#WritingContest2020 (/the-bridge?

category=%23WritingContest2020)

Towards an Epistemology of
Grand Strategy: Stereotype, Ideal
Type, and the Dematerialization
of the Concept

Maurizio Recordati (/the-bridge?author=5f522ec8d79af8221d5fb778) · October 5, 2020 (/the-

bridge/2020/10/5/towards-an-epistemology-of-grand-strategy-stereotype-ideal-type-and-the-
dematerialization-of-the-concept)

Earlier this year, The Strategy Bridge asked (https://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2020/2/20/the-

2020-strategy-bridge-student-writing-competition-on-strategy) university and professional military
education students to participate in our fourth annual writing contest by sending us their thoughts on
strategy.

Now, we are pleased to present the first-place winner, from Maurizio Recordati, a student at American
University in Washington, D.C.
Scholars from disparate disciplines have been agonizing over definitions of grand strategy with
increasing frequency over the last decades. Not a few scholars have also criticized it for its
impracticality and would scrap the concept. Some studies have attempted to organize the literature
to bring some clarity to the field.[1] Nina Silove and Lukas Milevski have stressed the downsides of
semanticism, which lead scholars to talk past each other and leave the concept in disarray.[2] Silove’s
article “Beyond the Buzzword” offers a serviceable categorization of the term as she demonstrates
that conceptions of grand strategy may refer to three groups of observable entities: plans, principles,
and behaviors. Her contribution unpacks grand strategy ontologically as she looks at the substance
behind the definition—the “entity, object, or phenomenon of grand strategy.”[3] The issue at hand
is the unquestioned reification of the concept—that is, treating grand strategy as a real thing. The
vexing question in the U.S. national security scholarship, “whether the United States has had, can
have, or should have a grand strategy,” implicitly elicits such a problem.[4]

An illustration of the idea of containment in the Cold War (Pinterest)

Richard Betts has recently advanced the provocative suggestion that proponents of grand strategy
“rescue [it] by definition.” The concept “makes sense abstractly, but falters in application, [it is]
honored far more in principle than in practice.” In his view, this prompts scholars to “deflect
criticism” by redefining it in “vague” terms, notably by adopting a more inclusive processual concept
that embraces adaptation.[5] Betts instead posits grand strategy is a practical plan, that is, a product.
I do not debate the worthiness of grand strategy as a tool for guiding U.S. statecraft—it falls outside
of my field of study. As a strategic historian, however, I take an interest in showing other disciplines
participating in its study that abstract acceptations of the term are worth cultivating. In the process,
I suggest an alternative view to Betts’ and argue critics of grand strategy attack it by definition.

The history of the concepts of strategy and grand strategy does not warrant ostracizing adaptive
strategies in the name of a specific research agenda at the expense of other disciplines. As historians
have demonstrated, strategy (grand or not) was never exclusively the practical product Betts
advances. Since it entered the French vocabulary in the late eighteenth century, strategy was sublime
and cerebral as well. Military strategists conceived of strategy as a cognitive tool, a function, which
should not be denied a priori to its descendant—grand strategy.

The argument of this essay builds on a distinction between stereotype and ideal type. I show that
concepts under debate are stereotypical versions of grand strategy. A stereotype is a widely held but
fixed and reductive image of a particular entity or phenomenon. As a mold, it solidifies a plastic
substance such as a concept into a fixed shape (from Ancient Greek στερεός, stereós: solid).
Stereotypical concepts of grand strategy are orthodox in the American international relations
community, but should not be taken for granted in other disciplines such as strategy and history.
Nonetheless, I argue that grand-strategic historiography also participates in reinforcing grand-
strategic stereotypes.
Pericles' Funeral Oration (Perikles hält die Leichenrede) by Philipp Foltz (Wikimedia)

Finally, I illustrate the benefits of abstract concepts for studying grand strategy. My focus shifts from
ontology to epistemology. The analysis proceeds from observable entities—as in Silove’s
categorization—to the ideas we use to capture images of grand strategy from the past. Weber’s ideal
type is a useful abstract cognitive tool at strategic historians’ disposal and a better alternative to
stereotype. Clausewitz’s idealization of absolute war and Edward Luttwak’s level of analysis may be
used to perform similar tasks. The suggestion is that the historian’s craft prompts scholars to
attribute to grand strategy several different cognitive uses. The concept may refer to an observed
phenomenon, an object of study, a narrative device, an interpretive framework, and a field of study.
The ironic bottom line is that grand strategy’s much decried conceptual multiformity may save it
and stimulate its growth. Thus far, criticisms have scraped only the most brittle facets of this many-
sided concept.

Since the late 19th century, military scholars have lamented the degeneration of strategy into a blob
and an impractical concept.[6] As far as back as in 1892, general Jules-Louis Lewal lamented the
ongoing banalization of strategy had “swamped, obscured, and adulterated it.” With vulgarization,
the term had become overly vague and quixotic. Over the last decades, grand strategy has become
the target of strikingly similar criticisms. Security studies picked up grand strategy from strategic
studies, revived it, and gave it different shapes, which would be hardly recognizable to many
strategists.[7] Hervé Coutau-Bégarie has lamented that following its securitization, the concept
metamorphosed from being a military term into a vague, unworkable framework to guide the state
in long term horizons in war and peace. Grand strategy was corrupted, whence “everything became
strategic, and strategy was nowhere to be found.”[8] As the French strategist noted, its expanding
concerns for “global and human security,” the cacophony of its disparate conceptualizations, and its
tendency to “suggest models and stereotypes” have stretched the concept and stripped it of its
meaning and utility. Hence, Coutau-Bégarie has urged scholars to “return to a strategic strategy.”[9]
A similar line of criticism of grand strategy as it is understood in the U.S. security community found
an echo in the Anglo-Saxon strategic literature, notably in the works of Hew Strachan and Lukas
Milevski.[10]

