I’m excited to announce that next week, season two of the BIGA podcast will begin and the theme for the season will be: Security, Strategy, and Defence. With Peter Jones helping to round out our season on diplomacy, it seems a fitting leap to discuss all things security.
I’ve written previously about strategy, in particular what the word itself means, but there’s a hidden implication when discussing political strategy. In their book The Retreat from Strategy, David Richards and Julian Lindley-French argue that ‘London is bereft of strategic vision’ and that ‘British grand strategy should concern the generation, organisation, and application of still immense national means in pursuit of critical national interests’. There is a distinction to be made though: ‘Policy sets the overarching aims of a state across government. Strategy takes policy as its aims and objectives and sets out to achieve them’. It’s a subtle point but one that is important to make clear: strategy is for the state.
From Sovereigns to Sovereignty
If you have read my piece on The Lost Meaning of Strategy, you can appreciate that the study of strategy came about in the 18th and 19th centuries as European states were becoming increasingly distinctive. Nonetheless, key authors in the field of strategic studies, such as Edward Luttwak, have written books and articles such as The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire and The Grand Strategy of Charles V. What is interesting about the latter is that strategy is not employed by a ‘state’ per se but rather a dynasty. The interests and values as well as the resources generated are all shaped by a fundamentally different outlook on politics; instead of representing a certain group of people, such dynasties considered themselves to be representatives of God. Who they ruled over was less concerning so long as they ruled, as was their mandate.
Today, states are the most notable form of political organisation. By ‘state’, the usual definition is somewhere between being the institutional, organisational, and practical tools for implementing political decisions as well as being sovereign in the sense of having a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. In other words, the state is the one that makes the rules, carries out the rules, and ensures that it is only one attempting to do so within a given territory.
Across the West and in much of the world, this state is paired with the idea of the nation thus creating the nation-state. The two terms are often used interchangeably but the nation refers to a distinct territory made up of people with either a shared ethnicity (ethnic nationalism) or shared values and cultural practices (civic nationalism). Even though nationalism often gets a bed reputation, as a political term it is better understood as an ‘imagined community’ in which you do not know the vast majority of the people who make up your nation, but you share some underlying familiarity with them. I have never been to Newcastle but were I to go, I would be comfortable knowing that there is a Nando’s and a Wetherspoon’s to head to and that there would be some sort of sports fixture on at the weekend. Even though Newcastle cannot be said to be my community, it is part of my larger, imagined community of the British.
Taking Back Control
Returning to the title of this piece: who is strategy for? Clearly, the answer right now is ‘the state’ but that raises its own problems. Whether you look at it from a class, race, or gender perspective, there are plenty of criticisms to be had. Elitist, colonialist, patriarchal, the state as we know it today was built to operationalise the policies and ideas of a specific demographic of the nation. It has, naturally, evolved over time so that now contains a much more diverse, inclusive, and representative portion of the country but nonetheless, old habits die hard, and this is especially true in political institutions.
Moreover, much like the dynastic environment of Charles V, the interests and goals of the state might be ironically different to the people it represents. The state’s interest is to survive within a global context of competition but the interests of the disillusioned and downtrodden might be to first liberate or express themselves. Domestically, this creates tensions with the police regarding issues such as protesting laws. The state wants to maintain order so that rules can be enforced; the people want to challenge how things are done. Sometimes the usual mechanism for resolving that tension – voting elected representatives – does not seem to work for the people and so the state must decide between being stricter with its enforcement of order or ushering in reform.
In his most recent book The Strategists: How War Made Them and How They Made War, Professor Phillips O’Brien discusses the leadership of the main belligerents during World War II. He makes a strong case that it was the personalities of each leader that defined their country’s strategy, not an objective, rational pursuit of ‘self-interest’. In the case of Mussolini, he identified his goals as being Italy’s goals and pursued such a strategy to ruinous results. Strategy is made for the state, but when that state fails to adequately reflect and associate with its nation, the interests and values it pursues will always be askew to what that nation strives for.
This is not a call for a class uprising or an overthrow of the state, but rather that for strategy to work at its most effective, it requires the commitments and resources of everyone involved. To that end, good strategy requires a state that has made the effort to earnestly incorporate the different strata’s of the society it governs.
Today, there is a disdain for identity politics and a sense that “woke” has gone too far. But when we look to history, we see that women entering the workplace allowed them to also enter the factories required to manufacture war materiel. We see that the persecution of gay men risked denying Alan Turing the chance to crack the Enigma Code, and that it did deny him the chance from advancing computing even further. A state that is more inclusive is also one that is more resilient and it is on all of us to ensure that strategy is undertaken by the nation-state and not just the state.