School of War - Ep 236: Joshua Rovner on Grand Strategy

Episode Date: October 3, 2025

Joshua Rovner, Associate Professor in the School of International Service at American University and author of Strategy and Grand Strategy, joins the show to discuss the tension between pursuing military victory and securing a nation.       ▪️ Times     •      01:28 Introduction     •      01:35 MIT      •      05:03 Grand strategy              •      10:45 Peloponnesian War      •      18:05 Spartan strategy             •      22:34 Pericles                •      27:18 A terrible irony         •      32:43 Disastrous victory               •      41:35 British power     •      46:13 Atomic strategy Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

What's the difference between strategy and so-called grand strategy? How has the pursuit of military victory interacted with the nation's broader security needs at different times and places? Today, our guest, Joshua Rovner, is going to help us understand this interaction using examples like the Peloponnesian War, the war in Vietnam, and more. It's a fascinating conversation. Let's get into it. and they stay. We continue to face the rain, the situation in Iran. We'll fight on the beaches. We should fight on the landing ground.

We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today. Joshua Rovner, who is Associate Professor of International Relations in the School of International Service at American University. He previously was the John Goodwin Tower Distinguished Chair in International Politics and National

politics and national security at Southern Methodist University. He's taught at the U.S. Naval War College, author of numerous articles, and the author most recently of a book called Strategy and Grand Strategy, a part of the Adelphi series. Joshua, thank you so much for joining the show. Thanks for having me. How did you first get interested in this broad question of the tensions between strategy and grand strategy? So a lot of it has to do with personally, I grew up in a household where we were all reading the newspaper. We were always arguing about politics and world affairs. So I was interested in it from the start.

And professionally, I went to graduate school at MIT. And the MIT Security Studies Program is one of the great homes of grand strategy, people like Barry Pozen and others who really developed this idea of grand strategy over the course of many many years. So I was steeped in that as graduate student. Then I went off and I taught at the strategy,

and policy department at the Naval War College, which is one of the world centers of strategy, small-ass strategy. And I had a wonderful time teaching there and thinking about the sort of strategic masters, closets and some facilities and so forth, right? But I increasingly came to the view that these were kind of separate worlds. There was the world of people who were studying grand strategy and were engaged in these debates. about grand strategies of liberal internationalism versus restraint and so forth. And then there was this other world of strategy where people were focused on war, focus on how states fight and try to win wars.

And I was interested in how these two ideas related, how the idea of strategy and grand strategy came together. And one other thing, when I was at the war college at Newport, we struggled with it as well. The faculty struggled with it as well. We were really, really good at teaching about war. We were really good about teaching Klausvitz and teaching Sonsa and teaching what happens when the shooting starts and how do states try to achieve their wartime goals with military force.

We were a little less confident about what happens afterwards. How do they maintain what they want? How do they secure the peace in the aftermath? And I didn't think we had a terrific language at the time for speaking about that problem. So I went back to my old graduate student days and thought about grand strategy and how we thought about national security at all times. I thought we got to merge these things together. And so, you know, as a professor at the War College, I started giving lectures on different case studies and kind of developing my own ideas about these while trying to teach. to the officers who were there.

And I started writing about these issues of the inner relationship between strategy and grand strategy. And finally, I decided to put it all together in a book and go through the Adelphi series. That's the backstory. Sure. Yeah, it suddenly occurs to me. I don't know the answer to the very basic question. when is the origin of the self-conscious discipline or conversation of grand strategy as opposed to strategy? Obviously, as an activity of governments, it goes as far back as politics, but is a

self-conscious thing to think about as distinct from strategy in war. When does that begin? So grand strategy is a much younger term than strategy. Grand strategy gets popularized a little bit the 1920s by B.H. Littleheart and then is used by Edward Mead Earle in his famous edited volume makers of audit strategy, which comes out in World War II in 1943. He doesn't spend a lot of time talking about grand strategy, but he at least introduces the idea. And what Earl says about it is that grand strategy is this idea of how you build and deploy forces so that you can hopefully avoid fighting, but if you come into a war, you can win. So he's hinting at this idea that grand strategy allows you to protect your interests in peacetime and maximizes your chances

of winning in wartime if you do it right. Again, this is 1943, and this is kind of an interesting idea, and it's really not central to how people are thinking about strategy. They're in the midst of World War II, after all. But the nuclear revolution, is right on the horizon. So two years later, the war ends and the bombs are dropped. And suddenly, Americans are a caught in a dilemma. We're glad to have won the war. We're glad that it's over.

