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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

Grand strategy & empire « Previous | |Next »
June 29, 2006

The idea of "grand strategy", as classically promoted by military strategists and historians, such as Edward Meade Earle and B. H. Liddell Hart, refers to the integration of the war-making potential of a state with its larger political-economic ends.

Grand strategies are geopolitical in orientation, geared to domination of whole geographical regions---including strategic resources such as minerals and waterways, economic assets, populations, and vital military positions. The most successful grand strategies of the past are seen as those of long-standing empires, which have been able to maintain their power over large geographical expanses for extended periods of time. Hence, historians of grand strategy commonly focus on the nineteenth-century British Empire (Pax Britannica) and the ancient Roman Empire (Pax Romana).

Today we have Pax America instead of economic globalisation being accompanied by the emergence of forms of 'global governance' that would overcome the centuries-old struggle for supremacy among the Great Powers. The US operates from 'proceed from the firm ground of the national interest, not from the interests of an illusory international community', as Condelezza Rice puts it.

The US is quite open about Pax America.It arises in talk in the 1990s about how the United States should utilize its current "surplus of power" to reshape the world.

One form of the grand strategy had been presented by the Project for the New American Century, in a report authored by future top Bush-administration figures Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Lewis Libby, among others in the 1990s. Summing up the new imperial thrust in Harvard Magazine, Stephen Peter Rosen, director of the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard and a founding member of the Project for the New American Century, wrote:

A political unit that has overwhelming superiority in military power, and uses that power to influence the internal behavior of other states, is called an empire. Because the United States does not seek to control territory or govern the overseas citizens of the empire, we are an indirect empire, to be sure, but an empire nonetheless. If this is correct, our goal is not combating a rival, but maintaining our imperial position, and maintaining imperial order. Planning for imperial wars is different from planning for conventional international wars....Imperial wars to restore order are not so constrained [by deterrence considerations]. The maximum amount of force can and should be used as quickly as possible for psychological impact---to demonstrate that the empire cannot be challenged with impunity....[I]mperial strategy focuses on preventing the emergence of powerful, hostile challengers to the empire: by war if necessary, but by imperial assimilation if possible

What is at issue is the management of the international system by a single hegemon---the United States. The securing of hegemony by the United States by means of preemptive actions was a new grand strategy of transformation.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 3:20 PM | | Comments (1)
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I have long argued that the world is being forged into a Global Empire.