Over the last decade, as grand strategy has become all the rage in international relations, foreign
policy and security scholars have also started criticizing the concept in the common understanding
in their field. Whereas this literature seems content with grand strategy’s transition from its original
martial dimension to statecraft, it shows impatience with its lack of practicality in the realm of
government, so much so that Stephen Krasner has referred to grand strategy as an “elusive holy
grail,” and David Edelstein and Ronald Krebs co-authored a cautionary article against grand-
strategic delusions.[11] These political scientists’ concerns with the impracticality of the concept
match some strategy scholars’ disinclination to accept grand strategy into the corpus of strategic
theory. The dominant view in the latter discipline is that strategy’s raison d’être is pragmatic as it
serves the conduct of war or statecraft.[12] It is thus no surprise that, in its most visionary
conceptualizations, grand strategy met the resistance of some strategists.[13]
Part of the problem lies with some categorical acceptations of grand strategy that have gained
currency, particularly in the international relations literature. The commentary and scholarship of
the last few decades tends to reify the concept into a product, which at times shows with glittering
attributes as grandiosity, purposiveness, foresight, and coherence. Nina Silove comes to a similar
conclusion, but from a different premise. As she puts it, “Most contributions implicitly commit to
scientific realism and use grand strategy to refer to a real object or phenomenon, something that
exists independently of the mind of the observer.”[14] My ongoing research suggests the
hypostatization of grand strategy results not only from rigorous empirical observation but even more
often from imagination. Several studies tend to inject models of virtuous strategy into their
representations of the past. The attentive reader may trace this latent method in the prescriptive and
applied history literatures. Not a few students of grand-strategic history—including trained
historians—tend to recreate images of grand strategy not only from the evidentiary record, but also
by projecting the features of an ideal grand strategy. One of the fundamental misunderstandings in
the existing literature is that which blurs the lines between normative theory and prescription on the
one hand and description and interpretation on the other. Read this way, grand strategy is either a
deliberate, linear, coherent, and functional model—or it is not grand strategy. In other words, the
tangibility of grand strategy depends, at least to some extent, on the subsistence of its purest,
imagined qualities.

The latest criticisms are targeted most notably at such an oxymoronic understanding of grand
strategy as an ideal and yet tangible entity. Those critical observations are per se reasonable, but
scrape only the most brittle facet of this many-sided concept. They attack stereotypical versions of
grand strategy that are at odds with the very ideas labored by several strategists and historians over
the past few decades. Simply put, the critics are pushing at an open door only to beat a dead horse.
But scholars of international relations are not attacking a strawman. As I discuss further, some
historians who advocate grand strategy did contribute—if unintentionally—to its stereotyping.
Moreover, some historians behave as these scholars of international relations; they too imagine grand
strategy stereotypically and criticize such reductive concepts. Edward Luttwak’s seminal The Grand
Strategy of the Roman Empire received a critical treatment in the 1970s, which recalls today’s
criticisms in studies of international relations.[15] That his work was plagued with several historical
inaccuracies and implausible propositions—as noted in the harsh reviews of classicist historians—
nolo contendere, I do not have the expertise to contest it. But Everett Wheeler and Kimberly Kagan
had a point when they lamented that many adverse reactions to the book distorted Luttwak’s actual
position in their decrying any Roman master plan.[16] Like today’s critics of grand strategy, the
classicists who attacked him had a “tunnel vision on what strategy must be,” and Wheeler
concluded, “Denial of Roman strategy should not be based on the assumption that all strategy must
be optimal.”[17]

Similarly, today’s attacks on grand strategy uphold too exacting a standard of a master plan—a
product to guide policy well beyond short-term horizons. In the lay discourse, this is the most
obvious way of imagining the concept. To be sure, such an understanding of grand strategy is not
unwarranted, as luminaries in the field who advocated for grand strategy, have advanced similar
assertive and forward-looking views.[18] Strachan argues these linear and purposive attributes are
residuals inherited from grand strategy’s progenitor, nineteenth-century (operational) strategy.[19]
After the Cold War, scholarship started conflating the two levels of strategy, which created
expectations too high for grand strategy. Linearity and purposiveness suit doctrines for the
operational level, with its very specific geographic contexts and short-term horizons, but they hardly
apply to long-term statecraft. Strachan challenges, in particular, the prevailing American orthodoxy
of grand strategy—notably, Kennedy’s long-term view and Posen’s association of the concept with
doctrine.[20] It is thus no surprise that some critics of grand strategy also characterize it as a grand
plan or as a concept that is necessarily doctrinaire.[21] More recently, some political scientists even
declared that “grand strategic thinking is linear,” making the case that it does not suit a chaotic
world.[22] The list of such reductive representations of grand strategy among its critics goes on.
Such characterizations suit research agendas that conceive of grand strategy primarily as guidance to
U.S. policy, and accessorily, as a cognitive tool. But to reiterate, they ignore important parts of the
literature in strategy and history. In fact, today’s dispute over grand strategy seems somewhat of an
intramural showdown within the U.S. national security community.

Throughout the nineteenth century, military planning gained prominence in the realm of strategy.
Moving and provisioning large armies required forward-looking military commanders to use
practical systems, calculations, and checklists.[23] However, from the very moment when the term
strategy was reintroduced in the French vocabulary in the late eighteenth century, military theorists
and historians have tended to distinguish it from plans.[24] Today, while military strategists
inevitably use plans to direct some putatively linear processes, they are circumspect, if not altogether
reluctant, to equate planning with their art, knowing that strategy requires coping with nonlinear
dynamics.[25] When it comes to grand strategy (statecraft), tying the concept to planning is even
less tenable. In their critique, Edelstein and Krebs highlight the inadequacies of strategizing in
Washington, which they associate with bureaucracy drawing plans and documents. Such issues are
well-known in the historical-strategic literature, and advocates of grand strategy agree with the gist of
Edelstein and Krebs’ arguments, but not on narrow conceptualizations of the term.[26] Strategy
scholars are skeptical on the merit of “so-called strategic documents” and fully acknowledge the
complications nested in the interagency push and pull. They advance a processual view of grand
strategy that embraces day-to-day adaptation, reactivity, and muddling through in their descriptions
of grand strategy in practice.[27] On the other hand, they detour from the normative road that
would lead them to call this behavior astrategic.[28] All this is not to say that we should categorically
exclude the idea of grand strategy as a grand plan, but simply that not a few scholars regard
blueprints as mere accessories.[29]

Coherence is generally held to be a quasi-necessary condition for the subsistence of a (good) grand
strategy—both in normative theory and in history works.[30] In their historical accounts of grand
strategy, both political scientists and some historians tend to impute more coherence at the level of
implementation than the reality would allow for. This is not merely an effect of injecting normative
grand strategy into historiography. The problem also lies in the objective limitations of a historian’s
craft. Narrative inescapably attributes coherence and linearity to the past, particularly when it hinges
upon longue durée (long-term) perspectives or leans on structural factors such, for example,
geopolitics.[31] Grand strategy may function as an emplotment device, which uniforms described
behavior, diminishes or ignores tactical oddities, and fixes the field of vision on facile continuities.
Thus, historians may package consistent strategies with various degrees of impressionism.