But now we're worried that the next war, the next great power war could be existential, with the advent of nuclear weapons. So what do we do? How do we keep ourselves safe when we don't really want to go to war? And for some people, they can't even imagine going to war again, given the possible consequences. And so in the 1950s and 1960s, you see these really quite intense debates about deterrence and nuclear weapons. And a lot of this is infused with ideas borrowed from economics and rationality and formal models of deterrence. And about in the 1970s, there's a generation of scholars which start,

to put this in more accessible terms. In the 1970s and then the 1980s, they start theorizing grand strategy in a way that political scientists and policymakers and historians can start to wrap their heads around. And it really starts to flourish in the 1980s. So Barry Pozen writes a famous book which defines grand strategy and then the debate really starts getting going in the political science and international relations world. So this goes back probably about 45 years at this point where you have a self-defined study of grand strategy.

Problem, though, is that there's a lot of scholars who reject the idea. Historians tend to be much more skeptical at the idea of grand strategy. They felt that it was something of an academic invention that the world is just too messy and it's hard enough doing strategy. Who in the world can do grand strategy? And so historians, not all of them, but a lot of historians have been somewhat skeptical of this idea. So you get to the place where I mentioned earlier where you have these two separate camps. You have a grand strategy camp, people who devote themselves to thinking about grand strategy and arguing about it. And then you have people who are kind of shy of

about the idea and sort of keep their focus on war itself and think about what happens after the shooting starts. So I think we do have two very well-defined fields at this point of the grand strategic community and the strategic community. And what I want them to do is get together. These are two worlds that ought to be in constant communication, because one of the things that I try to argue in the book

is the strategic decisions that you make in war have enormous impact on your grand strategy. And the decisions that you make about grand strategy and peacetime affect what you can do in war. And it gives you a menu of more or less practical options. So I really am trying to write this to encourage more conversation among these two groups. Yeah, I think I first became familiar with the conversation years and years ago when I was a student myself with Edward Lippewack's book on the grand strategy of the Roman Empire. We're, of he takes it upon himself to prove that the Romans had a grand strategy in the face of skepticism and the obvious counterargument to make to that is there's no, as you just point out,

this is sort of a later developing conversation as a self-conscious discussion of its own entity or body of problems. So the case you have to prove that, to me, at least at the time, it seemed like Luech proved, was that you can do grand strategy without having this self-conscious discipline of grand strategy or certainly this academic study of grand strategy. And indeed, your book, you go well back here. You start, I really liked the book, by the way, and it's this series of essays on these sort of strange ironies that emerge from the interplay between strategy and grand strategy. You start with the Peloponnesian War and the great tragedy of the Peloponnesian War.

Maybe we can go there. Talk about some of the tensions that you identify between strategy and grand strategy in the Polypennesian War. So the Peloponnesian War, I was a little bit hesitant to write this the first time I started doing it because there's been this burst of everybody writing about Thucydides again over the last decade. And I was like, what am I going to add? What else can be said about this old war and this old book? But, you know, I kind of set out a challenge. It's like if I can make an argument that shows that strategy and grant strategy tells us something new about a very, very familiar

case, then maybe I'm onto something here. Maybe this is worthwhile. And so what I do in in that case study is I start by saying, okay, well, can we identify the grand strategy of Athens and the grand strategy of Sparta before the war, right? And I think they are pretty clear, right, that Athens is a naval commercial empire, and Athens for many decades before the war had built this quite coherent grand strategy, which linked its naval expansion with increasing revenue, which it poured back into its navy, which helped it expand further. It was a kind of virtuous cycle of naval imperialism. It had a quite modest army.

It thought of itself as a naval power, right? Protected the city of Athens with walls and with a protected port. Sparta, on the flip side, is your sort of paradigmatic land power. Sparta has the strongest army in ancient Greece. There's no close competitor to the strength of Sparta's land forces. And it organizes its whole society around maintaining its heavy infantry. It's fighting force. Sparta also has a slave-based economy.

