Abstract: Maritime Strategy Is Grand James R. Holmes (bio) Michael Green's book By More Than Providence: Grand Strategy and American Power in the Asia Pacific Since 1783 is sure to gladden the heart of any American maritime strategist. He opens and closes with references to Alfred Thayer Mahan, the most influential saltwater strategist of the fin de siècle era and the second president of the U.S. Naval War College. What's not to like? Mahan is best known as the prophet of sea battles, whereby the victor wrests "command of the sea" from the defeated, driving the enemy's flag from important expanses or at most allowing it to appear there "as a fugitive."1 But battle was a means to an end for Mahan, not an end in itself. The goal of amassing "overbearing power" at sea was to pry and hold open commercial, diplomatic, and military access—in that order of importance—to lucrative trading regions such as East Asia.2 For him commerce, not naval strife, was king. The navy was the servant of diplomacy, and diplomacy was the servant of commerce—commerce that yielded tax revenue to fund the navy and the diplomatic apparatus. That made for a virtuous cycle well suited to an insular industrial power such as the United States. But while Mahanian strategy provides a scaffolding for Green's study, By More Than Providence is about far more than sea power. It is dedicated to the proposition that the United States can make and execute grand strategy, harnessing the full panoply of statecraft instruments to achieve a "better state of peace," as English strategist B.H. Liddell Hart put it.3 Green's verdict (pp. 4–5, 541) is that U.S. grand strategy in the Asia-Pacific has proved effective on the whole, even though it has been "episodic and inefficient" at times (p. 541). To oversimplify, U.S. strategy [End Page 132] aims at keeping access to the region open while preventing another hegemon or alliance from dominating the East Asian rimland—and thereby constituting a trans-Pacific threat to North America. A foe commanding all those resources could reach out and do the United States harm. Hence the imperative to meet gathering dangers from forward positions along the rimland. That Washington is capable of grand strategy is a statement some eminent commentators would dispute. In his book American Diplomacy, for instance, the father of containment George Kennan, who makes numerous appearances in Green's book, likens democracy to "one of those prehistoric monsters" that slumbers "in his comfortable primeval mud" until someone whacks off his tail "to make him aware that his interests are being disturbed," whereupon the beast "lays about him with such blind determination that he not only destroys his adversary but largely wrecks his native habitat."4 Inattention to the strategic surroundings, a dearth of forethought, and clumsy use of power are U.S. hallmarks of grand strategy in Kennan's telling. Green demurs. Indeed, the central claim he puts forth in By More Than Providence is that the United States formulated and carried out grand strategy in a deliberate, if sometimes haphazard way, long before the phrase came to be. He maintains it did so starting in 1783—in other words, from the time the country won independence from the British Empire. Kennan was wrong to denigrate U.S. strategy-making. Washington does more than lie inert or flail around. It seems that Green has plunged into a larger theoretical controversy. The phrase "grand strategy" is of relatively recent provenance, coming into vogue in the middle of the twentieth century.5 It did not exist for much of U.S. history, and therefore U.S. leaders cannot have practiced it. Right? Well, not so much. As Beatrice Heuser counsels in her treatise Strategy before Clausewitz, practitioners undertook strategic thought and action long before the 1830s, when Prussian sage Carl von Clausewitz composed his masterwork On War.6 Or as Michael Handel points out, "One does not [End Page 133] necessarily have to read On War to be a Clausewitzian, since most of his ideas can be arrived at independently through the application of logic...
Publication Year: 2018
Publication Date: 2018-07-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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