Moreover, coherence is seldom qualified or justified, as its worthiness is routinely taken for granted.
[32] Perhaps this attitude, too, is a legacy of nineteenth-century optimistic and rationalistic ways to
operational strategy. Coherence informs the mechanical logic of linear blueprints, and from that
perspective, regularity and persistence go a long way. Yet Sun Tzi’s maxims on the benefits of
unpredictability may also elicit a few doubts on the value of coherent behavior. Unsurprisingly,
Luttwak, who advanced the idea of “paradoxical logic of strategy” and “seemingly contradictory
policies” on the level of grand strategy, favors harmony over coherence and consistency.[33] But
there are scant examples of questioning the value of coherence—let alone cases of outright
skepticism. Nonetheless, it may well be argued that within an adaptative concept of grand strategy,
the quality of adherence (i.e., to the environment and to a state’s interests) is at least as worthy as
that of coherence. By the same token, I suggest that the attribute of congruence suits both the
problem-solving and the ends-based paradigms of strategy better than consistency.

The notion that grand strategy must be eo ipso grand is a widespread canard, and at that, a
stereotypical one. Such a view is standard among critical voices but is firmly grounded in some
caricatures of grand strategy advocates.[34] Associations to grandiosity are arbitrary, as they depend
on one’s chosen conceptualization and, even more so, on the phenomena under scrutiny. Moreover,
they hinge on one etymological and one axiological misunderstanding. First, as Freedman reports,
the English term is a translation from the French grande stratégie, which referred to the art and
knowledge of the “supreme commander and generals of any rank.”[35] As Jeremy Black aptly notes,
it is ironic that the term readapted Guibert’s grande tactique and referred to what today passes for
military strategy—that is, a narrower plane below today’s grand strategy as statecraft.[36] What is
more, the French grande does not translate as grand. In that context, a better rendering would be
high or large, as opposed to petite stratégie, for it just connotated the difference with the tactical level.
Axiologically speaking, the term was neutral, but its core values evolved over two centuries. Initially,
it did not suggest the awesomeness that the adjective grand carries with. A century of historical
construction added to the initial inaccurate translation. Scholars reinforced the association to
grandness by applying the concept strategy to the preservation of declining global empires or the
successful conduct of total war. Some credit the concept with delivering such grand achievements,
but even then, several specialists insist that a primal value of grand strategy lies in humility.[37] Its
history preaches sermons of prudence, not grandiosity, and precisely because it seeks long-term
sustainability, grand strategy requires measure rather than ambition.

Different concepts are not as rigid, not as fixed on intended goals and on the right sequence to
achieve them, thus better understanding how grand strategy works in practice. Generally, these are
pieces of descriptive analysis of strategic behavior, which may also carry normative attributes. Such
approaches accept the inevitable corruption of strategy as it was envisaged ab initio, and, unlike the
stereotypical concepts, they focus on strategy in the making, or strategizing, with little deference to
its deliberate baseline. As Black puts it, “The understanding of strategy in practice in particular
circumstances poses questions that underline the problem with the otherwise apparently attractive
concept of optimum strategy.”[38]

One type of such understandings is that of strategy as an adaptative and flexible process.[39] It is
telling that one of the most prominent of such perspectives came from business strategy, a field
where strategy was predominantly understood as a product and a plan. In his seminal studies on
strategy formation, Henry Mintzberg conceptualized emergent and deliberate strategy “as two ends
of a continuum along which real-world strategies lie.” He imagined a spectrum between these two
pure ideas, in which several hybrid types could be observed. He was interested not so much in the
concepts per se, but “especially their interplay,” for “strategy formation walks on two feet, one
deliberate, the other emergent.”[40] Military studies offer other possible examples of mixed and
variable strategy. In his revisitation of Wylie’s sequential and cumulative strategy, Milevski notes that
“the boundary between the two models is blurred to the extent that this dichotomy may represent a
spectrum with two idealized poles.” Sequential strategy, which is linear in principle, transforms in
practice. Milevski then points to cases of guerrilla strategy, which “attempt to fuse cumulative and
sequential strategy into a sort of progression of strategy, in which cumulative strategy creates the
foundations for and naturally transforms into a sequential strategy.”[41] For his part, Yarger stresses
that strategy encompasses both linear and non-linear dynamics and that its analysis ought to grasp
such distinction.[42] In other words, as intentions meet contingencies in a chaotic environment,
emergent features transfigure the intended linear path and participate in the strategic process. As
Silove notes with a dash of puzzlement, Brands, too, presents a mixed picture, as his concept of
grand strategy is both purposive and unconsciously emergent.[43] In Strachan’s words, “Strategy
occupies the space between a desired outcome, presumably shaped by national interest, and
contingency, and it directs the outcome of a battle or of another major event to fit with the
objectives of policy as best as it can. It also recognizes that strategy may itself have to bend in
response to events.”[44] The bottom line is that large parts of strategic scholarship recognize the
virtues of adaptability and flexibility, particularly as strategy ascends to the level of grand strategy,
with its far-reaching geographic, temporal, and political dimensions.