Sparta is mostly populated with slaves who do the day-to-day work of maintaining its agricultural economy, leaving Spartan citizens to spend their lives fighting. From a very early age, they go and they train and they spend their lives becoming masters of phalanx warfare, fighting in this formation of phalanx. Now, Sparta has this great army and it has a grand strategy, the strategy which accompanies it. It doesn't want to venture far out. It's very different from Athens. Athens wants to expand in terms of its number of tributary allies and its holdings and so forth. part of its mode. Sparta wants to stay close to home, right? Because Sparta worries that sending

that army too far away would increase the danger of a slave uprising. So before the war, both of these great powers have coherent grand strategies. They make sense. They sort of exploit their economic models and their social models. And the tragedy is that there should have been a long period of peace between these great powers. Both sides had comparative advantages on the sea and on the land, respectively. Neither side had any easy or obvious way of overcoming its rival. If you're Sparta and you're trying to defeat Athens, Navy, good luck. If you're Athens and you're trying to defeat the Spartan heavy infantry, good luck. And for a long time, they both knew this. They understood the balance in the Greek world. And yet, for a variety of reasons, the politics of ancient Greece start to become

fraught. This has to do with complicated alliance diplomacy at the time. Both sides are increasingly getting fearful that the status quo cannot hold. What happens then is that, and this is where the real tragedy is, they start telling themselves a bunch of strategic fantasies about how they can win without having to challenge the other side's comparative advantage. Sparta starts to tell itself a happy story, well, maybe we can bait the Athenians to fight us in pitched battle. And the Athenians start telling themselves stories, but maybe if we can just do some coastal raiding on the Peloponnese,

we can inspire that slave uprising. We won't have to defeat Sparta ourselves. They end up going to war in 431 BC. and these strategic fantasies are quickly exposed. Within the first three years of the war, it becomes very clear that neither side can win, but neither side can lose. The tragedy is that by then,

they have invested so much politically into this conflict that it becomes very difficult to back down. It becomes very difficult to walk away from what seems like an existential crisis. And what both sides thought would be a short war, based on these strategic ideas, turns into this grinding, horrendous, exhausting war of attrition, which goes on for nearly three decades. The end of the war, Sparta wins the war ultimately, but at enormous cost,

and it makes itself very vulnerable in the aftermath. So the war ends up being a disaster. So basically, the bottom line, the punchline of this case is that you can have a very, good grand strategy, and by good grand strategy, I mean it's durable, it's coherent, and it's appropriate, given your geography and resources. And you can undermine that good grand strategy with strategic blunders. You cannot ignore the questions of war. You can't presume that war will work itself out. You can ruin it all with inattention to strategy. And I think that's basically what happened in that war. So there's a lot there. I want to pull on a couple of the threads in what you just said. So the famous Spartan fear of Athens rise. It's been famous since Thucydides identified it as one of the principal causes of the war. Is your position essentially that the rational or correct thing in the moment to have done for the Spartans, afraid as they were of the rise of Athens in its relative power with regard to Sparta, is to recognize that there's no plausible.

theory of victory and and thus I guess this is out the sentence I don't know how to finish and thus either their fear is misplaced because the Athenians also have no plausible theory of victory and so there's a kind of balance of power regardless of Athenian ambition is that sort of what you're suggesting or how how would you because there's there's one way to respond to what you just said is the fact that neither side really has a plausible theory of victory just makes the situation more tragic if Svardo was still right to fear of power and still, there really was a necessity for it to go to war. But I don't know if you accept or reject that necessity.

I don't think Sparta needed to go to war. I mean, I'm much of the view of the Spartan king, Archadamus, who was a respected figure in Sparta, but he was somewhat older than his colleagues. And Archadamus gives a very famous speech before the war trying to tell his compatriots to settle down. It's a brilliant speech. He does this marvelous net assessment. Like, here's our strengths. Here's Athens strengths.

