Tag: strategy

The World Has Passed the Old Grand Strategies By

Dangerous
Courtesy Thomas Hawk/Flickr

This article was originally published by War on the Rocks on 5 October 2016.

It’s grand strategy season in Washington, and with good reason. From War on the Rocks to Foreign Affairs to a recent spate of books, there has been a renewed argument over primacy, offshore balancing, and other contenders for the grand strategy crown. The debate is timely: The international order is in the midst of an epochal shift and a new administration will have to rethink basic organizing concepts for America’s role in the world.

Unfortunately, most of the debate has already begun to ring hollow. The default grand strategy concepts no longer capture the choices that America faces. The most important truth about grand strategy today is that the United States badly needs new options to choose from. The classic stand-off is between advocates of primacy or preeminence on the one hand, and restraint or offshore balancing on the other. There are dramatically different versions of each, and the terms can mislead as easily as they can inform. As Stephen Brooks, John Ikenberry, and William Wohlforth have rightly argued, for example, “primacy” can sometimes imply a straw man vision of hegemonic dominance that nobody really advocates.

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Eurocentrism and the Global Strategy: How Do Others Perceive the EU’s Role in the World?

Euro Blog
The Eifel tower lit up with the EU flag, courtesy looking4poetry/flickr

This article was originally published by European Geostrategy on 3 June 2016.

The idea of eurocentrism has been both debated and somewhat discredited in recent years. Philosophically, a realisation that European Enlightenment thought was perhaps more hegemonic than universal has led to a wider appreciation of alternative knowledge systems from further afield. Politically, a similar shift in the centre of gravity has displaced ‘the West’ as the paradigm of progress and development, helped by the economic rise of ‘the rest’. And on a more profane level, the navel-gazing of European policy-makers has also been challenged as too inward-focused in an increasingly competitive world.

As the European Union (EU) prepares to launch the new Global Strategy, it is worth examining how much it really has moved on; has it managed to come to terms with an increasingly non-eurocentric order? Can it craft a strategy which is assertively European yet realistically conscious of its external partners? A key consideration in gauging this is examining how these partners view Europe – what they think of its global role and how they see it developing. Such perceptions, although not fundamental drivers of policy formulation, nevertheless shape the reality within which decisions are taken, and are arguably often overlooked in the study of international relations.

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Reconcilable Differences? Rethinking NATO’s Strategy

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. Image: Håkan Dahlström/Flickr

This article was originally published by the Centre for International Policy Studies on 16 November, 2015.

NATO has just announced that it will soon put forward proposals for a new “southern strategy,” in response to growing instability in the Middle East and Russia’s growing military presence south of the Bosphorus. According to the NATO Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, the strategy will include a range of measures, such as enhanced surveillance in the Mediterranean by allied forces, the use of NATO troops in advisory roles in crisis-affected countries across North Africa and the Middle East, and reinforced permanent NATO military deployments in the region.

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Is France Taking a Strategic Holiday?

A French army soldier plots a course on a map during the command post exercise portion of Exercise Steadfast Jazz. Image: US Army Europe/Flickr

This article was originally published by European Geostrategy on 31 May, 2015. Republished with permission.

The title of this article may seem like a staggeringly misplaced and ill-timed question. After all, is France not militarily engaged in Mali, the Central Africa Republic and Syria? Is Paris not involved in the type of crises that have a direct impact on European security, when so many of its fellow European states shy away from military action? Has France not jostled its way alongside London as the United States’ partner of choice on military affairs? Did France not recently agree to spend an extra €3.8 billion on defence over the next four years?

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Solving the ‘Rise’ Dilemma: How the Chinese Silk Road Initiative Could Challenge the United States

Symbolic image of a clash between the US and China. Image: Iecs/Wikimedia

On March 28, China’s National Development and Reform Commission and Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Trade presented the first national action plan to promote the “One Belt, One Road” initiative (一带一路, Yīdài yīlù). This initiative has become the economic and diplomatic priority of Chinese President Xi Jinping since the presentation of two complementary projects in late 2013: a “Silk Road Economic Belt” throughout the Eurasian continent, and a “21st century Maritime Silk Road”, connecting the South China Sea to the Mediterranean Sea. These initiatives aim to boost economic integration on the Eurasian continent and its peripheral seas through the construction of an infrastructure network. Beijing has been pursuing this goal through the creation of an Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), which has been joined by 56 countries including France and Germany, recently announced investments worth $46 billion to build a China–Pakistan Economic Corridor bypassing the Strait of Malacca, and the creation of a $40 billion Silk Road Fund.

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