Ernst Henseler’s painting of Bismarck’s last great parliamentary speeches. (Napoleon.org)

There are yet other concepts that avoid the clichés of purely deliberate and linear approaches and
preserve grand strategy into the realm of abstraction. The first, most diffused such understanding is
that of art, or an activity of the mind, which it borrows from its source, military strategy—for
centuries, also known as military art.[45] General André Beaufre aptly marked the distinction
between strategy, understood as a method of thinking, and a strategy—an overly ambitious product.
[46] In essence, the former is what Marshal Ferdinand Foch termed as “an abstract game.”[47]
Bismarck is a good incarnation of the strategic player. Marcus Jones presents him as a genius whose
greatest strategic achievements were not the product of a long view but of his tactical skills and
“expert navigation of uncertain events.”[48] The Iron Chancellor himself had often characterized his
statecraft as “continuous gambling.”[49] He viewed politics as an aleatory realm in which precise
calculations were mostly ineffective. Grand strategy as art finds its place in historiography and
strategic literature but is virtually absent from scholarship in international relations. Qualities such as
adaptability and flexibility become apparent in historical and descriptive studies that focus on
strategizing. The making of grand strategy is a particular focus in Murray’s collections of historical
case studies.[50] Conversely, as Rebecca Friedman Lissner notes, strategizing and choice find no
place within the linear logic of structural-realist studies.[51]

The concept of strategy as art is less affirmative and optimistic than the stereotypes of grand strategy.
As Tami Biddle puts it, “Because it is so challenging on so many levels, strategy is difficult to practice
in any idealized form. But it is not an impossible art.”[52] Grand strategy is hard to capture within
normative standards—what works in one context may fail elsewhere. Because he considers strategy
“more an art than a science,” Strachan cautions, “[It] needs to be more modest about itself and about
what it can deliver...it behooves those who think about it and those who practice it not to be too
brazen about its status.”[53] Notably, if grand strategy is an art, it may include styles of play that
most purist observers would define astrategic or anti-strategic. In the absence of standards (e.g.,
coherence, foresight, or purposiveness), modes like opportunism, trial and error, or ad hoc
approaches may as well be considered legitimate kinds of strategy—that is, provided that they
produce a strategic effect. In other words, strategy as art rescues tactical adroitness from the
condescendence of proponents of stereotypical strategy.

Strategy has always been about the production of knowledge. One mode of study was doctrinal, in a
Jominian tradition, and its alternative was more cerebral. Clausewitz’s On War was predicated on the
idea that thinking hard about war is necessary before waging it. Strategic thought may be viewed as
“a route to comprehension rather than to action.”[54] Thus, the concept grand strategy may also
function as a cognitive tool.

After the barrage of criticism of his work on the Roman Empire (1976), which refuted the notion
that Rome had a master plan (a grand-strategic product), Luttwak tried to clarify his position. In his
sequel on Byzantium (2009), he wrote: “Grand strategy is only a level on which different state efforts
interact, and therefore, all states inevitably have one.”[55] A level—or, in Liddell Hart’s terminology,
a plane—is an abstract analytical category.[56] However, the claim that all states possess one implies
that grand strategy is somewhat tangible, at least an observable entity. In an earlier book, Strategy:
The Logic of War and Peace (1987), though, Luttwak had stated that grand strategy could
simultaneously be a doctrine, a level of analysis, and “the reality of grand strategy, the conclusive level
of strategy as a whole. Of course, only the latter exists universally.”[57] Notwithstanding the
unconvincing claim that a level is real, Luttwak was trying to drive home a valid point: it takes an
abstract category to reify strategy.

When scholars study grand strategy in history, their point of departure may be an idealized model. A
large part of the literature is inspired by the normative standards of virtuous grand strategy—what
good grand strategy should be. Thus, the scholar’s risk is to overemphasize—or even imagine—the
stereotypical qualities I have discussed above: purposiveness, linearity, foresight, coherence, and
grandiosity. A bibliographic review suggests that there is a tendency to reify grand strategies by
drawing from that stereotype as much as from evidentiary bases. In other words, the stereotype
becomes a paradigm to follow, and its influence is such that some scholars find exactly what they
were looking for. This raises eyebrows among earnest historians. It is not uncommon to run into
academic reviews chastising works in grand-strategic history for post hoc fallacies and arguments
that are “more asserted than demonstrated.” Thus, Betts has a point when he claims that “grand
strategy...emerges as a rationalization more than an explanation.”[58] Such modus operandi reads
the source material with an analytical framework that is more affirmative than inquisitive. It is more
pertinent to auxiliary history—history written in support of other disciplines such as strategy or
international relations—and to applied history. Search for theory construction and policy relevance
may come at the expense of a genuine historical perspective.

There are, of course, different ways of using abstract

categories in the study of history, and there are less
affirmative approaches than the one described above.
Clausewitz’s concept of absolute war offers a good
example for strategy students. As Strachan elucidates,
the Prussian author was initially inclined to considering
it a real phenomenon, not a fiction. Later, “Clausewitz,
the historian...had to acknowledge that absolute war
could not be a universally applicable model for real
wars.” This illumination explains why he treated it as an
experience in Book 1, and turned it into “an abstraction
against which all wars, not just Napoleonic war, could
be measured” in Book 8. Friction became his “way of Carl von Clausewitz (Karl Wilhelm
squaring history with theory.”[59] Wach/Wikimedia)

By the same token, historians may conceive of grand

strategy as an “ideal type.” As Max Weber defines it:

An ideal type is formed by the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view and by
the synthesis of a great many diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent
concrete individual phenomena, which are arranged according to those one-sidedly
emphasized viewpoints into a unified analytical construct. In its conceptual purity, this
construct cannot be found empirically anywhere in reality.[60]

Contrary to a stereotype, an ideal type has no normative vocation and is not conceived to materialize
into a historical phenomenon. As Marc Trachtenberg puts it, “...(if it is used correctly), [theory] is
not a substitute for empirical analysis. It is an engine of analysis.”[61] Under this guise, grand
strategy’s exaggerated qualities and accomplished shape serve to generate hypotheses and questions,
not to suggest answers. A historian needs a paradigm, not to follow it, but to poke holes in it. Such a
flexible framework facilitates a scholar’s understanding that strategizing is constantly susceptible to
the risk of error and strategic performance is regularly subpar.[62] History is a cemetery of failed
strategies.[63] Moreover, an interpretive tool as Luttwak’s level of analysis serves to frame integration
and collisions of different individual strategies and tactics. As Timothy Sayle notes, “If one
reconceptualizes ‘grand strategy’ as a plane upon which the different resources of the state interact,
with or without a conscious act of coordination, a different working definition emerges.”[64] From
this perspective, it is not necessary to imagine a deus ex machina weaving the plot of a grand strategy,
nor is the scholar tempted to impute more linearity and coherence than can be discerned.

