Grand Flattery: The Yale Grand Strategy Seminar. In 1. 90. 9 a group of men met on an estate in Wales to save Western civilization. Troubled by the erosion of British world power, they believed the decline could be reversed if statesmen turned away from the mundane tasks of modern diplomacy and channeled the wisdom of ancient Greece instead. The Greeks, in reconciling rulership with freedom,Ad Policyhad made the West great, and supplied a model for their Anglo- Saxon heirs. No longer should the empire run itself; members of the group, including Lloyd George and Lord Milner, would train men of penetrating insight to direct imperial affairs more self- consciously than ever before. They produced countless articles and monographs. Chapters of the society flourished all over the empire. Ten years later, they had disappeared: nationalism had swept away their plans to knit the colonies closer together. British ascendancy ended sooner than any of them could have imagined. Anxiety about America’s place in the world intensified after 9/1. In the wake of the departure of one of its founding members, Yale’s Grand Strategy program is looking into inviting female professors to its instructing team. History professor Paul Kennedy, co-director of. US leadership in response. This was the moment when liberal interventionism and neoconservatism ascended to the political mainstream and the grand narrative of “globalization” entered into wide circulation. In New Haven, historians John Lewis Gaddis and Paul Kennedy put forth a different response. Opposed to the Clinton administration’s ad hoc policy- making, they conceived a series of “grand strategy” seminars at Yale that aspired to train the next generation of leaders. Grand strategy, as Gaddis has explained in a recent speech on the subject, exposes students, “in a properly distilled form, to the accumulated wisdom of those who have gone before,” all of which is supposed to instill in its recipients the sensibility to formulate the grand strategy that has eluded Americans since their cold war enemy collapsed. Such a strategy would relate the broadest possible ends to the means of achieving them and therefore invigorate US global leadership with a new, singular purpose. Ten years on, grand strategy is flourishing. Not only has the Yale seminar grown into a campus juggernaut, securing a $1. US universities, funded in part by right- wing financier Roger Hertog. Kennedy has likened the spinoffs to Benedictine monasteries, “all doing their own versions of grand strategy but still belonging to the Order of Saint Benedict.” For $4,4. Yale for a two- week Grand Strategy summit on the fine arts of “critical and strategic thinking, social networking, professional etiquette, financial and asset management” and more. Grand strategy is now a popular idea, too. A string of op- ed writers, including Jackson Diehl, Niall Ferguson and Fareed Zakaria, have criticized the Obama administration for lacking one. The charge was repeated during the Republican primaries by Newt Gingrich and, in effect, answered by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who presented the administration’s revised military posture as a new “American grand strategy in an age of austerity.”. Though grand strategy went national only recently, the term gained currency in the run- up to World War. Another Anglo- American duo, the military strategist Basil Liddell Hart and the historian Edward Mead Earle, reasoned that states needed strategies not just during wars but also in peacetime. Through “grand strategy” a state might prevent wars from breaking out and prevail in any that did. The original concept of grand strategy, then, despite extending temporally into peacetime, remained centered on the problem of warfare. And it was pioneered in a mid- century world where major threats were readily identifiable, coming from large states able to amass industrial power and mobilize vast populations. The radical contribution of Yale’s program is to make a grand strategy out of everything—from national security to economics, the environment, even culture and ideology. The Yale syllabus touts grand strategy’s use in “any future leadership role in which you may be called upon to connect desired ends with available means.” Gaddis says he regularly gets papers on “the grand strategy of falling in and out of love” and of “achieving success in soccer, football, and especially rowing.” (The last sport “particularly attracts the members of our class, probably because of its ancient echoes in Herodotus and Thucydides.”) GET A DIGITAL SUBSCRIPTION. FOR JUST $9. 5. 0! After romping through the great strategists in history, the course turns to contemporary policy challenges for its second semester. At the end, students dress up like national security officials to brief their professors, who play the president. Least conventional of all is the “summer school of surprise.” Gaddis encourages students to embark on a “Patrick Leigh Fermor experience” in obscure locales around the world, “the great classical texts still fresh in their mind.” “Why not go to China, speak only Chinese, and check out the places they won’t let you see when you become ambassador?” Gaddis says he tells students. Grand strategy is “endangered,” Gaddis laments, “for in the absence of sufficiently grave threats to concentrate our minds, there are insufficient incentives to think in these terms.” But then why think in those terms if the conditions that seem to have called for them no longer exist? Gaddis and company are remarkably untroubled by the possibility that the incessant push to strategize grandly might construct the threats it seeks to meet. Easterners urge a program of tough love and reforms for Europe’s stragglers. Chris Miller is associate director of the Grand Strategy Program at Yale and