The Shaping of Grand Strategy: Policy, Diplomacy, and War

by Edited by Williamson Murray , Richard Hart Sinnreich , James Lacey

• ISBN13: 9780521156332
• ISBN10: 0521156335
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-02-14
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Within a variety of historical contexts, The Shaping of Grand Strategy addresses the most important tasks states have confronted: namely, how to protect their citizens against the short-range as well as long-range dangers their polities confront in the present and may confront in the future. To be successful, grand strategy demands that governments and leaders chart a course that involves more than simply reacting to immediate events. Above all, it demands they adapt to sudden and major changes in the international environment, which more often than not involves the outbreak of great conflicts but at times demands recognition of major economic, political, or diplomatic changes. This collection of essays explores the successes as well as failures of great states attempting to create grand strategies that work and aims at achieving an understanding of some of the extraordinary difficulties involved in casting, evolving, and adapting grand strategy to the realities of the world.

Table of Contents

Contributors	p. ix
Thoughts on grand strategy	p. 1
The grand strategy of the grand siècle: Learning from the wars of Louis XIV	p. 34
Strategic culture and the Seven Years' War	p. 63
Strategy as character: Bismarck and the Prusso-German question, 1862-1878	p. 79
About turn: British strategic transformation from Salisbury to Grey	p. 111
British grand strategy, 1933-1942	p. 147
Toward a strategy: Creating an American strategy for global war, 1940-1943	p. 182
Harry S. Truman and the forming of American grand strategy in the Cold War, 1945-1953	p. 210
Patterns of grand strategy	p. 254
Index	p. 271
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