The bottom line is that scholars may choose to reify grand strategy a posteriori and reconstruct it
with all its imperfections. Or their research may conclude that the phenomenon under scrutiny does
not deserve that name. All the same, a study in grand strategy it is. The critics of the concept may
declare with a pinch of hyperbole that they “come to bury grand strategy.”[65] Eppur si muove! (And
yet it moves!) The ultimate cognitive concept of grand strategy is that of an area of teaching and
research. Grand-strategic scholarship is growingly active and includes its critics’ studies, at that. It is
not a discipline for, as this essay shows, the scientific interchange among its primary professions (the
strategists, the political scientists, and the historians) is still inadequate. More importantly, it calls for
the development of an epistemic bedrock. This essay attempts to build in this direction.

Maurizio Recordati is a Ph.D. student at American University in Washington, D.C. He specializes in

history and theory of grand strategy and late imperial Russia. His dissertation explores theory and methods
for writing grand-strategic history. He holds an MA in Russian and Eurasian Studies from European
University in St. Petersburg (EUSP) and a BA in History from the University of Milan.

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N OT E S :

[1] Several studies discuss the concept and definitions of grand strategy. Among the most useful
works: Paul Kennedy’s essay “Grand Strategies in War and Peace: Toward a Broader Definition” is
worth citing for its seminal role in reviving grand-strategic history in its contemporary focus on
statecraft (rather than higher military strategy). Williamson Murray’s collections offer helpful
introductions to grand strategy as a historical phenomenon. See Williamson Murray and Mark
Grimsley, “Introduction: On Strategy,” in Williamson Murray, MacGregor Knox and Alvin
Bernstein (eds.), The Making of Strategy: Rulers, States, and War, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994: 1-23; Williamson Murray, “Thoughts on Grand Strategy,” in Williamson Murray,
Richard H. Sinnreich, and James Lacey, eds., The Shaping of Grand Strategy: Policy, Diplomacy, and
War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp. 1–33; Williamson Murray, “Introduction,”
in Williamson Murray and Richard Hart Sinnreich (eds.) Successful Strategies: Triumphing in War and
Peace from Antiquity to the Present. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014: 1-16. Lukas
Milevski offers an analysis of grand strategy’s historical construction. This is the most comprehensive
work on its conceptualization: Lukas Milevski, The Evolution of Modern Grand Strategic Thought,
New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Hal Brands and William Martel offer possibly the most
valuable didactic tools for non-adept students in IR and government: William Martel, Grand
Strategy in Theory and Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012; Hal Brands, What
Good is Grand Strategy: Power and Purpose in American Statecraft from Harry S. Truman to George W.
Bush, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014. See also Nina Silove, “Beyond the Buzzword: The
Three Meanings of ‘Grand Strategy’,” Security Studies, 27:1, 27-57; Frank G. Hoffman, “Grand
Strategy: The Fundamental Considerations.” Orbis 58, Issue 4 (2014): 472-485; and Paul D. Miller,
“On Strategy, Grand and Mundane.” Orbis 60, Issue 2 (2016): 237-247.

[2] See Silove, “Beyond the Buzzword,” p. 6; and “Introduction” in Lukas Milevski, The Evolution of
Modern Grand Strategic Thought, pp. 1-26.

[3] Nina Silove, “Beyond the Buzzword,” p. 7.

[4] Ibidem, 5. Lawrence Freedman notes that when the term “strategy” was coined, it became a
distinctive product with military professionalization. Nonetheless, both the author who introduced
the word, Joly de Maizeroy, and the more famous strategist of that time, Guibert, describe strategy as
“sublime.” Freedman makes the case that when strategy entered in the business vocabulary, its
understanding as a product became more widespread. Lawrence Freedman, Strategy: A History,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013: 72, 541, 552, 562.

[5] Richard K. Betts, “The Grandiosity of Grand Strategy,” The Washington Quarterly 42, no. 4
(October 2, 2019): 7-10. At p. 10, Betts challenges Hal Brands’ understanding of grand strategy as
“process, not a blueprint.” See Hal Brands, What Good is Grand Strategy: Power and Purpose in
American Statecraft from Harry S. Truman to George W. Bush, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014:
198-201.

[6] In his words, strategy had become “noyée, obscurcie et en quelque sorte dénaturée.” Jules-Louis
Lewal, Introduction à la partie positive de la Stratégie, Paris: Librairie militaire de Baudoin, 1892:
passim 2-9.
[7] For an account of the reciprocal skepticism between strategy and security scholars, see Joshua
Rovner, “Warring Tribes Studying War and Peace”, War on the Rocks, April 12, 2016:
https://warontherocks.com/2016/04/warring-tribes-studying-war-and-peace/
(https://warontherocks.com/2016/04/warring-tribes-studying-war-and-peace/) (last access:
01/14/2020).

[8] Hervé Coutau-Bégarie, Traité de stratégie, Paris: Economica, Institut de Stratégie Comparée,
1999: 81.

[9] In his own words: “revenir à une stratégie stratégique.” Ibidem, passim pp. 70-76, 81-82, 96, 120-
124, and 441-442.

[10] See, for example, “Strategy: Change and Continuity” in Hew Strachan, The Direction of War:
Contemporary Strategy in Historical Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014; Lukas
Milevski, The Evolution of Modern Grand Strategic Thought, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press,
2016; Lukas Milevski, “Can Grand Strategy be Mastered?”, Infinity Journal, Volume 5, Issue 4,
(Summer 2017): 33–36; Adam Elkus, “Must American Strategy Be Grand?” Infinity Journal, Volume
3, Issue 1, (Winter 2012): 26–30; Richard K. Betts, “The Grandiosity of Grand Strategy,” The
Washington Quarterly 42, no. 4 (October 2, 2019): 7–22. It should be noted that Coutau-Bégarie
did not receive credit on this line of argument. The title of Strachan’s article “The Lost Meaning of
Strategy,” [on Survival 47, no. 3 (2005): 33-54] sounds like a calque of the French author’s formula,
i.e., strategy’s “perte de sens” (Traité de stratégie, p. 441.) See also Paul D. Miller, “On Strategy, Grand
and Mundane.” Orbis 60, Issue 2 (2016): 244-245.

[11] David M. Edelstein and Ronald R. Krebs, “Delusions of Grand Strategy: The Problem With
Washington's Planning Obsession,” Foreign Affairs 94, no. 6 (2015): 109-16.

