Grand Strategies

(Boston Globe Feb 8 2004, http://tinyurl.com/2ldq3jLaura Secor said of , "Surprise, Security, and the American Experience" by John Lewis Gaddis, the Robert A. Lovett professor of military and naval history at Yale University, that Mr. Gaddis believes President George Bush will be remembered like other great presidents. "Who, then, have been the great grand strategists among American statesmen? According to a slim forthcoming volume by John Lewis Gaddis, the Yale historian whom many describe as the dean of Cold War studies and one of the nation's most eminent diplomatic historians, they are John Quincy Adams, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and George W. Bush.")

Professor Gaddis' book "Surprise, Security, and the American Experience", was published in March 2004, one year after the Iraq invasion. In a column in the January/February 2005 of Foreign Affairs, http://tinyurl.com/yok52x titled "Reconsiderations", Professor Gaddis was more critical of President Bush. I wonder what his views are now of President Bush's grand strategy, four years after the invasion of Iraq.

Laura Secor's Boston Globe article continues, "The Bush doctrine is more serious and sophisticated than its critics acknowledge -- but it is also less novel, Gaddis maintains. Three of its core principles -- preemptive war, unilateralism, and American hegemony -- actually hark back to the early 19th century, to the time of John Quincy Adams."

Then in 2006 Professor Gaddis has a new book that is critiqued here. http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2006/01/22/a_world_divided/ (By Michael C. Boyer, Associate Editor of Foreign Policy magazine- So it comes as no surprise that, in his previous writings, Gaddis has shown a reverence for bold foreign policies and powerful personalities. He has closely allied himself with the theory that, as Thomas Carlyle wrote in 1840, ''the history of the world is but the biography of great men." And in ''The Cold War," an entire, requisite chapter is dedicated to what he calls ''actors," with particular deference paid to Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II. In recent years, Gaddis has put President George W. Bush under his great-man umbrella, calling Bush's vision of democratizing the Middle East ''right on target."That's why ''The Cold War" is perplexing. It departs from the great-man perspective of history. In fact, it reads like a shot across the bow of elitists who would export democracy in a managed and manipulated fashion.

The number of democracies in the world quintupled during the last half of the 20th century, Gaddis says, thanks to increasing levels of education, the spread of ''transparency" via the information revolution, and, most important, ''because they generally outperformed autocracies in raising living standards." Did Reagan help? Certainly. Was Mikhail Gorbachev a catalyst for change? Without question.

But, Gaddis says, it is ''ordinary people" who make democracy happen. Who ended the Cold War? ''The Hungarians who declared their barbed wire obsolete and then flocked to a funeral for a man who had been dead thirty-one years; the Poles who surprised Solidarity by sweeping it into office; the East Germans who . . . climbed embassy fences in Prague, humiliated [Erich] Honecker at his own parade, persuaded the police not to fire in Leipzig, and ultimately opened a gate that took down a wall and reunited a country."

It has become de rigueur in some circles to tout China and other semi-authoritarian regimes as an example of how to cultivate democracy by elite decree. Fareed Zakaria's much-heralded 2003 book, ''The Future of Freedom," laid out just such an argument at length.
With democracy now dawning in some of the most benighted corners of the globe, ''The Cold War" offers a reminder that ordinary people have a way of leaving world leaders, in Gaddis's words, ''astonished, horrified, exhilarated, emboldened, at a loss, without a clue." It's a lesson that elites in China and the Middle East would do well to remember.Michael C. Boyer is associate editor of Foreign Policy magazine. )

A grand strategy sounds noble and sophisticated when done by a head of state. When a couple of bank robbers like Bonnie and Clyde have a grand strategy, it becomes laughable.

The late Sam Walton had a grand strategy when he started Wal-Mart in 1962. Some people who hate big business would say his grand strategy was evil. His grand strategy created jobs for thousands of people and low prices for millions of low income consumers. Sam Walton did all of this using free market capitalism, where millions of voluntary transactions are done each day between buyers and sellers. Ordinary people, as Gaddis referred to in "Cold War", carried out Walton's grand strategy.

Contrast Sam Walton's kind of grand strategy to that of state leaders, and bank robbers Bonnie and Clyde, who use force and aggression to carry out their grand strategies. I suspect there are more voluntary transaction at Wal-Mart each day than there are in all of Iraq. When leaders with grand egos have grand power at their disposal, millions will be trampled and killed. Grand power with grand egos soon become grand delusions.

World history is filled with egoists who had grand strategies. Their paths across the earth are littered with the bones of their victims, and still we praise, admire and critize them, but we never forget them, which is what they wanted in the first place.

Bilbo Baggins