This is not going to work out well for us, right? But calm down. Don't worry. Time is on our side. Sparta absolutely had an alternative. It could have been patient. It could have waited. It could have noticed that things were

getting more difficult for Athens because it was trying to manage this increasingly complex empire of its own, this naval trading empire. So Archadamus is trying to settle down his sort of hot-headed colleagues who are upset for various reasons. They think that the Athenians are insulting down. They're worried that Athens is going to try to blockade Sparta, all of these things. This is guys, this is not necessary right now. Don't get baited into a conflict and we don't need to fight. We don't need to rush into this war. And he says, look, we're not going to do well against Athens Navy. And if we can't figure out a way to overcome Athens Navy, this is not a winning proposition. At least it's not the sort of short, sharp war that you hope for. So there was an alternative for Sparta. For Athens,

meanwhile, Athens was too easily swayed by smaller allies or warning it about Sparta. And by going to it in this book, there's this long complicated story that Thucydides tells about how a distant conflict in a tiny outpost called Empedamnus leads to this cascading series of crises. And you have middle-sized powers in Greece trying to convince Athens to find Athens to fight on their behalf, right? Because if Athens doesn't fight, then somehow Sparta will grow ever stronger. And in Athens, you have kind of a similar debate. You have sort of elder Athenians saying, we don't need to rush into this. Maybe we should be more patient here. But younger Athenians say,

no, no, we have to go now. And once they decide to go, then they say, well, how are we going to do this? And that's when you start getting into these ideas that, well, we can defeat Sparta without actually having to defeat the Spartan army. And that's what the real disaster follows. Yeah, I'm curious, the idea that the Athenians thought that there would be a quick victory. I mean, it's been a little while since I've spent time with Eucydides, but I think of that first big strategic speech of Pericles, where he also does a bit of a net assessment. And as I recall it, it's a sort of a speech about how if we don't screw up, we can't lose. That is to say, if we stay at sea and we don't get entangled on land, we can't lose. And if we bide our time, victory will be certain. I didn't, I don't remember,

maybe, but of course, Pericles dies and others presumably have greater recourse to fantasy than he does. But, you know, I always, my reading of Thucydides is that, you know, Athens is kind of dangerous. Athens does have pretensions to universal empire. And the Spartans are sort of right to be somewhat afraid of them. And to me, that only enhances the tragedy, because your analysis of the cross-domain mismatch is exactly right. There is no way either can easily defeat the other. But, you know, that first speech of Pericles seems to me to indicate he knows that there's the potential for a long war.

And then, of course, the funeral oration, which often, you know, some readers like to elevate as this great, you know, pain to freedom, which in a way it is. It's also, you know, there's another way to read it where it's kind of a scary speech. It's a speech about Athenian global supremacist. and lust for power. Yeah, sure. I mean, Pericles is a tragic figure for many reasons, not least to which is that he dies in the plague,

but Pericles goes from sort of a champion of democracy. I would see when he is younger, to, by his third speech, you're absolutely right. He says, we're in it now and we're an empire now, and we have no other choice but continuing on with this. in terms of whether Athens was ready for a long war, I think that the classicists who have studied this in detail suggests not. The Athenian treasury essentially was set up for a maximum of a three-year war. So there was not really a plan in place for a long, exhausting, decades-long conflict.

They had enough revenue to fight for a little while. When that revenue goes away, the Athenians have to resort to really extreme steps to continue financing the war, melting down statues for gold and so forth. And so I think that the idea that they wanted or expected a long war is probably not true, despite the fact that, you know, Pericles gave this sort of uplifting pep talk that if we just trust ourselves and trust our institutions, we'll do okay. Yeah. One other thought on this, because I want to get to some of the other examples.

in the book, but I also always saw, you know, the tragic ravaging of the attic countryside by Sparta as almost a bit of a feature, not a bug for Pericles' view of the war. That is to say that rural Attica, where the Spartans are going to go screw with everyone's lands and hearths and what have you. This is conservative Attica. This is conservative Athens, as opposed to the city and, you know, the place where Periclean, the Periclean vision of the future is mostly going to be more. accepted. So the evacuation of that countryside, the fact that those are the people who are really

going to be harmed by the war, there's a, there's a, there's a political connection to this strategy as well. I don't know if it's a grand strategic strategic connection so much as a domestic politics strategic connection. I can't imagine that escapes Pericles, he's notice that the people most being harmed by his strategic vision are probably the families and the religious practices of the families who are most likely, I think, to be his political enemies, right? That could have been the case. I mean, in terms of strategy and grand strategy, I think the important thing is that when the war begins, because there's a fear of Sparta coming over and what they said, ravaging the land, is that they had to evacuate the countryside

and bring everybody in behind the walls surrounding Athens for safety. This is a high-risk proposition. You're vastly suddenly increasing the population. You're vastly suddenly increasing the population of an enclosed space. And even though they didn't really know anything about germ theory back in the day, they knew well that it's difficult to organize and maintain the peace among a huge mob of people who is suddenly thrown together. And it was the case that there was a lot of anger within the city after the war began and the desire to fight back against Spartans who were ravaging the land.

