, originates in fear. That’s the same for all nations. They do not set out to conquer the world. The United States would have been quite content at first not to be attacked and defeated by the British, as it was in the War of 1812. Each fear, once alleviated, creates new vulnerabilities and new fears. Nations are driven by fear of losing what they have. Each solution generates a new fear. These fears draw a nation outward until their fear is losing control of the oceans and the solution is the conquest of the world. It isn’t madness that creates empire. It is insecurity. And given what happens to nations who fail to overcome their vulnerabilities, nations are not acting irrationally.

Regardless of ideology, no one wants to be invaded. Regardless of what Marxists might haves said, securing the Soviet Union against invasion took priority over everything else. Washington might not have wanted entangling alliances but what he wanted and what the country ultimately needed diverged, and need trumped ideology.

Policy makers have much less room for maneuver than they would like to think, or would have others think. Leaders choose from a limited menu. Frequently, there is only one item on the menu. Like the invisible hand discussed in economics political leaders are forced, sometimes without being fully conscious of it, to pursue certain ends in certain ways.

It is an interesting game to play in idle hours to imagine if Woodrow Wilson knew that his plan for a Post-World War I world guaranteed that there would be a second war, from which the United States would emerge as the major winner and a global power. If he knew it, he was one of the cleverest politicians who ever lived. If he didn’t know it, he was one of the most interesting, because the path he chose was both consistent with U.S. Grand Strategy, and ruthlessly efficient in breaking European power and enhancing American. What Wilson thought he was doing might have been completely different from what he actually achieved. Which is why paying attention to the intentions of politicians—especially the most sincere ones—confuses more than helps.

The pursuit of U.S. grand strategy, therefore, is not about policy pronouncements. It moves with its on logic, trapping policy makers in its own rules and constraints. What is unique about the United States is not that its leaders are constrained. It is that they have achieved far more than the leaders of other countries. But that has far less to do with their own genius than with the tools they had to work with and the way the tools worked them. It doesn’t make American power eternal. It does allow it to endure and it helps explain the origins of that power.

The United States resembled Chile. It as very long and thin, without mountains on once side, the ocean on the other side, and very poor transportation running north-south. This was a prescription for disaster. The interests of the various states, regions and sub-regions were very different and frequently antagonistic. Federalism, the existence of sovereign states was not a matter of political philosophy. It was an empirical reality. That’s the way things were.

The U.S. had a strategic problem. It had just won independence from England, but the English dominated the North Atlantic. The United States didn’t have a significant Navy. That meant that the United States was wide open to having its coastal shipping interfered with and its trade with Europe strangled. Moreover, given the length of the coast, an enemy could invade at any point and other states couldn’t come to their existence. That’s exactly what happened in the War of 1812. The British captured U.S. ships, then invaded the United States and burned Washington.

Had the United States remained a nation of discreet states existing between the coast and the mountains, it is extremely unlikely that it would have survived. The geographical isolation of its parts and its vulnerability to British or French naval action meant that they were an accident waiting to happen. The United States had to expand beyond the Appalachians in order to have any strategic depth and survive.

The United States had, in fact, received a large amount of territory from the British as part of the settlement of the Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War. Called the Northwest Territory, it consisted of a huge area stretching from the Appalachians as far west as eastern Minnesota. It had some of the richest farm land in the world. But it was on the other side of the Appalachians. It was almost another planet, certainly another country.