Start Making Sense: Strategy and Grand Strategy in the Trump Administration
As he has told us many times, Donald Trump knows a lot about winning. But for all we know about the man and his methods, we still don’t know how he thinks about winning wars. Trump bellows and blusters, but we don’t know how he would lead America in a war if someone calls the bluff.
This is a problem, given the anxious state of international politics. The Trump administration enters office in the midst of renewed fears of terrorism, a looming conflict with Iran, and an intense geopolitical contest with China. Its approach to these problems may have lasting implications for national security. How it deals with terrorism will have immediate impacts on the military services and the intelligence community, because the more they focus on non-state actors, the less they can respond to state adversaries. How the administration thinks about Iran will say much about its approach to diplomacy and nonproliferation in the Middle East. How it deals with China is most important of all, and the answer may have lasting implications for the global economy and international security. Getting China right will enable prosperity and stability, even during a period of great power rivalry. Getting it wrong risks catastrophe.
These questions also reveal strange puzzles about the president’s attitude towards national security and foreign affairs. Trump simultaneously revels in the details of counter-terrorism operations but has been sharply critical of the long wars of which they are a part. Trump enjoys swaggering with military forces but boasts about not starting wars. And while Trump has berated China for a host of activities, he derides U.S. partners and allies who share a common adversary in Beijing.
How do we make sense of these contradictions? What do they say about the next four years of U.S. national security policy?
Trump is a thoroughly modern creature — a politician who has proven adept at tapping into popular trends and exploiting social media. He has also proven to be enthusiastic —sometimes positively giddy —about demolishing traditional notions of diplomacy and statecraft. At a glance, it might seem that we need new conceptual frameworks to make sense of Trump’s approach to national security. Yet there is reason to believe the opposite. Indeed, we can learn a lot about Trump’s approach by returning to a couple of very old concepts that I explore in a new book: Strategy and Grand Strategy.
Two Theories
Strategy is a theory of victory. It is a logical story about using military violence to achieve political goals. A decent strategy requires calibrating the amount of force with the value of the object at stake. It also requires answering difficult questions about where to target military strikes and for what purpose. Because war is an exercise in political coercion, strategists need to imagine how the use of force will influence their enemies, for better or worse. Finally, a coherent strategy needs to consider the problem of ending wars. Convincing enemies to put down their arms is particularly difficult, given that war breeds intense hatred and mistrust.
Grand strategy, by contrast, is a theory of security. It is the logical story about how states make themselves safe in an unsafe world. A decent grand strategy begins with a broad idea about international politics, which produces a set of assumptions about the causes of stability and instability, and about the sources of strength and weakness. It then aligns the theory with peacetime diplomacy, economic statecraft, and military activity. For example, post-Cold War American grand strategy reflected a liberal theory of world politics. The spread of democracy, expansion of trade, and growth of institutions all encouraged international stability. The United States would reap the benefits, becoming more secure as the world became more peaceful. Making this possible required actively promoting democracy, trade, and institutions. It also required maintaining the ability to project conventional military power around the world — and the willingness to use it in service of liberal ideals.
In the ideal, strategy and grand strategy should be mutually reinforcing concepts. Grand strategy informs decisions about force structure and force posture. Such decisions set practical limits on military action. It also informs pre-war considerations about the wartime usefulness of allies, institutions, and firms. Perhaps most importantly, grand strategy determines the value of the object in any given war. Effective wartime strategy is impossible without such a determination. Likewise, good strategic judgement should bolster post-war security. All things being equal, we should expect that victory should make the state safer than it was before the war.
But this is not always the case. States that triumph in war do not always benefit from a post-war peace, and in some cases, the demands of strategy actually work against grand strategy. The clearest examples are those in which the costs of fighting leave the state cash-strapped and vulnerable in the aftermath of fighting.
Consider, for example, the French experience in the American War of Independence. French strategy was exceptional. French military leaders worked well with their American counterparts, choreographing a highly effective joint effort against their common British enemy. French diplomats also cobbled together a coalition of European supporters, an impressive achievement given the Europeans’ skepticism about the war. Yet the quality of strategy proved to be counterproductive for French grand strategy, because the costs of fighting put enormous strain on French finances at a time in which it lacked a coherent tax system and the financial tools to accommodate a growing debt. French reformers were unable to pursue a much-needed fiscal and industrial reform, putting the state on very precarious ground.
