At the height of World War II, the book “Makers of Modern Strategy” was published in 1943, addressing military thought from Machiavelli to Hitler. In 1986, a second edition of this substantial volume appeared during the Cold War between the Eastern and Western blocs, led by the former Soviet Union and the United States, focusing on the makers of modern strategy from Machiavelli to the nuclear age.
Amid unprecedented global interactions today, Princeton University Press published the third edition of this series in 2023, titled “The New Makers of Modern Strategy: From the Ancient World to the Digital Age,” edited by Hal Brands, a professor of international affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he studies U.S. foreign policy and defense strategy.
These books collectively represent a cornerstone of strategic studies, being an interdisciplinary applied field that encompasses a full range of military and non-military topics related to global, national, defense, and warfare security. “The New Makers of Modern Strategy” reflects the evolution of strategy over the past eighty years, providing a contemporary guide to the multifaceted strategic challenges that are reshaping our world in the 21st century. It emphasizes that the fate of any state depends on more than mere superiority in warfare. In today’s world, strategy is the art of managing and effectively leveraging state resources, including its armed forces, to prioritize and enhance its vital interests securely against adversaries, whether they are actual or potential.
The Essence of Strategy:
The book posits that the essence of strategy is clear and direct; it is the art of mobilizing and utilizing power to achieve central objectives amidst global interactions and resistance from competitors and foes. In this sense, strategy is closely linked to the use of power; for if the world were harmonious and everyone achieved their goals, there would be no need for a system focused on mastering competitive interactions. Furthermore, the field of strategic studies is rooted in the belief that there exists a fundamental logic of strategy that transcends time and place.
While each era teaches us something about the concept of strategy and the requirements for executing it effectively, the deep understanding of fundamental strategic challenges by Thucydides, Machiavelli, or Clausewitz renders their works still essential reading today, as they renew our understanding of strategy. The fierce competition permeated by the threat of catastrophic conflict is a defining characteristic of the current global reality. Strategy holds great value when the stakes are high, and the consequences of failure are severe.
Thus, the book draws on certain classical conclusions and narrates the history of wars that have shaped the world as it is today, grappling with current challenges. In his preface, Hal Brands concludes with the risks involved, indicating that the current global situation is marked by sharp and ongoing disputes, and that the likelihood of war between nuclear states is a frightening reality. There are no guarantees that democracies will prevail geopolitically or ideologically in the 21st century, as they did in the 20th century. The increasing complexity of the international landscape and the accelerating rate of change poses a strategic problem in itself.
The book, which spans 1,185 pages, argues that the making of strategy does not occur in a vacuum; it is “cast” through technological change, social forces, intellectual movements, ideological narratives, types of political systems, and generational and professional mindset differences prevailing today. New domains of warfare have emerged as the digital age has transformed intelligence, clandestine operations, and other tools of traditional strategy, leading to a list of issues that will preoccupy political decision-makers in the coming decades, which are no longer what they were in the aftermath of World War II. The key issues highlighted in the book can be summarized as follows.
Technology and the Future of War:
Does technological change alter the purpose of strategy? Does technology not only change the tools of war but also the nature of war itself? The discussion on nuclear weapons illustrates how issues arising after World War II continue to occupy the world today. To illustrate the fundamental change in the nature of war as quickly as possible, nuclear technology has shifted the purpose of strategy from how wars are fought and won to how they are avoided and deterred.
It has been equally true that the basic imperatives of strategy remain relevant, with the most apparent being the broader context of the future of war currently manifesting in Ukraine, cyber warfare, counter-terrorism, geopolitical conflicts, and the outer space domain. It is clear that technological innovation is reshaping traditional relationships between national security organizations and the private sector, and more broadly, it is redefining war itself.
The book argues that many people’s belief in technological solutions as a sure pathway to victory is a questionable proposition; the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima did not automatically compel Japan to surrender in World War II in 1945, just as Donald Rumsfeld’s proclaimed “revolution in military affairs” did not swiftly and decisively crown U.S. wars post-9/11. The book asserts that the dangerous potentials of technology will not and cannot precede human decision-making, given that war tools have become more precise and lethal.
Conventional vs. Unconventional Wars:
The book seeks to address the question: Do gray zone warfare and hybrid warfare represent a new and brave world of conflicts necessitating innovative strategic theories? Or are they merely new “obscure” labels that blur the binary distinction between peace and war, substituting confusion for historical and conceptual clarity regarding the relationship between regular and irregular warfare?
The book posits that the American preference for conventional warfare has led to poor military performance on the battlefield, failing to adapt to the complex and asymmetric realities of war, from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan. It is worth recalling that during the Cold War, the United States waged open and indirect wars in gray areas like Angola, Central America, and Afghanistan. Referencing deeper roots in American military history, the book affirms that the U.S. became a nation by successfully engaging in a hybrid war for independence against Great Britain, and for those who wish to draw a clear distinction between war and peace, it may be more beneficial to recognize that hybrid warfare or gray zone conflicts are merely useful modern terms encompassing the irregular complexities of war itself.