[12] Raymond Aron’s formula of strategy as a “praxéologie”, a “science de l’action,” has gained
currency in the French school of strategy and, most notably, in the scholarship of Lucien Poirier
(Raymond Aron, Paix et guerre entre les nations, Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1962.) As Bernard Brodie
pithily put it, “strategic thinking … is nothing if not pragmatic … Above all, strategic theory is a
theory for action (Bernard Brodie, War and Politics, New York: Macmillan, 1973: 452.)

[13] See, for example, Hew Strachan, “Strategy and Contingency,” in The Direction of War:
Contemporary Strategy in Historical Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

[14] Silove, “Beyond the Buzzword,” p. 6. Betts and Edelstein & Krebs argue grand strategies are
often a product of rationalization. Betts, “The Grandiosity of Grand Strategy,” p. 11; David M.
Edelstein and Ronald R. Krebs, “Delusions of Grand Strategy: The Problem With Washington’s
Planning Obsession,” Foreign Affairs 94, no. 6 (2015): 111.

[15] Edward N. Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire: From the First Century A.D. to the
Third, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970.

[16] Everett L. Wheeler, “Methodological Limits and the Mirage of Roman Strategy: Part I,” The
Journal of Military History 57, no. 1 (1993): 8. Kimberly Kagan later made the case that “definitions
and concepts in the field of Roman grand strategic studies have not kept the pace with the increasing
sophistication of their counterparts in the field of modern grand strategy.” Too often, historians of
Rome unacquainted with the concept conceived grand strategy in the reductive terms of grand
design or “systematic plan.” This “unfortunate equation”, she claims, “has had baleful effects on this
discussion.” Kimberly Kagan, “Redefining Roman Grand Strategy,” The Journal of Military History
70, no. 2 (April 1, 2006): 334-335.

[17] Everett L. Wheeler, “Methodological Limits and the Mirage of Roman Strategy: Part II,” The
Journal of Military History 57, no. 2 (1993): 218, 222.

[18] Silove provides a summary of US scholarship propounding the idea that grand strategy is a
“grand plan” and includes names that shaped the field such as Paul Kennedy, Geoffrey Parker,
Stephen Waltz, and Peter Feaver. Silove, “Beyond the Buzzword,” pp. 8-13.

[19] As Strachan notes, such a brand of strategy had gained currency with the two nineteenth-
century strategy giants. Jomini’s approach was conspicuously “prospective and purposeful”: to him,
strategy was a science - centered on operational planning, which largely ignored contingency.
Clausewitz advanced a consequentialist and purposive view: one by one, tactical gains would turn
into strategic success. The Prussian author, Strachan continues, is more often remembered for
concepts as “friction” and “chance” than for planning. Yet his book VIII, which consists of his more
mature thoughts, is prudential and purposive; tellingly, it is titled “War plans.” Hew Strachan,
“Strategy and Contingency,” in The Direction of War: Contemporary Strategy in Historical Perspective,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013: 242-244. Colin Gray, a devoted reader of the
Prussian strategist, had previously rebuked Alan Beyerchen’s thesis of Clausewitz as a “chaos
theorist.” In his words, “what Clausewitz argues in On War is that by careful planning and the
‘genius’ of the commander, warfare’s undoubted non-linearities, tendency towards chaos, and
awesome complexity, generally can be, and are, mastered well enough.” Colin Gray, “Approaching
the Study of Strategy,” in Ralph Rotte and Christoph Schwarz eds., International Security and War
Politics and Grand Strategy in the 21st Century, Hauppauge, NY: Nova Science PublishersPublisher’s,
2011: 14. Cfr. Alan Beyerchen, “Clausewitz, Nonlinearity, and the Unpredictability of War,”
International Security, 17: 3, Winter 1992/93: 59-90.

[20] Paul M. Kennedy, “Grand Strategy in War and Peace: Toward a Broader Definition”, in Paul M.
Kennedy (ed.), Grand Strategies in War and Peace, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991. Barry
Posen had famously contended that grand strategy is a chain of political and military ends and
means” and that “military doctrines are critical components of national security policy or grand
strategy.” As Silove notes, Posen does not define grand strategy, simply refers to it as a “theory.”
Tellingly, Poses defines doctrine. Silove, “Beyond the Buzzword,” p. 6. Barry R. Posen, The Sources of
Military Doctrine: France, Britain, and Germany Between the World Wars, Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1984: 13, 25 [emphasis mine]. In his 2014 book, Restraint, Posen labors a less
assertive view: “A grand strategy is not a rule book; it is a set of concepts and arguments that need to
be revisited regularly.” Barry R. Posen, Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy, Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 2014: 1.

[21] Edelstein and Krebs associate the making of grand strategy in Washington to a “planning
obsession.” Edelstein & Krebs, “Delusions of Grand Strategy.” For his part, Richard Betts has
maintained that planning is a “necessary condition for implementing any intention” and thus
submitted the definition of grand strategy as a “practical plan.” Richard K. Betts, “The Grandiosity
of Grand Strategy,” The Washington Quarterly 42, no. 4 (October 2, 2019): 8. Ionut Popescu is
extremely categorical in associating policy planning to an imagined “grand strategy school,” as he
attempts to advance a putatively alternative approach based on learning and adaptation. He imagines
a division of the field in two alternative schools “grand strategy” vs. “emerging strategy.” The former
group includes political scientists as Posen and William Martel, and historians as John Gaddis and
Hal Brands. Conveniently, this categorization does not include other scholars who do use the term
and even advocate grand strategy, but do not necessarily associate it to planning (e.g. Lawrence
Freedman, Edward Luttwak, Williamson Murray, and Richard Sinnreich.) Popescu promotes the
benefits of Henry Mintzberg’s “emergent strategy,” but as I discuss further, he misinterprets
Mintzberg’s rationale in his conceptualization of the term (see footnote n. 40.) Ionut C. Popescu,
“Grand Strategy vs. Emergent Strategy in the conduct of foreign policy,” Journal of Strategic Studies,
41:3 (2018): 438-460.

[22] Daniel Drezner, Ronald Krebs, and Randall Schweller, “The End of Grand Strategy,” Foreign
Affairs 99, no. 3 (May 1, 2020): 107–117.