So what Athens does is instead of going out looking for Sparta to fight, to get revenge, they do assemble an army, but they march around to Megarup. They try to march to a different place to relieve some of that political pressure in Athens in the early years of the war. This land offensive amounts to nothing. The army is recalled, and the war goes on. And what happens after the first few years is you settle into this stalemate. where the Athenians are not willing to challenge the Spartan army. The Spartans are not willing to challenge the Athenian fleet.

And they're stuck. And you have a long period in which there's not a lot of strategic creativity. Everybody is pretty risk-averse for a long period of time. It's hard to find bold commanders on land or on water. And it just becomes this very long grind. Yeah. And you see in the big picture of the tragedy of the thing, and in particular the cross-domain mismatch between strategic advantage, an echo today with the United States in China, right?

Could you say a little bit about that? Sure. In the Peloponnesian War, there's a terrible irony, which is that there should have been stable deterrence before the war, and it breaks down. But after the shooting starts and both sides remind each other of what they're good at, deterrence returns, like intra-war deterrence returns and you get a long protracted war. The fear that I have regarding the U.S. and China is that you have a similar cross-domain balance where you have a dominant maritime power in the United States and a dominant land power

in China, right? And both sides for a long time have recognized this balance. You can go back to the 1990s. Robert Ross is a great scholar of China, wrote this famous article laying this out. Like, you have dominant maritime power, dominant land power. You should have peace. The problem is that neither side is satisfied with that. And both the United States and China have spent the better part of three decades now trying to figure out ways of defeating one another in the event of war that requires.

requires something other than attacking each side directly. So I don't think that I'm not a China specialist. For my read of the secondary literature, they're looking for a way of challenging the United States, which doesn't require some grand fleet-on-fleet confrontation because they would lose such a confrontation. The United States doesn't want to go to war on mainland China. They don't want a big fight. I mean, that would be, you know, to paraphrase Senator McCain, that would do.

be ridiculous. So what are they doing? So China and the United States are very interested in using information operations, various forms of cyber attacks on one another, perhaps ballistic missiles, used in creative ways, right, to try to hopefully win quickly without having to challenge the others' strong suit. I saw this, or I've seen this in Chinese documents, where they're really fascinated with the idea of seizing the initiative very quickly with deep strikes and information dominance. And this goes back to the early 2000s in Chinese doctrinal statements, where they're talking about the idea, this very alluring idea that if we launch deep strikes really quickly and we combine them with some kind of information attacks, potentially including cyber operations,

we can set the United States back. We can sort of own the conflict right away without having to do a big, violent collision with the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Air Force, right? And we don't want to deal with the U.S. conventional advantages directly. United States has also tried to think about different operational concepts which would give it the advantage to. United States has a way of fighting

that really goes back to about the Gulf War, where it envisions kind of a two-step. And the first step are blinding strikes. We love the idea of going after enemy forces command and control nodes, seizing the advantage, leaving them sort of blind and incapable of organizing a coherent defense. And then we sort of mobilize forces at the tempo of our choosing. So I worry about this. What you have is you have two great powers, a dominant land power, a dominant maritime power, and both are seeking ways of fighting which allow them to win without confronting the other side's comparative advantage. That has echoes of the Peloponnesian War.

Obviously, the technologies are radically different. The time is very different. There's no such thing as a perfect analogy. But there's enough there, I think, to give us a moment of pause. And so in the book, I do spend some time trying to think this through, you know, what would it take for the two sides to try to implement these plans? What would it take to try to take these new technologies and implement them organizationally? And I think that the reality will be, it's going to be a lot harder than they think. This is something that the Greeks found out way back when I think it's something to watch for today.

I thought one of the most interesting chapters in the book was your discussion of French and British statecraft and military strategy in the American Revolution and your case that British victory, excuse me, British failure, of course, a strategic failure, ultimately is to the benefit of British grand strategy. Whereas French victory in the American Revolution, of course, French as listeners, remember, partners of the United States, our first ally, actually leads to French grand strategic disaster. How can this be? Isn't winning, generally speaking, what you want out of a war? It is at the time, but this is one of the really bizarre ironies which emerges from this. That strategy and grand strategy sometimes work against each other. And there's no case which puts that in sort of more stark relief than the American War of Independence. So as you say, France fights the war, helps the United States win its independence. And French strategy is excellent, right?

