Defending and Contesting the West: Grand Strategy in Our Time
by Raymond Haberski
On 31 January 1950, Paul Nitze and his team in the U.S. State Department submitted to president Harry Truman National Security Council memo #68. NSC-68, as the document has been called ever since, was perhaps the most ambitious attempt at grand strategic thinking in United States history. By the late 1940s, the United States had a policy to counter Soviet power known as containment, but NSC-68 was an attempt by to develop a holistic approach to the Cold War that was grand enough to respond not merely Soviet intentions but economic, political, and, perhaps most importantly, ideological and even spiritual aspects of the United States itself. In fact the authors of NSC-68 waxed existential near the beginning of their powerful memorandum. Following a section in which Nitze, the document’s primary architect, summarized the dramatic changes to world politics over the previous fifty years, he hammered a final point:
“The issues that face us are momentous, involving the fulfillment or destruction not only of this Republic but of civilization itself. They are issues which will not await our deliberations. With conscience and resolution this Government and the people it represents must now take new and fateful decisions.”
Thus, before President Truman read the policy options available to him, he had to grapple with the moral purpose for American actions. Nitze and his team laid this foundation knowing that this ambitious policy had to be sold to the American public. But lest we think all attempts at grand strategy are cynically designed to sell misguided ideas, we should give due attention to the type of strategic thinking NSC-68 advanced. The document has been admired by recent policy planners because it clearly defined three elements fundamental to an effect strategy:
First, NSC-68 identified a threat; second, it identified what was worth protecting from that threat; and third, it identified ways to manage, combat, and perhaps even eliminate that threat. Of course, NSC-68 had it flaws: its authors could not account for strategic uncertainty; or, in other words, how to rank crises that had not yet appeared. Furthermore, it spoke only in passing of international agreements, treaties, and partners. And finally, it did not attempt to foresee how the financial structure of the United States would be fundamentally change by creating an open-ended and many-sided build-up of forces under the imperative of a war for civilization.
The West
One of the things both admired and deplored about NSC-68 was the way it made appeals to American ideals that were understood at the time as reflecting a universal cause. In short, American strategic planners believed what was good for the United States was good for the world. And therefore, this American grand strategy had the tragic pedigree of being only superficially an American term, for historically-speaking NSC-68 had European origins and thus imperialistic implications. Its liberal pretensions provided shabby cover for actions that were felt throughout the world, but most acutely in Latin America. After all, the Cold War was chilly only in those places with nuclear weapons—it could not have been much hotter for the thousands of people caught up in the ideological maelstrom that swept across the Atlantic Ocean from Africa to Latin America.
But what of today? From the existential struggle in the Good War through the ideological conflict of the Cold War and to quasi-war on terrorists, a notion that there is a set of universal ideals known as the West has remained part of every American attempt to formulate grand strategy. Even as the West has become something hotly contested, it has also been something worthy to defend. Generally speaking, the world post-WWII world knew what the West was not: it was not fascism, communism, or theocracy. What it has been is more complicated: It was has been everything from market-based liberation to capitalist oppression; liberal democracy to liberal lies; and representative government to government for, of, and by dictators. There is little doubt that during WWII, soldiers died to defend the West, even if at the same time they also helped preserve British and French imperialism. Likewise, the Cold War covered both the roll-back of communist totalitarianism in Eastern Europe and the roll-back of democracy in Latin America. Today, we grope to find terms equivalent to this recent (even if not-so-glorious) past.
Can we speak of a Western tradition worth dying for, much less worth protecting with unmanned drones? If threats exist that are worth confronting, are they external or internal? In light of the ongoing financial crisis and the growing awareness of a climate apocalypse, have we indeed seen the enemy and it is us? Thus, does grand strategy still make sense? Is there something grand enough to defend? And if so, is there a threat severe enough to build a strategy to oppose it?
There is a glaring difference between NSC-68 and the possibility of creating a similar strategy today: the identification of a grand threat. During the Cold War, the grand threat was communism and communists. What is the equivalent today? What created our contemporary signposts in New York, London and Madrid? What does Afghanistan represent to Barack Obama when he addresses cadets at West Point?
Is grand strategy capable of defining a totalizing threat that does not exist exclusively as something external to our own society? For example, when United States opposed the Soviet Union, it did NOT do so in order to protect the rights of communists to practice their political ideology. Yet contemporary grand strategists are in a bit of a bind. Muslims are citizens of all western nations, Islam is tolerated and integrated like any other religion, but Muslims and Islam are undoubtedly implicated in the war on terrorism.
It is not lost on soldiers fighting in Afghanistan that they are asked to kill people who are Muslim and possibly sacrifice their own lives doing so, in order to protect people living in the West, including Muslims, from another terrorist attack by people who will most likely be Muslim. That paradox lies at the heart of the modern condition and it has direct relevance to any understanding of the West and any attempt to build a grand strategy to defend it.
What Is ‘Grand’ About Grand Strategy
Should we jettison NSC-68 as a model because it defined grand strategy in response to a grand threat? And thus, because the threat that exists today is so complicated, no grand strategy is capable of working? I think we should return to NSC-68 and consider an aspect that often gets overlooked. Nitze and his team imagined their policy would recognize two basic things: First,
It is only by developing the moral and material strength of the free world that the Soviet regime will become convinced of the falsity of its assumptions and that the pre-conditions for workable agreements can be created.
And second,
The seeds of conflicts will inevitably exist or will come into being. To acknowledge this is only to acknowledge the impossibility of a final solution. Not to acknowledge it can be fatally dangerous in a world in which there are no final solutions.
Might we conclude that there was a relative modesty at the core of NSC-68? The point was to protect American ideals and to recognize that those ideals would not prevent conflict or eradicate threats—there were no final solutions.
Does Barack Obama’s first National Security Strategy echoes of this? While Obama clearly thinks his nation should continue to be a world leader, he also clearly believes that grand strategy does not define the United States, rather the interests and ideals of the nation give rise to a grand strategy. “Our strategy starts by recognizing that our strength and influence abroad begins with the steps we take at home,” he wrote in the introduction to the document. Put another way, the existential purpose for the United States does not depend on making the world safe for democracy, winning the hearts and minds of other people, or ridding the world of tyranny. Instead, taking the grandest example of grand strategy quite literally, the United States should “contain” those threats that exist but not be so grandiose as to imagine threats can ever be eliminated.
‘Going forward, there should be no doubt,’ Obama declares: ‘the United States of America will continue to underwrite global security—through our commitments to allies, partners, and institutions; our focus on defeating al-Qa’ida and its affiliates in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and around the globe; and our determination to deter aggression and prevent the proliferation of the world’s most dangerous weapons. As we do, we must recognize that no one nation—no matter how powerful—can meet global challenges alone.’
Is Obama’s vision modest or small-minded? Does it follow a tradition in grand strategy that is often overlooked, namely that threats do not dictate strategies and strategies do not dictate outcomes. In short, there was never a NSC-68 or a grand strategists like Nitze or even George Kennan that accorded to the myths that arose around them. The first rule of grand strategy might be to reject the idea that it can live up to some illustrious, but wholly imagined past. The second rule might be to figure out what this strategy is designed to protect.
To engage in cross-discipline, transatlantic conversations about grand strategy requires us to speak about existential meaning. What are we willing to defend and why? Now that the grand threat has become much more complicated, perhaps we will return to asking questions about ourselves. What questions should we be asking?
