The McMaster plan

When Lt Gen H.R. McMaster was appointed by Donald Trump to the post of national security adviser, newspaper reports hailed him as a military strategist. It’s not fully clear what the phrase means: not, presumably, that he originated a big idea akin to Alfred Thayer Mahan’s theory of seapower or Billy Mitchell’s conception of strategic bombing. More likely it is supposed to mean ‘a soldier who thinks’. Or more crudely, ‘not a knuckle-dragger’. Or ‘preferable to the cretin who Trump just fired’.

Of course, the responsibilities of the position to which McMaster now ascends extend well beyond mere military matters. The national security adviser operates (or should operate) in the realm of ‘grand strategy’. In this rarified atmosphere, preparing for and conducting war coexist with, and arguably should even take a back seat to, other considerations. To advance the interests of the state, the successful grand strategist orchestrates all the various elements of power. While not shrinking from the use of armed force, he or she sees war as a last resort, to be undertaken only after having exhausted all other alternatives.

This distinction between military strategy and grand strategy is more than semantic. Maintaining it is crucial to successful statecraft. Consider the case of 19th-century Germany. Von Moltke the Elder was a gifted military strategist. Bismarck was a master of grand strategy. Their collaboration, with the Iron Chancellor as senior partner, created the modern German state. Once Wilhelm II handed Bismarck his walking papers in 1890, however, the distinction between military and grand strategy was gradually lost. The results became apparent after 1914. In the person of Erich Ludendorff, war absorbed statecraft, with the fall of the House of Hohenzollern the least among the catastrophes that ensued.

US national security policy in the present century bears more than passing resemblance to that of Germany a century ago.