Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

Grand strategy is not clairvoyance

It is not predictive but prescriptive. Its plausibility in prescription must be based on a systematic approach to thinking about the future. That approach eschews a new-grand-strategy-every-three-weeks approach (classic op-ed-ism: you declare WWIII one month and then forget all about it the next month). So it does not entertain, much less succumb to, single-point-failure doomsaying (the Deus ex machina crowd), because system-wide thinking adheres to the horizontal view, not the vertical drill-down of experts who say, "I don't know anything about the rest of all that, I just know that my pet single-point failure makes your entire vision impossible!"

Systematic thinking about the future means you're not "for" or "against" issues like peak oil or global warming, you just accept the dynamics implied and rank them accordingly. As such, you will always disappoint the single-issue-trumps-all crowd, because you do not subvert your entire logic to their presumed hierarchy.

Systematic thinking about alternative global futures recognizes no such hierarchy (the essence of interdependency), but instead focuses on sequencing (when pain "a" reaches point "b," action "c" will move from implausible to imperative) and trusts markets and individual decision-making more than governmental grand schemes.

When government's role in grand strategy is explored, its primary function is that of enabler of overriding era trends, thus grand strategy is contextualized at all times. This is crucial for someone who approaches grand strategy from the perspective of national security, because the military's tendency--especially in the United States--is to view war strictly within the context of war (our penchant for annihilation). Thus, one great purpose of grand strategy for me is help the military come back to society (crucial for the "army of the people," easiest for the Marines [historically not very distant], less comfortable for the navy [which craves the independence of the high seas and finds all this competing connectivity disturbing--thus it constantly reminds us of how much "moves by sea!"], and damn near queer as far as the Air Force is concerned [it prefers the wild blue yonder where men are men and dogs get to fight]).

To the extent grand strategy cites future trends, it does so to lessen or eliminate gross surprise, not to project infallibility ( i.e., vertical shocks cannot be predicted although horizontals scenarios can be anticipated).

A fundamental characteristic of grand strategy is adaptive planning according to fundamental rule sets enunciated in said strategy. Strategy is neither confirmed nor denied by events, for it is not an objective reality but a desired end state (think "Groundhog Day").

The grand strategist gets what he wants in the end because he consistently plays favorable angles revealed to him by systematic analysis of the future. He does not will the strategy into being, he builds it incrementally and with care (save me from fads and the persistent rumors of X's demise!), taking what the opposition and the environment provide him--event by event.

Certitude comes in knowing what you want, and wanting what you know, and applying that logic consistently while your enemies suffer constant distractions and the temptations associated with both temporary victories and defeats. They celebrate or commiserate while you effect your next moves. They wear their desire and fears on their sleeves, you treat all events with equanimity. They lie and deceive at cross-purposes, you manipulate perceptions with a systematic confidence that today's perceptions of success or failure matter less than tomorrow's span of opportunities (yours expand, his contract).

In the end, your victories belong to all. His loss is his own.

The rest is just bread and circuses and the rantings of the unenlightened and purposefully disempowered (they who choose not to know but to submit to "great and powerful Oz!"--whomever he is this week).

You either connect to the strategy and stick with it or you jump from causality to causality looking for faith in powers beyond your own.

Systematic thinking about the future is both horizontal (across sectors and geography) and vertical (system, state, individual). The grand strategist resists the demands of narrow thinkers to declare some region or state "all powerful" or to choose either the system (e.g., global economy, Info Rev) or nation-states (e.g., realism, democracies, China model) or individuals (e.g., terrorists, Wikipedia, celebrities, great men) as currently transcendent. Such choices are required only among the narrowest of minds (or most savvy editors) out of fear that their arguments (or, more to the point, their publications) won't find purchase among others unless some clear niche can be fenced off (i.e., the "victory" or "defeat" be canonically recognized).

"50 ways to excite your transnational terrorist!"