Really, really good on the number of levels. French operations are great. It's relationship with the American army, which could have gone sour, doesn't. Like, they work really well with the Americans. French wartime diplomacy is really very good. France does a lot right in this sport. It helps the Americans win, helps defeat Great Britain. But it's really costly, like, stupend.

tremendously costly. And France doesn't have at the time, they don't have the financial instruments available to service the kind of debt that they are accumulating over the course of this war. This is one of the reasons why the monarchy cannot sustain itself for very long after the war. It simply is pouring, pouring debt onto an economy which just can't sustain it. So this is a case in which French strategy was excellent, right, and it ends up undermining French grand strategy in the long run. It would have been better for France, honestly, or at least for the French monarchy, it would have been better to lose early and get out. And there were some French officials that warned about this, the comptroller at the outset of the war, a very fascinating character named Trigo, was warning against this. Don't get involved with the Americans.

We don't have the economic basis to do this, and this is going to be detrimental in the long term. He was pushed out. He was pushed out, and I think France suffered from it. From Great Britain, the situation was the opposite. So, British strategy was not great in the war. I'm trying to fight a way of being diplomatic about this, but I can't. And their strategy was a dismal failure. We've discussed a number of times.

Yeah, I mean, the civil military relations were awful. Relations between British generals were awful. They didn't coordinate their efforts very well. There were all sorts of problems with how the British executed strategy in the war. And they lose. And it's a shocking loss. Like really unbelievable loss in, for the British Army, for the Royal Navy.

In Parliament, people are up in arms. How in the world did this happen? And in the immediate aftermath of defeat, there was a great deal of acrimony and finger pointing, everybody trying to shift the blade. But after they got through the finger-pointing stuff and the blame-shifting stuff, losing was a good thing for the British

because it was a painful and necessary corrective. The British Empire had been expanding prior to the war, but Great Britain hadn't really finalized its program of administrative reform and of building the Royal Navy's bureaucracy, the sort of boring infrastructure stuff that it was going to need in order to sustain its security in the aftermath of any conflict. The war itself put all of its reforms on hold, and it basically costs Great Britain the better part of a decade. But what it does do is that it changes the tenor of the debate in Parliament and in London more broadly. That is that we're not going to be an empire by stationing huge garrisons abroad. We're not going to be an empire by overwhelming the frontier with our fighting forces. We're not row. We are going to thrive as a sort of medium-sized island in the North Atlantic.

We're going to thrive by having a dominant navy and by being the center of world finance and commerce. So what we need to do is think hard about how to reinvest in that navy, how to shore up its bureaucratic foundations, to actually build the infrastructure of a world-spanning, Navy, right? And how to think about what we need from different colonies and different parts of the world, whether or not we can get needed supplies through trade and through diplomatic agreement, or in some cases do we actually need to occupy colonies and govern them ourselves. The important thing is we need to do all of this in the service of the Navy and not do it just because we feel like we need to own a piece of territory abroad. What follows is a century of just remarkable

British power in the world. It really is kind of extraordinary that, again, this is not a huge country. Like Great Britain is a medium-sized island in the North Atlantic. If you were a Martian looking down and saying, well, who's going to be the strongest empire on Earth for a century? you probably wouldn't have chosen that place. And yet, because they think very methodically about the relationship between naval power, finance, and resources, they build it up and they actually pull it off. But I think they needed the experience of losing a big ground war in North America to serve as that reminder. So, you know, as I say in the book, this is a weird case in which history is written by the losers. Britain comes out much better in the long run for having lost the war.

