The Evolution of Modern Grand Strategic Thought by Lukas Milevski. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 175pp., £50.00 (h/b), ISBN 9780198779773
The concept of grand strategy is one of trendy concepts that has been used by numerous states to describe comprehensive national security policies, especially since the end of the 20th century and in today’s context, it was first used by Carl von Clausewitz & Baron Antoine-Henri de Jomin, Napoleon’s students during the Napoleonic Wars. The concept considers the world as a chessboard and the civil society living on it as chess pieces. This conceptual approach reduces the humanistic nature of civil society to the mechanistic level, as we often see in statist political systems (socialist, fascist, and fundamentalist), and as the result, wrecks all individual rights and freedoms. This work of Milevski clearly reveals the intellectual history of this destructive concept.
The first systematic theories on this concept were put forward by Alfred Thayer Mahan & Julian S. Corbett, two Englishmen working on maritime strategy in the pre-World War I period, who today are regarded as the fathers of grand strategic thinking. Mahan & Corbett built their theory on the understanding of protecting maritime trade and avoiding escalations on land by using civil and military instruments on a national scale.
The British school of strategic thought was able to establish its identity by J. F. C. Fuller & Basil H. Liddell Hart, who are known as the giants of this school in the interwar period and who basically continued the thematic understanding of their predecessors Mahan and Corbett. In addition, in the same period, the concept was approached with different comprehensions both from within and outside the school. While two British strategists, Henry Antony Sargeaunt & Geoffrey West, introduced understandings that focused on the social benefits of war (in terms of social development), Edward Mead Earle from the United States enriched the concept with another approach that linked military ends with political results.
The atomic bombs dropped on the skies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the harbingers of a new era in strategic thinking as well as in world history. Despite the fact that many new names began to produce ideas in this field in the hottest period of the Cold War, which started when the wreckage of the Second World War had just been removed, the most common point of the few original ideas that were put forward was on the concept of limited war.
In the détente period of the Cold War, which was entered in the shadow of the Vietnam Wars, it is seen that there was a relative revival of the concept. The names John M. Collins, Edward N. Luttwak, Barry R. Posen & Paul Kennedy reinterpreted the concept with a national security-centered understanding in accordance with the spirit of the time.
In the post-Cold War era, which John Hattendorf, John L. Gaddis, Gregory Foster, William C. Martel & Robert Art came to the fore, more civilian contributions to the concept began to be made, especially from international relations, political science and even history. For the historian John B. Hattendorf, grand strategy was a force driving the war. For Gaddis, this concept was about how to use everything one has to achieve the desired goal. According to Foster, grand strategy was a supra-political concept that guided politics. William C. Martel revealed that grand strategy is a framework paradigm that determines international relations policies. Finally, Robert Art has put forward a conceptualization that focuses only on the use of force and the relationship between politics, in line with his retrospective approach that adapts the roots of strategic thinking to the present.
Nowadays, the concept of grand strategy has become a more psychological and developmental concept, even an ideal concept that institutions and individuals can apply to their own lives, with the effect of globalization and individualization. Two names at this point; Hal Brands and Peter Layton stand out. According to Hal Brands, while grand strategy is understood as the guide to self-actualization of a nation to succeed in such a competitive world, from Peter Layton’s point of view, the understanding that grand strategy is a specific method for the decision-making process is dominant.
As a result, the concept of grand strategy is a non-standard, thinker-centered concept that is constantly open to new understandings. According to Milevski, the concept of grand strategy is useless as it is, since it does not provide the principle of clarity and commonality, which are the most basic conditions for developing a useful scientific theory on this concept, but first of all, the concept behoves to be rehabilitated in order for it to become academically useful.
As it is seen, Milevski has analyzed the evolution of the concept of grand strategy quite adequately, and contrary to what he claims in his title, he has not put forward a new understanding and a new synthesis with an evolutionary integrity, he has only been content with revealing the intellectual history of the concept and complaining that the concept is polysemous, and has suggested the concept is not academic as it is. He argues that the concept behoves to be rehabilitated in order for it to become academic. In addition to it, the fact that each decision-maker attributes different meanings to this destructive practical concept clearly shows us how arbitrary the threat to individual rights and freedoms can be.