a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Richardson Dilworth Professor of History, director of International Security Studies at Yale, and Distinguished Fellow of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy, coordinates the ISS programs funded by. The Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy seeks to revive the study and practice of grand strategy by devising methods to teach that subject at the graduate and undergraduate levels, by training future leaders to think about. Grand Strategy spreads across US. Peter Feaver runs Duke’s American Grand Strategy program and says that he modeled the program off Yale’s in some important ways—the focus on. Invaluable program at Yale. Yale Studies in Grand Strategy (Course Syllabus) The Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy seeks to revive the study and practice of grand strategy by devising methods to teach that subject at the graduate and undergraduate. Why are Yale and other top universities teaching a Grand Strategy seminar if the conditions that seemed to call for grand strategizing no longer exist? Studies in Grand Strategy. INTRODUCTION (To be read during break. Henry Kissinger's Grand Strategy Takes a New Turn at Yale. 11/15/2011 07:59 am ET. The Grand Strategy program shows students. Henry Kissinger's Grand Strategy Takes a New Turn at Yale. Strategy likes enemies. It has traditionally addressed military affairs because war is an inherently adversarial condition and tends to produce a simpler range of outcomes than do most other areas of life. Kennedy, following Liddell Hart, suggests that the Clausewitzian dictum that “war is a continuation of politics” implies the opposite, but grand strategy turns Clausewitz on its head, squeezing all of politics into an analytical method best suited for war. It assumes that a grand strategy is necessary all the time, whatever the circumstances. That’s why not having a grand strategy becomes a sin. Yet is there a single, overarching purpose, much less strategy, around which a world power should orient everything it does? Certainly, if an all- consuming threat truly exists, but otherwise grand strategy becomes a recipe for simplifying the world and magnifying threats—in which case the best “grand strategy” may be no grand strategy. Author of the cold war doctrine of containment, Kennan achieved mythical status in policy circles long before his death in 2. Gaddis, his authorized biographer, has done the most to secure Kennan’s reputation as a grand strategist. If Kennan’s example looms large in American discussions of grand strategy, it’s because containment is the most inarguably grand strategy the United States has ever pursued. America scarcely needed a grand strategy as a rising power, and after the cold war it had something resembling a grand strategy only in the handful of years when terrorism appeared to supplant the Soviet Union as an encompassing threat. In Gaddis’s hands, Kennan prescribed both sustained action to block Soviet expansion and restraint in picking which battles to fight. This prescription flowed from Kennan’s diagnosis that the Soviet Union was driven to expand by purely internal forces. If checked by outside resistance, however, it would desist and eventually implode. Gaddis thus positions Kennan between two unpalatable extremes: the timid isolationism of ceding the world to Soviet domination and the crusading globalism of the Truman Doctrine and NSC- 6. National Security Council in 1. Soviet- backed communism wherever it advanced. Gaddis insists it was those expansive interpretations of the containment strategy that led the United States into disaster in Vietnam and beyond. Kennan’s original version of containment, by contrast, was a sober grand strategy, carefully calibrating means to ends. Kennan’s initial idea of containment, explained in his Long Telegram of 1. Soviet Union was implacably driven to expand its power mainly because it inherited a “traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity” dating back centuries to when Russians were agriculturalists surrounded by fierce nomadic tribes. Kennan mixed in other explanations, involving Marxist- Leninist ideology and the Kremlin’s desire for internal stability, all to the same effect: the United States was doing nothing—could do nothing—to stoke Soviet fears. Rather, the Soviet system was paranoid by its very nature, and an enemy so childlike it could only be slapped around until it finally changed its ways. That cultural stereotypes underpinned Kennan’s framework should have raised more doubts at the time. In any case, Gaddis’s uncritical stance toward Kennan’s characterization of Soviet conduct, long after most scholars perceived its crudeness, is no less breathtaking. By 1. 94. 8 Soviet behavior appeared to him a predictable response to American provocations. Cold war antagonism now seemed to come less from the nature of Soviet society than from the interaction between the two superpowers. From then on, Kennan called for precisely what he once proscribed: negotiations with the Soviet Union, aimed at securing the mutual withdrawal of forces from central Europe and thus the end of intense conflict. He opposed creating NATO on the grounds that it would ossify Europe’s bipolar division. He criticized US wars in Vietnam and, just before his death, Iraq. In his memoir, Kennan wrote of rereading his Long Telegram with “horrified amusement.” It sounded, he admitted, “like one of those primers put out by alarmed congressional committees or by the Daughters of the American Revolution, designed to arouse the citizenry to the dangers of the Communist conspiracy.”. Kennan, however, never appreciated, let alone articulated, the full extent of his reversal. This has made it easy for Gaddis to present Kennan as a master grand strategist.
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