[23] Freedman, Strategy: A History: 74-75. For his part, Strachan maintains that planning acquired
relevance in business schools and was later reinjected into military strategy. See Hew Strachan,
“Strategy and Contingency” in International Affairs 87, no. 6 (November 2011): 1294.

[24] As Joly de Maizeroy put it: “in order to formulate plans, strategy studies the relationship
between time, position, means, and different interests, and takes every factor into account…
[Strategy] is the province of dialectics, that is to say, of reasoning, which is the highest faculty of the
mind” [emphasis mine]. Quoted by Jean-Paul Charnay, in André Corvisier (ed.), A Dictionary of
Military History and the Art of War, English edition ed. John Childs, Oxford: Blackwell Reference,
1994: 769, cit. Strachan, “Lost Meaning,” p. 35. And as Strachan puts it, “a strategic plan is not the
same as strategy.” Hew Strachan, “The Future of Strategic Studies: Lessons from the Last ‘Golden
Age,’” in New Directions in Strategic Thinking 2.0: ANU Strategic & Defence Studies Centre's Golden
Anniversary Conference Proceedings, edited by Russell W. Glenn, Acton ACT, Australia: ANU Press,
2018: 165.

[25] For Antulio Echevarria, a war plan is but “the practical face of strategy.” Antulio J. Echevarria,
II, “Is Strategy Really a Lost Art?”, SSI US Army War College, 13 September 2013. As Harry Yarger
puts it, “Planning … relies on a high degree of certainty—a world that is concrete and can be
addressed in explicit terms. In essence, it takes a gray world and makes it black and white through its
analysis of the facts and assumptions about the unknown. Planning is essentially linear and
deterministic, focusing heavily on first-order cause and effect. It assumes that the future results can
be precisely known if enough is known about the facts and the conditions affecting the
undertaking.” See Harry Yarger, Strategic Theory for the 21st Century: The Little Book for Big Strategy,
Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College, February 2006: 10, 21, 22.

[26] It should be noted that Edelstein and Krebs preach the same principles of numerous grand
strategy advocates: they favor “pragmatism,” “flexibility,” “focusing on specific challenges,”
“creativity,” prudence (“do no harm,”), all of which are attributes of the art of strategy. Edward
Luttwak acknowledges that “the highly diversified bureaucratic apparatus of modern states is itself a
major obstacle to the implementation of any comprehensive scheme of grand strategy.” Edward N.
Luttwak, Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace, (Rev. and enl. ed.), Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press
of Harvard University Press, 2001: 260. Beatrice Heuser devotes the epilogue of her Evolution of
Strategy to “Strategy-making versus bureaucratic politics.” As she puts it, “Since their usage has
become widespread, [strategic documents] have been characterized more by contradictions and
compromises resulting from bureaucratic politics than by a logical application of explicit principles.”
Beatrice Heuser, The Evolution of Strategy: Thinking War from Antiquity to the Present, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010: 490. See also Tami Davis Biddle, Strategy and Grand Strategy:
What Students and Practitioners Need to Know, Carlisle Barracks, PA: Strategic Studies Institute and
U.S. Army War College Press, 2015: 38-40.

[27] Cit. Williamson Murray, “Introduction,” in Williamson Murray and Richard Hart Sinnreich
(eds.) Successful Strategies: Triumphing in War and Peace from Antiquity to the Present. Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014: 5. For his emphasis on day-to-day policymaking and
adaptation, see Williamson Murray, “Thoughts on Grand Strategy,” in Williamson Murray, Richard
H. Sinnreich, and James Lacey, eds., The Shaping of Grand Strategy: Policy, Diplomacy, and War,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011: 3-4. His characterizing strategy as an adaptive
process dates from his first book specifically on the making of strategy. Williamson Murray and
Mark Grimsley, “Introduction: On Strategy,” in Williamson Murray, MacGregor Knox and Alvin
Bernstein (eds.), The Making of Strategy: Rulers, States, and War, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994: 1. See also Geoffrey Parker, The Grand Strategy of Philip II, New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2000.

[28] For his part, Betts categorically divorces adaptation and emergence from grand strategy:
“although adaptation is good and soundly tactical, it is not strategy per se.” Betts, “The Grandiosity
of Grand Strategy,” p. 10.

[29] See, for example, the section “Think of grand strategy as a process, not a blueprint” in Hal
Brands, What Good is Grand Strategy: Power and Purpose in American Statecraft from Harry S. Truman
to George W. Bush, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014: 198-201.

[30] This equally applies to the imperfect synonym of “coherence”—“consistency.”

[31] John P. LeDonne, The Grand Strategy of the Russian Empire 1650-1831, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2004.

[32] This term may suggest, for example, coherence between different tactics, ‘horizontal’
integration between different agencies, ‘vertical’ consistency between means and ends, or simply
regularity.

[33] Luttwak, Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace, p. 261.

[34] Tellingly, Drezner, Krebs, and Schweller’s Foreign Affairs critical piece is “America must think
small.” Betts’ essay refers directly to “the grandiosity of grand strategy.” Both works are cited above.

[35] Lawrence Freedman, “The Meaning of Strategy, Part I: The Origins,” Texas National Security
Review, Vol. 1, Iss. 1, November 2017: 100. According to Freedman, the term was coined by
François Nockhern de Schorn. [Freedman transcribes the title and page incorrectly: it is “idées,” not
“Dees,” p. 200.] See François De Nockhern Schorn, Idées raisonnées sur un système general suivi et de
toutes les connoissances militaires et sur une methode etudier lumineuse pour la science de la guerre avec
ordre et discernement en trois parties avec sept tables methodiques, Nuremberg et Altdorf: chez George
Pierre Monath, 1783: 200.

[36] Black, Military Strategy, p. 8

[37] As Frank Hoffman picturesquely puts it, strategy is an “appetite suppressant pill.” Frank
Hoffman, “Strategy as Appetite Suppressant,” War on the Rocks, March 3, 2020:
https://warontherocks.com/2020/03/strategy-as-appetite-suppressant/ (about:blank) (last access:
May 28, 2020.)

[38] Jeremy Black, Military Strategy A Global History, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020: 3.
For Brands, “Grand strategy […] can never be a game of perfect; it can only be a game of good
enough.” Brands, What Good Is Grand Strategy? P. 193.