Its grand strategy succeeds because its strategy failed. This is a very Andrew Lambertian kind of argument. I don't know if you're familiar with his work on sea power states. He's been on the show a few times. I've always found his work really fascinating that there's a sort of maritime, not just maritime strategy available to any country with the Navy, but almost a sort of maritime style of politics and international politics of which the British Empire was at its pinnacle when it sort of was self-conscious and recognized

it and acted accordingly and risked failure and ultimately does kind of achieve failure with overextension in places like India. So it's very, very consonant with that. I guess it's sort of impossible to quibble with your argument about French overextension and French strategic victory leading to grand strategic failure for no other reason than the issue of financial trouble. I want to push back a little bit on the British one and push back with Andrew Lambert's ghost as well. Okay. So in the short run, by which I mean the next century, yes, the British Empire achieves this sort of pinnacle of maritime dominance, extraordinary wealth, if not primacy exactly, then certainly something approaching it. Do we think that by the time we get to the 20th century, there are really no regrets about not having the warmaking potential of North America at its disposal?

that is to say in the very long run, if Winston Churchill in the late 1930s or 1940 could still have had what is now the United States instead as essentially an extension of Canada, a part of the Commonwealth, whatever politically would be at the time, wouldn't that have, this is, you know, as you know, I don't tell you, in these early debates in Britain

about the future of the American colonies, there's this great fear that they're just going to suck all the vitality from Britain because it's going to become the center of gravity of the world. And in a way, it's true. It does become that. So, yes, Britain certainly it adjusts, it achieves this sort of clean maritime strategy that propels its success to the 19th century.

But when push comes to shove with these repeated bids for continental hegemony by the Germans in the first part of the 20th century, Britain's really on the ropes, especially the second time around. Wouldn't it have been better for Britain to still be holding on to the United States? In a perfect world, Britain would have. have loved to hold on to the United States, enjoy unveterate access to all of its resources and manpower, and use that to build out British strength. But that was never going to be the world of the late 18th or 19th centuries. The United States, for many reasons, the 13 colonies

were already making it quite clear that there was not going to be a stable arrangement where it would be part of the empire, would not be satisfied with this. Berg, I think, was on to this, and he was making this argument on the floor of parliament before the war. And he said, these Americans are crazy. They're nuts. He didn't use that language. But he's saying, look, they're litigious. They have this really sort of passionate, Puritan and Protestant legacy, which makes them hostile to us.

They're a long way away. So it's going to be really hard enforcing that kind of control. right? This is not a normal colony. For a lot of reasons, we're not going to be able to just sit on top of the United States the way we can do so with other parts of our empire. So cut that loss. The Americans are different. You can play out a counterfactual and say, well, what if the war had turned out differently, right? What if the British had a better strategy? What if, for instance, the Hudson River campaign, had worked well and the two British armies had, you know, met in the middle and avoided the disaster of Saratoga. It's possible. What if they had been able to kill George Washington in the Battle of New York, right? Just undermine the early, you know, cobbled together American force, right? This is certainly possible. In that case, what you would have been left with, I think, is control over an increasingly hostile and rest of population.

And it would have been enormously difficult to manage. Just given the geography of the United States, given the numbers involved, trying to cobble together that kind of control for another century and a half was probably never going to happen. The better move, which actually ultimately happens with Great Britain, is. is you let the Americans go. You try again in the War of 1812, and that doesn't work out either.

But you finally figure out that maybe it's best just to cultivate good relations. And then you hope that you can count on the United States as an ally in future conflicts, given ours shared heritage and commercial interactions, everything else. That's kind of what happens. The United States does join World War I and World War II

and helps the British in both of those cases. Late in both cases. I mean, there's a, my case should be stronger, had tragedy really struck in the 1940s and the United States not gotten involved in the war. Fair enough. Yeah, you know, it's an important point you make that there's no, in some ways,

managing what the colonies are going to become. My fantasy counterfactual, and I, you know, if I are really going to make a strong case, I would say it would be less about British, the British winning the Revolutionary War, it be more about sound management such that the war. If it does happen, it never gets to the scale that it's at. That there's conciliation and concessions made early to maintain the political bond. But you're totally right.

I mean, how does the King of England in the year 1920 rule what North America is going to become in the way that it's possible in the mid-18th century? There would have to be some sort of political evolution. The center of gravity would shift to what becomes the United States, no matter what, then how to think that through is hard. I want to be respectful of your time, but I want to make sure we get to nuclear weapons before we break. Because your book brings this up to the present day,

and we've lingered in long ago, but really interesting history. How does the advent of nuclear weapons intersect or affect these tensions between strategy and grand strategy that you're reflecting on in the book? Yeah, I mean, as we mentioned at the start of our chat, like the end of World War II is sort of a decisive moment for the study of grant strategy, right? Because you immediately have a weapon which is so much more destructive than anything humans