The grand strategist recognizes complexity without succumbing to its challenges by throwing up his hands and crying "chaos" (for therein lies the pathway of intellectual surrender to the "god-machines"). Not understanding everything does not equate to understanding--and controlling--nothing (unless you need your answer to all challenges right now!).

A holistic approach is therefore the grand strategist's calling card, leaving the doomsayers to the corners into which their need for binary, zero-sum outcomes ("A is up, so B must be down") paints them. The grand strategist welcomes such analysis as he welcomes all such data points. He simply refuses the accompanying Kool-aid.

The grand strategist avoids the tyranny of trying to explain all matters, and instead focuses on all that matters to his desired end state. Thus he focuses on differentials--as in, things that will make a difference. The good that is all (e.g., technological advance) or the bad that is all (e.g., global warming) interest him less than that which creates significant rule-set gaps and their ever-accompanying system perturbations, whereby man or nature reveals the distance between what we thought we were accomplishing and what we really accomplished. If awareness is there, the system cannot be truly perturbed, just motivated toward logical response. So surprise matters where awareness lacks, but where awareness grows there is no surprise--just adjustment.

Grand strategy is not a book report, nor a review of the literature. It does not search for the mean but it is a means for searching (and yes, I'll be copyrighting that for a fortune cookie message, so back off!). The emerging global rule set is always under adjustment. The only constant rule is that rules are constantly changing. The grand strategist tracks these evolutions across various sectors primarily for the purpose of gap analysis. These gaps are only incrementally revealed under normal circumstances, and conflicts reveal them only under extreme duress, which globalization is--in its sum expression of connectivity, rules, alliances and mutual understanding--getting better and better at processing (a good example being the currency crises of the 1990s that many experts saw as naturally growing into the future in a linear fashion).

The grand strategist is therefore not impatient. He is interested more in direction than degree of change, and he recognizes that politics lags dramatically behind economics and that security lags dramatically behind connectivity. His work is primarily concerned with keeping those gaps from growing too large by filling them in with strategic choices distinctly favorable to his own side (defined variously and often simultaneously at the levels of system, state and individual).

The grand strategist isn't interested in being right today, but correct years or even decades from now. The judgments of commentators interest him less than the actions of practitioners, for his battleground is not public opinion but public policy.

His target audience finds its center of gravity in the persistent classes of government, not the politicos but the military and mid-level bureaucrats. Within these ranks, victories are measured from the botttom up--as in, generationally. The grand strategist judges progress not from reviews by the chattering class (academics--even less) but rather by invitations from commands and offices. As such, he spreads the vision opportunistically, going where breakthroughs form in a sort of viral blitzkrieg. The carping from the rear guard interests him not, the seat at the table interests him plenty.

The grand strategist does not laugh all the way to the bank (alas!), but he does chuckle on his way up to the stage, which interests him more, because grand strategy is vision and vision touches the heart as well as the mind because it asks for today's sacrifices for tomorrow's collective goods. And so the grand strategist takes seriously the art of motivation. He accepts the left-handed compliments ("Wasn't that immensely entertaining!") with the right-handed ones (" ... and so substantive too!"), because the grand strategist realizes that message plus style beats message without style every time.

The grand strategist loves to refer to himself in the third person. It maintains the interpersonal distance between the character and the individuals who play him. People come and go, and many inhabit this role over time and substance, but the character lives on because people, states and the system as a whole seek ever clearer understanding of the causes of war and of peace.

It is a good and worthy profession. It needs serious exploration for the purposes of rule-setting. It is too often tied to individual personalities when it needs to be a skill set that is repeatably applied as a strategic planning solution. It should not be outsourced to columnists and talking heads, but should remain organic to the field of national security. It is a skill we lost across the Cold War, primarily because of the success of the "wise men" in the late 1940s and early 1950s. But that vision no longer holds sway.

I am talking to myself thus because I am gearing up for Vol. III, where I'm far more likely to engage in a conversational style as opposed to this "voice of God." I'm just reading a lot of formal language lately from centuries past and an inveterate mimic, I can't help myself...

You either put the past behind you or put your behind in the past.

[ahem!]