[39] Richard Sinnreich offers a good example of such approach: Richard H. Sinnreich, “Victory by
trial and error: Britain’s struggle against Napoleon,” in Murray, Williamson, and Richard Hart
Sinnreich (eds.) Successful Strategies: Triumphing in War and Peace from Antiquity to the Present.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

[40] Henry Mintzberg and James A. Waters, “Of Strategies, Deliberate and Emergent,” in Strategic
Management Journal, Vol. 6, No. 3. (Jul. - Sep., 1985): 257, 271. For this reason, Popescu’s elevating
emergent strategy as an alternative to grand strategy fundamentally misses Mintzberg’s rationale. In
the real world, Mintzberg observes disparate kinds of realized strategies, which include both
deliberate and emergent elements.

[41] Lukas Milevski, “Revisiting J. C. Wylie’s Dichotomy of Strategy: The Effects of Sequential and
Cumulative Patterns of Operations,” Journal of Strategic Studies, 35:2 (2012): 224, 232, 233
[emphasis mine.] It should be noted that Wylie was a practitioner and was prone to conceiving of
strategy as a product rather than as an abstract activity. Ibid., 226.

[42] Harry Yarger, Strategic Theory for the 21st Century: The Little Book for Big Strategy, Carlisle, PA:
Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College, February 2006: 10, 21.

[43] Hal Brands, What Good is Grand Strategy: Power and Purpose in American Statecraft from Harry
S. Truman to George W. Bush, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014: 6, 9, cited in Silove, “Beyond
the Buzzword,” p. 5.

[44] Hew Strachan, “Strategy and Contingency,” in The Direction of War: Contemporary Strategy in
Historical Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013: 251. See also Williamson
Murray and Mark Grimsley, “Introduction: On Strategy”: 1.

[45] To Joly de Maizeroy, who is credited with coining the term “strategy” in its first modern
Western version, “[Strategy] is the province of dialectics, that is to say, of reasoning, which is the
highest faculty of the mind.” Quoted by Jean-Paul Charnay, in André Corvisier (ed.), A Dictionary of
Military History and the Art of War, English edition ed. John Childs, Oxford: Blackwell Reference,
1994: 769, cit. Strachan, “Lost Meaning,” p. 35. Edward Mead Earle’s definition is canonic in the
Anglo-sphere and includes grand strategy: “Strategy is the art of controlling and utilizing the
resources of a nation—or a coalition of nations—including its armed forces, to the end that its vital
interests shall be effectively promoted and secured against enemies, actual, potential, or merely
presumed. The highest type of strategy—sometimes called ‘grand strategy’—is that which so
integrates the policies and armaments of the nation that the resort to war is either rendered
unnecessary or is undertaken with the maximum chance of victory.” Edward Meade Earle ed.,
Makers of Modern Strategy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1943, p. viii.”

[46] André Beaufre, Introduction à la stratégie, Paris: Librairie Fayard/Pluriel (2012): 24. In French,
the difference is makes is that between “la stratégie” and “une stratégie.”

[47] Ibidem, 34. In French: “un jeu abstrait.”

[48] Marcus Jones, “Strategy as character: Bismarck and the Prusso-German question, 1862-1878,”
in Williamson Murray, Richard H. Sinnreich, and James Lacey (eds.), The Shaping of Grand Strategy:
Policy, Diplomacy, and War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011: 80-81.

[49] Marcus Jones, “Bismarckian strategic policy, 1871-1890,” in Murray, Williamson, and Richard
Hart Sinnreich (eds.) Successful Strategies: Triumphing in War and Peace from Antiquity to the Present.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014: 238.

[50] Murray, Knox, and Bernstein (eds.), The Making of Strategy; Murray, Sinnreich, and Lacey
(eds.), The Shaping of Grand Strategy; Murray and Sinnreich (eds.) Successful Strategies.

[51] Rebecca Friedman Lissner, “What Is Grand Strategy? Sweeping a Conceptual Minefield,” Texas
National Security Review: Vol. 2, Iss. 1, (November 2018): 57-58.

[52] Biddle, Strategy and Grand Strategy, p. 58.

[53] Hew Strachan, “Strategy in theory; strategy in practice,” Journal of Strategic Studies 42, no. 2
(2019): 188.

[54] Strachan remarks the difference between Jean-Jacques Langendorf ’s biography of Jomini and
Raymond Aron’s book on Clausewitz were titled Faire la guerre and Penser la guerre (“To Make War”
and “To Think War.”) Hew Strachan, “Strategy in theory; strategy in practice,” Journal of Strategic
Studies 42, no. 2 (2019): 177. Jean-Jacques Langendorf, Faire la guerre: Antoine-Henri Jomini (2
vols), Geneva: Georg, 2001–2004. Raymond Aron, Penser la guerre, Clausewitz (2 vols), Paris:
Gallimard 1976.

[55] Edward N. Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2009: 409.

[56] Basil Liddell Hart, Strategy (2nd Rev. Ed.), London: Faber and Faber, 1967: 322; cited in
Biddle, Strategy and Grand Strategy, p. 28.

[57] Luttwak, Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace: 208 [emphasis mine.]

[58] Richard K. Betts, “The Grandiosity of Grand Strategy,” p. 11.

[59] Hew Strachan, Carl von Clausewitz’s On war: a biography, Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre
(2008): 149-152.
 [60] Max Weber and Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch (trans. and ed.), Max Weber on the
Methodology of Social Sciences; translated and edited by Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch, New
York: Free Press, 1949: 90 [emphasis original.]

[61] Marc Trachtenberg, The Craft of International History: A Guide to Method, Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2006: 32 [emphasis original.]

[62] Laure Bardiès, “Le raisonnement stratégique,” in Stéphane Taillat et al. Guerre et stratégie,
Presses Universitaires de France, 2015: 55-56.

[63] Williamson Murray, “Introduction,” in Murray, Williamson, and Richard Hart Sinnreich
(eds.) Successful Strategies: Triumphing in War and Peace from Antiquity to the Present. Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014: 2.

[64] Timothy A. Sayle, “Defining and Teaching Grand Strategy,” The Telegram, Foreign Policy
Research Institute, Temple University, vol. 4, January 2011:
https://www.fpri.org/docs/media/201101.sayle_.teachinggrandstrategy.pdf (about:blank)

[65] Cit. Drezner, Krebs, and Schweller, “The End of Grand Strategy.”

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