had ever been able to invent that scholars of strategy and practitioners of strategy are perplexed. You have a famous moment where Bernard Brody, who is sort of the dean of American strategic thinkers in mid-century and a committed Klaus Vitsian scholar. A serious Klausvitzian analysis basically says Klausvitzian strategy is impossible. The reason it's impossible for Brody is that if you have a war among nuclear-armed adversary, there is nothing fighting for, nothing to fight for which is worth the cost of the war itself. There's no value of the object high enough which would justify the cost of a nuclear exchange. can't do Klaus Vizian strategy anymore. And Brody wrestles with this, right? Spends his old,

the rest of his light in some respects wrestling with this paradox. So, but what do you do? We've got nuclear weapons. We think the Soviet Union's going to get weapons. We think they're going to proliferate and they do. So what do we do in that world? Well, this, it, it, what follows is a really interesting intellectual history. People following Brody start to argue, make arguments which become cumulatively known as the theory of the nuclear revolution. The idea of the nuclear revolution is that because these weapons are too big to use, they make strategy and absurdity, right, and they have really peculiar outcomes. Like, you shouldn't see war anymore because deterrence will fold.

But the problem is that leaders in the Cold War don't really believe in the theory of the nuclear revolution. They don't see nuclear weapons as something that ends war or something that puts an end to conflict among great powers. In fact, they spend a lot of time thinking about nuclear war fighting, and they invest a lot of money into it and building different kinds of weapons and helping to formulate doctrine that they might use in the case of a nuclear exchange. None of this makes any sense, according to the theory of the nuclear revolution. If that theory was correct, leaders should have been pretty chill about nuclear weapons, right? If the theory of the nuclear revolution was right, it would have been okay to see proliferation

because as nuclear weapons spread, general deterrence would take hold and the world would be a more peaceful place. So, nor would we have had to spend so much money build. a large, elaborate arsenal of so many different designs, nor would we have to worry about missile defenses, right? You just build a modest little arsenal, and you put it in the middle of a rural place, and if other countries do the same, that's it. That's a good thing.

But of course, we know that that's not what the United States did, and that's not how other power powers have behaved with nuclear weapons. So the theory of the nuclear revolution doesn't tell us much about grand strategy. It doesn't explain how states actually thought about nuclear weapons and their own national security in the Cold War. But I would argue, and I do argue in the book, I actually think the theory tells us something about strategy in war. So the theory fails the test in the level of grand strategy.

It doesn't explain how nuclear weapons affected states' theory. security, but it does tell you something about how they thought about fighting. What it tells you is that there's a reason why these weapons haven't been used since 1945. There is something deeply scary about nuclear weapons. I call it the special fear of nuclear weapons, which is totally unusual. Human beings since forever have been perfectly willing to use all sorts of innovative new ways of killing each other. After Nagasaki, they have not used nuclear weapons. Not for lack of opportunity. There's been plenty of crises, right. There have been plenty of nuclear-armed countries with deep political crises with their rivals. There have been

conventional wars. There have been unconventional wars at lower levels. Don't go nuclear, right? So at the very end, the closer they get to a high-intensity conflict, the more scared and skittish leaders become about actually crossing that threshold. And you see this in the Cold War. It's fascinating. You see it on the U.S. side with presidents from even Truman, who actually used them, getting very scared in the aftermath, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and so forth. And on the Soviet side, from Stalin all the way to Brezhne, you have these remarkable anecdotes of them apparently getting physically sick at the thought of launching a nuclear war.

These are not people who are unfamiliar. with violence. These are people like Nikita Cruzchev who saw some of the worst bloodletting of the 20th century, but even he wasn't really nervous about the idea of nuclear weapons. So at that point, when you get to the idea of actually using these as instruments in war, leaders always back off at the end. And this is consistent with the theory of the nuclear revolution. This is revolutionary. This is different. So the book makes the argument that this famous theory of the nuclear revolution, which has been the subject of debate going back since Philly, the 1940s, right? The theory itself is not entirely wrong, but it's not right either.

It really depends on whether you're looking at it through the lens of strategy or through the lens of grant strategy. It's a really interesting book. It's thought-provoking. I personally really enjoyed working my way through the essays. I'm sorry, there's a lot in there we haven't gotten to. But I really want to thank you for making the time today. And it was a really, really interesting conversation. Joshua Rovner, author of Strategy and Grand Strategy. Thanks for joining the show. Thanks for having me. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.