The British experience was opposite. Political and military leaders failed to agree on a unified approach to the war, and their internecine squabbles led to repeated errors. Rival army commanders did not coordinate their actors, and the Royal Navy failed to provide reliable support for expeditionary forces on land. But while these strategic blunders led to its shocking defeat, British grand strategy benefited. Unburdened of its troublesome colonies and spared from the expense of garrisoning a vast territory across the Atlantic, British leaders were free to focus on modernizing the fleet and, more importantly, building the extraordinary infrastructure needed for naval imperialism. The question was not simply increasing the number and quality of warships, but developing a durable system for shipbuilding, maintenance, supplies, and labor. This effort was a major part of the ongoing administrative revolution, which laid the foundation for a century of global expansion. Britain’s strategic failure made possible this grand strategic success. History was written by the losers.
Strategy and grand strategy do not always work at cross-purposes, of course, and some states are better than others at keeping them aligned. But the British and French cases serve as a useful reminder that winning in war is not the same as winning the peace, and that efforts to achieve one can undermine the other.
The Trouble with Transactionalism
What can strategy and grand strategy tell us about the new administration? This is a difficult question for several reasons. Trump’s strategic preferences — his basic attitudes about warfighting — are unclear. While he enjoys the spectacle of military parades and seems to believe that military swaggering generates diplomatic leverage, he is not particularly hawkish. He had opportunities to go to war in his first term, as in Iran, but did not take them. He also had opportunities to escalate military action, as in Afghanistan, which he declined. If Trump is temperamentally averse to war, then it is unsurprising that we know little about his beliefs about the best way to fight.
Trump’s rhetorical swings can also obscure his ideas about grand strategy. Sometimes he berates adversaries, sometimes he embraces them. Trump’s bombast, moreover, does not always reflect actual policies. In his previous term, Trump did not reduce America’s military presence abroad, nor did he withdraw the United States from long-standing alliances, despite fears at home that his election meant a new era of isolationism. Trying to define Trump’s grand strategy has become a cottage industry.
The lack of consensus partly reflects the shock that accompanied his first election. Global politics watchers were not clear on what to make of a politician who treated the shibboleths of U.S. foreign policy with contempt. For a long time, debates over grand strategy had settled into a predictable rhythm, with mainstream champions of liberal internationalism pit against critics who advocated restraint. Those critics sometimes seemed resigned to defeat, given the entrenched bipartisan consensus for a large forward U.S. presence abroad, investments in international institutions, and taking on military obligations in support of liberal ideals. Trump’s anti-internationalist rhetoric seemed utterly opposite. His surprising victory caused scholars to wonder if his victory heralded the decline of the post-war order, or whether institutional inertia would enable the order to outlast the new president. There was little consensus on this question.
Perhaps the most important reason that Trump’s grand strategy is murky is his preference for transactionalism. Trump’s view of politics is akin to his view of business: an ongoing and unending cycle of deal making and deal breaking. This requires maximum policy freedom of action, and Trump bridles at the notion that the United States is better served by binding itself to post-war institutions that reflect post-war liberal values. International institutions, from his perspective, constrain the United States from entering into profitable partnerships and leaving them when the time comes.
An effective transactional approach also requires cultivating a reputation for risk. Bargaining power comes from a belief that leaders are willing to do whatever is required to get their way — even if that means a willingness to accept significant costs. Trump’s bellicose language suggests a kind of deliberate recklessness. But it also suggests a kind of deliberate inconsistency, which makes it difficult to identify a coherent and predictable approach to grand strategy.
For advocates of transactionalism, this is precisely the point. Foreign states — allies and adversaries alike — should always be a little uncertain about American grand strategy. They should never be too confident about what the United States will do next. They should always remain off-balance, so that they tread carefully in their dealings with Washington. Allies will think twice about free-riding on American aid and military support if they understand that aid and protection are not guaranteed. Adversaries will think twice about challenging the United States over economic or military disputes if they believe that U.S. leaders are willing to take extraordinary risks to defend U.S. interests.
