Great Powers and Grand Strategy 1900–1954
De Gruyter Oldenbourg, Berlin/Boston, 2022, 436 pp
eBook ISBN: 9783110718713
DOI: 10.1515/9783110718713
Edited by: Brian P Farrell, SR Joey Long and David J Ulbrich
Reviewed by: Andrew Carr
In his concluding reflections, Brian Farrell observes that this edited book is best thought of as ‘a jazz score, not a symphony—one that combines a steady and discernible rhythm section with connected, but strikingly diverse, individual riffs’. In the hands of these capable editors and a few stand-out soloists, this is a work that hits many of the right notes and justifies the audience’s time.
That clever metaphor is symbolic of the thoughtful yet direct approach of the editors. Their touches can be seen regularly, yet lightly, across the text. Rather than a lengthy opening chapter, the editors provide six shorter contributions distributed throughout the book. This enables them to offer breadth in setting up the big ideas of each section, as well as depth, interrogating the contribution of the various chapters and their relationship to the theme of the book.
Their theme, the bass line of this historical composition, is the difficulty of constructing a regional order in Asia from 1900 to the early 1950s, with China’s weakness as the pivotal factor. As Farrell explains early on, ‘China’s weakness was the cardinal fact around which geopolitics and regional order revolved’; however, ‘neither China nor the Great Powers could reorder anything on their own. They needed each other’.[1] Establishing order was a complex dance, one which involved grand schemes and sure-footed adaptations on the fly. It was a political construct built from military, diplomatic, intellectual and economic foundations—hence the theme of ‘Grand Strategy’.
Grand strategy is a useful way to examine broad, interconnected questions of national approach. How did the big ideas and personal inclinations of the various leaders shape a broad direction for the state? What other fields of national life were pulling in a similar direction? How well did these common concerns accord with the central strategic problems of their time? For instance, Shannon A Brown details the way US private industry led to a quite distinct approach in Asia, of a ‘community of interest’ seeking peace, as opposed to the ‘chauvinistic set of fantasies’ which defined America’s approach in the Pacific.[2] Karl Hack examines Britain’s approach to South-East Asia following the Second World War, while Jeremy A Yellen starkly details the incoherence and confusion of elite Japanese policymaking prior to and during the war, along with the efforts to overcome it.
When searching for coherence, the chapters which focus on a single person are among the strongest. Yamamoto Fumihito elegantly shows how Japan transitioned from a democracy to a militant society by the mid-1930s by exploring the role of Takahashi Korekiyo, the Japanese foreign minister from 1931 to 1936. Similarly, Andrea Benvenuti reveals a Jawaharlal Nehru as Prime Minister of India who navigated between the rival blocs of the early Cold War not merely as a pragmatic realist but as one who fundamentally did not accept the Cold War framing of bipolarity.
The challenge with this work—and, to be clear, most of the literature on ‘grand strategy’—is to signify what this concept meaningfully contributes to our analysis. Grand strategy is a category of state practice which policymakers endlessly aspire to achieve, and which analysts compete to bestow on favoured practitioners. Yet, having anointed those with the requisite coordination of ‘all’ elements of national power with this most prestigious of labels, what then? What additional insights does this judgement contribute? The stronger chapters analytically sidestep this issue by viewing grand strategy as a spectrum, with more coherence generally treated as a good thing. To go beyond that, absent specific historical strategic problems and contexts, can be troublesome.
It is often thought easier for great powers to do grand strategy than for smaller nations. In a useful coda, Peter J Dean’s chapter on Australia demonstrates how a smaller nation regularly improvised while staying in tune with its larger partners. Dean provides a direct and authoritative account of the emergence of Australian strategic policy from British settlement through to the early Cold War era. He argues that Australia’s unique:
combination of location at the bottom of Asia combined with a reliance on a great and powerful ally located on the other side of the globe resulted in a relatively high degree of continuity in national security strategy.[3]
Dean labels this a grand strategy based on six key themes:
An alliance with a Great Power … The promotion of a local defence capability … a state-based focus for national security policymaking … a ‘realist’ (pragmatic) tradition in foreign policy … an active bilateral and multilateral approach to diplomacy … [and] a liberal internationalist approach.[4]
For military audiences in Australia and across the Indo-Pacific, the value of sitting down to read From Far East to Asia Pacific is threefold. First, it is a reminder that China’s centrality to Asia’s regional order is neither recent nor primarily tied to economic or demographic trends. A situation of ‘China weak’ is as significant for Asia as ‘China strong’. Second, this book offers a number of less commonly found historical case studies. Our capacity for strategic imagination depends upon the richness of our historical memory. Those who have a deeper well of events, metaphors and past experiences to draw on will be better placed for making a useful contribution today.
Finally, the book offers a way of thinking through what the ‘right approach’ to strategy should be. Should a grand strategy always be our aim? What kinds of strategic problems does it help us to serve, and what ones might it impede? Given the turmoil of events in the first half of the 20th century, many chapters reveal that adaptation, and breaking problems down into manageable chunks, is just as much a part of the strategist’s toolkit as building up frameworks for coherence and coordination. David Ulbrich’s chapter on the US Marine Corps’ development of amphibious capabilities from 1900 to 1941 is a particularly useful account. He shows that for the Marines to be an effective fighting force, they needed to understand the evolving direction of national policy settings. Yet the political level could not give them a central authoritative document and set of objectives to guide their actions. Instead they had to innovate, adapt and remain flexible to keep in line with the evolving political level as well. Ulbrich quotes the great American military historian Russel F Weigley on the value of breaking issues down into the specific problems that could be solved:
[S]imply by defining the specific problems into which amphibious operations divided themselves, the Marine Corps made it evident that the problems likely were not insoluble; and the Corps went on to delineate many of the solutions.[5]
Symphonies, like grand strategies, may look elegant and impressive, but the flexibility and improvisation of jazz is often the surer path to pleasing outcomes in discordant times.
Endnotes
[1] Brian P Farrell, ‘From Far East to Asia Pacific: Great Powers and Grand Strategy, 1900–1954’, in Brian P Farrell, SR Joey Long and David J Ulbrich (eds), From Far East to Asia Pacific: Great Powers and Grand Strategy 1900–1954 (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2022), p. 2.
[2] Shannon A Brown, ‘Grand Strategy by Other Means: US Foreign Policy, Public-Private Collaboration, and “Employing all Proper Methods in China,” 1895–1914’, in Brian P Farrell, SR Joey Long and David J Ulbrich (eds), From Far East to Asia Pacific: Great Powers and Grand Strategy 1900–1954 (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2022), p. 42.
[3] Peter Dean, ‘Managing Great Power Allies: Australian Grand Strategy in Asia, 1900–1954’, in Brian P Farrell, SR Joey Long and David J Ulbrich (eds), From Far East to Asia Pacific: Great Powers and Grand Strategy 1900–1954 (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2022), p. 390.
[4] Ibid., p. 390.
[5] Russel F Weigley quoted in Brian P Farrell, SR Joey Long and David J Ulbrich (eds), From Far East to Asia Pacific: Great Powers and Grand Strategy 1900–1954 (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2022), pp. 112–113.