Walter McDougall on "American Grand Strategy"

Walter A. McDougall

(University of Pennsylvania)

My old Berkeley professor Walter A. McDougall (though now at the University of Pennsylvania) has recently published an article -- "Can the United States Do Grand Strategy?" -- in The Telegram (No. 3, April 2010).

The paper originated as a question posed by a student in the spring of 2003, asking McDougall how long he expected the United States to remain dominant in the world. Off the cuff, he replied:

It all depends on whether the United States is as exceptional as we like to believe. If the United States follows the pattern of all previous powers, then demographic or technological trends, new foreign threats, strategic folly, overextension, domestic decadence, or sheer loss of will must hurl it into decline, perhaps within fifty years. If, however, our institutions, values, and national character really do amount to a new order for the ages, a potent mix enabling the United States to reinvent itself and force other nations to adapt to the challenges posed by us, then the republic may stay on its asymptotic trajectory.

That was his measured response, but he had second thoughts on the matter:

I stopped there [in my response], but as I walked to my office I recalled Arnold J. Toynbee's historical law to the effect that empires die by suicide, not murder.

With that gloomy note, McDougall open his reflection on whether or not America is capable of conducting any grand strategy, and he quickly turns to a similarly gloomy view, namely, that a grand strategy capable of keeping a nation from suicidal despair is simply impossible for a democracy:

Democracies, especially the wild and vast American one, do not do grand strategy, or else cannot do it very well or for very long: such was the famous judgment rendered by Tocqueville 170 years ago.

McDougall, however, does not entirely agree, and speaking as a historian of diplomatic relations, he argures:

[T]he historical record would seem to indicate, first, that the United States can and has embraced grand strategies (even during the eras once scorned as isolationist), second, that strategies based on realist premises have been mostly fruitful, and third, that strategies based on idealist premises have been mostly abortive.

In this view, McDougall situates himself between neoconservatives and paleo-conservatives:

Robert Kagan, the neoconservative heavyweight, does not agree [with my skepticism about idealism]. Indeed, he is devoting years to a two-volume history of U.S. foreign relations seemingly to debunk interpretations such as my own -- albeit without so much as a footnote to the scholarship he dismisses. Dangerous Nation, Kagan's first volume, covers the century down to 1898 during which neutrality, unilateralism, and reticence seemed to characterize U.S. foreign policy. On the contrary, Kagan labors to argue, the American people have believed ever since their nation's inception in their mission to liberate the whole human race, not just by example but exertion abroad. In short, George Washington was a neo-con. The sometimes explicit, but always implicit message of Kagan's books and columns is that the true and abiding U.S. grand strategy is to export democracy, free markets, and human rights in what amounts to universal regime-change. Now, there are prophecies of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth where swords are beat into plowshares and lions lie down with lambs. For a few years after the Cold War there were also Hegelian prophecies of an end to history thanks to the ideas that conquered the world. But grand strategy is not usually thought of as a faith-based initiative. Or does Kagan really believe the U.S. government knows how to pacify and develop Fallujah or Kandahar? If so, he ought to inspect how little billions of dollars in urban renewal have achieved over forty years in the United States' own inner cities. What is more, even if such Global Meliorism, with or without guns, were a viable option for terrorist sanctuaries under U.S. occupation, what strategic relevance can nation-building theory possibly have for such sources of geopolitical angst as Iran, China, and Russia?

Andrew Bacevich disagrees with my interpretation of the U.S. foreign policy traditions and grand strategies for the opposite reason than Kagan. While agreeing with us that American isolationism is a myth, Bacevich rejects both my emphasis on geopolitics and Kagan's emphasis on ideology in favor of an economic interpretation. Indeed, his paleo-conservative critique of what he calls the new U. S. militarism and empire revives the New Left revisionism of William Appleman Williams. That "Wisconsin" or "Open Door" school was not strictly Marxist, but it did advance a mono-causal economic theory for what Williams called the tragedy of U.S. diplomacy. The real motive for U.S. foreign policy during all eras of history was not security or liberty, but the capitalist appetite for new markets, resources, and customers, at home and increasingly abroad. So the American Dream was real, but therein lay tragedy because in order to meet the growing expectations of a growing population the United States was ineluctably drawn to imperialism that belied its liberationist rhetoric. Keenly aware of the consumerism and seductive advertising lurking behind this national tragedy, Bacevich blames the United States' grand strategic folly on the iron triangle of business, political, and military elites who alone benefit from the nation's peripatetic crusades. Indeed, the statistics he cites on U. S. debt and over-extension suggest a Ponzi scheme at the end of its tether. In sum, the United States has indeed pursued a grand strategy ever since 1776. But far from being ideological, benign, and destined to triumph, as Kagan suggests, it is material, malign, and destined to ruin.

McDougall doesn't agree with either extreme, but he seems rather more distant from Kagan, based on his own pessimism concerning idealist aims to reform the world:

I think it is because my training was that of an old-school European historian, which gave me an outside vantage point from which to view U.S. shibboleths more objectively than do U.S. historians. I suspect my training in European history also inclines me to think about foreign policy in terms of realism, balance of power, contingency, tragedy, irony, folly, unintended consequences, and systemic interactions -- all of which are foreign if not repugnant to U.S. citizens. Finally, I am a Vietnam veteran skeptical of nation- and state-building, winning hearts and minds, and making the world over in the United States' image.

To temper their enthusiasm for idealist schemes, suggests McDougall, America's national security agencies should keep posted on their walls the list of ten strategic blunders identified by the business strategist Richard Rumelt:

1. Failure to recognize or take seriously the fact that resources are scarce
2. Mistaking strategic goals for strategy
3. Failure to recognize or state the strategic problem
4. Choosing unattainable or poor strategic goals
5. Failure to define the challenge competitively
6. Making false presumptions about one's competence
7. Loss of focus due to too many stakeholders and bureaucratic processes to satisfy
8. Inaccurately determining one's areas of competitive advantage
9. Failure to realize that few people have the cognitive skills needed for strategy
10. Failure to understand the adversary

To which, McDougall adds an eleventh strategic blunder:

11. Failure to understand ourselves

Avoiding strategic blunders seems more important than formulating strategic aims, McDougall would seem to imply, and he ends his article on a poetic, if somber note implying much the same:

To cite a Samuel Huntington metaphor told me by Jim Kurth, the most a wise statesman can do is imagine his ship of state on an infinite sea, with no port behind and no destination ahead, his sole responsibility being to weather the storms certain to come, and keep the ship on an even keel so long as he has the bridge.

How long can such a ship sail on with no port even for repairs, and with maintainance forced to be done at sea . . .