One problem with a transactional approach in peacetime, however, is that it can have serious consequences in the event of war. Ambiguous grand strategies can lead to strategic frustration.
The U.S. experience in the Vietnam War is a good example. The major period of escalation in Vietnam occurred between the Cuban Missile Crisis and détente with the Soviet Union. This was a time in which U.S. leaders were still committed to containment — Cold War fears of falling dominoes were still present. Yet they were also desperate to avoid another existential crisis. Defining “victory” was difficult during this strange interregnum, and the Lyndon Johnson administration was unable to agree on the value of the war itself. Unsurprisingly, there was precious little unity of purpose. Rather than set a clear strategic path, the administration tried a hodgepodge of approaches to the war, including escalating air and ground operations and various counter-insurgency and covert action campaigns. The results pleased no one. Frustration with the war mounted because strategy was incoherent. This was a direct result of grand strategic uncertainty.
Much Ado About Nothing?
Trump’s instinctive military caution might make this problem irrelevant. Unclear grand strategies can produce unsuccessful strategies, but this will not matter if Trump stays out of war. The next four years are likely to be contentious at home, but they may be relatively uneventful for U.S. forces abroad. In that case, questions about U.S. strategy will remain hypothetical. It is noteworthy that the recent election was the first in a quarter-century in which U.S. strategy in an ongoing war was not central to the campaign. Questions about U.S. support for allies and partners played a role in presidential debates, of course, but questions about U.S. military action did not.
Trump’s first term was marked by more bluster than action. In 2017, he threatened North Korea with “fire and fury like the world has never seen” if it put U.S. interests at risk. Yet he ended up travelling to meet with North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong Un the following summer and released a joint statement on U.S.-North Korean relations. In 2019, Trump engaged in a war of words with Iran after shooting down a U.S. drone, but he later called off a series of retaliatory airstrikes. The president remained enthusiastic about counter-terrorism operations, to be sure, but he was decidedly averse to conventional wars. As Lawrence Freedman summarized, “despite his presumed belligerence, he held back from new large-scale military operations.”
If this trend continues in the Trump administration, then the relationship between strategy and grand strategy will be a moot point. But the United States has a history of entering wars despite the pacifist promises of its leaders. “He kept us out of war” was Woodrow Wilson’s slogan during his re-election campaign in 1916, but the next year he led the United States into Europe. “I hate war,” Franklin Roosevelt declared in 1936, before deliberately nudging the United States towards intervention in World War II. Lyndon Johnson wanted to focus on domestic policy after taking office, but deteriorating events caused him to escalate in Vietnam. And George W. Bush, who ran for president on a platform of conservative realism, became a model hawk after the Sept. 11 attacks.
It is not hard to imagine a similar scenario playing out in the near future. Suppose, for example, that China decides to act against Taiwan. This is a case in which Trump’s military caution is at odds with his anti-China rhetoric. It may be that he is unwilling to stay out of a conflict, given his nationalist inclinations and suspicions about Beijing. If so, then questions about strategy will become urgent. How will U.S. grand strategy under Trump guide its military response? How will its theory of security inform its theory of victory in a war with a nuclear-armed great power? How will the United States think about fundamental questions about the use of force? How far will it go in war? What will it demand in a settlement? Who will rule the peace?
The same questions will apply in the event of a conflict with Iran. The Iranian regime has recently seen its own grand strategy fall to pieces, given devastating losses to its protégés Hamas and Hizballah, along with the fall of its longtime ally in Syria. Backed into a corner, Iran may lash out in many ways: launching cyber operations against its enemies, accelerating its nuclear weapons program, or sponsoring terrorist attacks. Transnational groups like the self-proclaimed Islamic State may also seek a return to spectacular acts of terrorism, mimicking the Sept. 11 attacks but also drawing on their own history of gruesome violence.
Trump may feel compelled to respond in such an event. If so, he will have to confront the enduring strategic questions described above, which are inherently difficult. It will be much harder to find answers in the absence of a clear and coherent grand strategy.
Joshua Rovner is an associate professor of international relations at American University, and the author of Strategy and Grand Strategy.
Image: Tia Dufour via The Trump White House
