My Amazon Review of Hal Brands' Ed. "The New Makers of Modern Strategy...."

Thinking Strategically

 

Johns Hopkins professor Hal Brands has updated Peter Paret’s 1986 “Makers of Modern Strategy,” which in turn updated Edward Mead Earle’s 1943 version. It is a very long book consisting of 45 separate essays by different authors that runs 1168 pages. In my opinion this is way too long for the average educated lay reader. Nevertheless, there is much to be learned and I will highlight below a few of the essays that caught my attention.

 

Walter Russell Mead’s discussion of Thucydides is on the mark because it deals with the timeless question that the fear of a rising power (Athens) engenders in an established power (Sparta). I wish he spent more time on Graham Allison’s parallel thoughts on the U.S. vis-à-vis China. (Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Graham Allison's "Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap" ) Matthew Kroenig’s essay on Machiavelli’s realism is spot on. Further he understands that despite Machiavelli’s bad rap, he was a republican at heart seeking to unify Italy. (Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Philip Bobbitt's "The Garments of Court and Palace: Machiavelli and the World that he Made")

 

I was disappointed in Hew Strachan’s essay on Clausewitz. To be sure he emphasizes that war is the extension of politics by other means, but he is all to brief on friction, the fog of war and the center of gravity of the enemy. He does, however, mentions Col. Harry Summers’ Clausewitzian critique of U.S. military policy in Vietnam.

 

The essay by Charles Edel on John Quincy Adams’ realism hits the mark. Understanding the U.S. was not ready for the global stage, Adams utilizes the implicit support of the British navy to establish the Monroe Doctrine and further avoids direct U.S. involvement in the Latin American and Greek revolutions. At the time the U.S. could rightly only offer moral support.

 

I didn’t realize how influential Alfred Taylor Mahan’s treatise in sea power until I read John Maurer’s essay. Mahan’s influence extended well beyond the United States to Germany and Japan with global consequences. Robert Kagan’s essay on Woodrow Wilson casts him, not Theodore Roosevelt, as the architect of American global strategy for the 20^th Century. Wilson comes off far more realistic than I expected as he protected U.S. interests at Versailles.

 

Nobel Laureate Thomas Schelling’s theories of nuclear deterrence and flexible response are examined by Eric Edelman. Schelling’s theories were in contradiction to the Eisenhower Administration’s massive retaliation response to potential Soviet aggression. One of the problems, as Edelman notes, is that sometimes the message you want to send is misinterpreted by the enemy, which is what occurred during the Cuban missile crisis. The Russians thought the embargo was a far bigger deal than how the Kennedy Administration viewed it.

 

Mark Moyar’s essay on U.S. strategy in Vietnam accuses the Johnson Administration of refusing to listen to its military advisors who wanted to go all-in at the start of the war. Simply put, gradual escalation failed. However, it is not clear that Johnson would have had the political support for what his advisors advocated. Nevertheless, this debate echoes to this day with the Biden policy with respect to Ukraine. Biden has been a gradualist, but ultimately, he is doing far more than what he thought practical at the start of the war.

 

I am glad that Dmitry Adamsky has given credit to Andrew Marshall, the long-time Pentagon guru of the net assessment project. If any one person has been the architect of U.S. military strategy in a networked age, it is Marshall. (Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Andrew Krepinevich's and Barry Watts' "The Last Warrior: Andrew Marshall and the Shaping of Modern American Defense Strategy")

 

The book ends with a summation essay by Yale’s John Lewis Gaddis. It is a well thought out summary, but where he errs is that he gives too much credit to Franklin Roosevelt’s recognition of the Soviet Union as a strategic decision that would play out in World War II. To me, it is an ex-post rationalization where Roosevelt’s motivation had more to do with the hope of near-term trade deals.

 

I know I have only scratched the surface of Brands’ book, but if the reader puts in the effort there is much to be learned here.

For the full Amazon URL see: Thinking Strategically (amazon.com)