The Ideology of Liberal War:
The book engages with the issue of liberal ideals and standards of war concerning strategic practice, affirming the ideology of liberal war, and the promise of global and national enhancement of human security, rooted in the principle of sovereignty, bolstered by international law and organizations, and protected by the U.S.-led international security structure. The fruits of liberal war form a framework for the ideological and geopolitical challenges facing American leadership, ranging from a limited indirect conflict against Russia in Ukraine, four decades of confrontation with the “theocratic” Iran, contestation with nuclear-armed North Korea, and systemic rivalry with the rising China for global dominance.
However, as a broader strategic issue, the book argues that the wars proliferating in today’s world reveal multiple unresolved contradictions between liberal war in concept and execution. The United Nations Charter operates only as the lowest common denominator when competing national interests are low or absent. Certain dynamics also impact international conflict resolution initiatives, peacekeeping missions, and humanitarian aid, where a small effort can yield positive damage, or these efforts can inadvertently perpetuate the same wars they seek to alleviate and end.
More specifically for the United States, the moral and strategic dilemmas of liberal war have produced a troubled record of interventions dating back to the Spanish-American War, which persist today. The indispensable American mission to enforce democracy through war tends to yield low-quality outcomes, especially when attempted hastily and when so-called “agents” have ambitions that do not align with those of their American sponsors. Misconceived and rushed nation-building efforts are bound to devolve into chaos or, in the worst cases, folly.
The lengthy wars the U.S. engaged in following the events of September 11, 2001, particularly in Afghanistan and Iraq, displayed strategic failures arising from the most apparent contradictions with the declared principles of liberal war, as hundreds of thousands of people died in those conflicts, the result of the 2,996 who perished in New York and Washington due to the September 11 attacks.
Ending Wars:
The book addresses the issue of how to end wars: If the most important consideration in war is how it ends, why has the United States faced such difficulty in ending its conflicts since World War II? Here, the book contends that the saying that ending a war is much harder than starting one encapsulates a fundamental strategic problem in American thought; the manner in which a war is concluded has the most decisive long-term impact. The U.S.-led victory in World War II, culminating in the unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan, set the golden standard for modern war termination, making the U.S. often a good steward in ending others’ conflicts. This raises troubling questions, as the U.S. has performed poorly in ending its modern wars of all types—limited, unlimited, conventional, irregular, domestic interventions, and covert actions, in defeat and even in victory.
The book notes that ending a war does not simply mean concluding the fighting, and one should not confuse withdrawal with peace. The problem began in 1950 in Korea, the first contemporary war where the U.S. ceased to achieve victory. After a back-and-forth in the first year of the conflict, negotiations stretched over the following two years, with little change on the ground until an armistice was signed in August 1953. As for the Paris Peace Accords that ended American fighting in Vietnam, “peace with honor” was neither present nor realized, and the flawed conclusion of these wars set the stage for the protracted wars the U.S. engaged in after 9/11 in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In Iraq, the failure to cement the decisive defeat of Saddam Hussein in 1991 served as a volatile backdrop for the American invasion and his overthrow in 2003. Then-President George W. Bush’s unilateral declaration that “mission accomplished” reflected a magical thinking rather than a defined theory for war termination. Instead of achieving decisive victory, the lackluster planning for post-Saddam Iraq and poor decision-making aggravated the insurgency that began and spread in Iraq, leading to an ongoing counter-terrorism war and the emergence of the terrorist group ISIS.
Moreover, the manner in which the U.S. concluded its first Afghan war was more severe; the failure to stabilize Afghanistan by setting conditions among the mujahideen factions after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 resulted in chaos and the first Taliban emirate, ultimately paving the way for 9/11.
Following the swift ousting of the Taliban, the destruction of al-Qaeda, and the establishment of a new Afghan government, the U.S.-led coalition squandered victory by continuing to fight without restoring order and never maintaining the initiative as the Taliban returned to insurgency. Two decades later, the “Afghanistan Peace Agreement” of 2020 represented another pretext for American withdrawal, mirroring the situation in Vietnam.
While President Joe Biden could have chosen to persist, the chaos resulting from the end of “the game” manifested in the return of extremists; the Taliban’s return to power marked the culmination of two decades of strategic failure in the longest foreign war the United States has waged. By accepting the liberal assumption that “the aim of war is a better state of peace,” these failures reveal a dangerously flawed strategy of American war termination and its execution, highlighting the need for a close integration between the studies of war and peace.
In conclusion, “The New Makers of Modern Strategy: From the Ancient World to the Digital Age” asserts that perpetual vigilance is the price of freedom. The book serves as a call to vigilant action directed at both leaders and citizens. Just as history condemns those who forget, straying from the fundamental principles of strategy is bound to be exceedingly costly, especially since the book can be viewed as a contemporary guide to strategic thinking regarding the challenges transforming today’s world.
Source:
Hal Brands (Editor), The New Makers of Modern Strategy: From the Ancient World to the Digital Age, Princeton University Press, 2023.
