Does Strategy Work?

Does strategy work? In Emergent Strategy and Grand Strategy. How American Presidents Succeed in Foreign Policy, Ionut Popescu, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Texas State University, asks whether following a coherent grand strategy is the key to achieving outcomes in American foreign policy. In doing so, he picks up an aspect of a broader crisis in the concept today. Strategy, like war, has become a widely defined term, used as much in relation to “gaming” a dinner-party as a conflict. The function of strategy, as the relationships between ends, ways, and means in power politics, is not necessarily military. Today, “strategy” refers to the full range of human activity, and serves as adjective, noun, and verb.

The ambiguities of the use of strategy in the field of military history throws light on the issue of its usage in other fields. In practice, strategy, whether military or non-military, and, in the former case, whether focused on war or not, is a process of defining interests, understanding problems, and determining goals. It is not the details of the plans by which these goals are implemented by military means. The latter are the operational components of strategy. The more the operational dimension is emphasised—as is common in modern war studies—the further strategy is “pushed back” or reconceptualised toward goals rather than means.