Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order
On Grand Strategies

Charles Hill’s Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order is a remarkable work that defines and explains the importance of a broad liberal education based on intensive and extensive reading for the purpose of prosecuting interests of states. The central message of Grand Strategies is that “the world should recognize high political ideas and actions of statecraft as aspects of the human condition that are fully within the scope of literary genius, and ones that great writers have consistently explored in important ways.” Hill laments that over the past decades the intellectual foundations of the international state system have been assaulted with great success by popular cultures and instant punditry. With the advent of the Internet attention spans have shortened, book reading of the serious kind has fallen by the wayside, and statesmen and their advisers are increasingly ignorant of the broader issues of history, politics, and human imagination.

The critical and essential characteristic of grand strategy is the ability to integrate experience, imagination and knowledge, into a broader and deeper insight. This integration requires the would-be integrator to be profoundly learned and capable of deriving meaningful conclusions from the swirls of facts and data points that now permeate the intellectual universe.

Hill, of course, focuses on the Western intellectual tradition, with smatterings of East Asia mixed in. His treatment, however, of the Greek and Roman classics, Shakespeare, the Enlightenment, and later philosophies of history is profound. Grand Strategies is a book of wisdom and insight with few peers in the contemporary-era.

In his treatment of strategic thinking and decision-making Hill proceeds with great humility and consciousness of the limitations of the decision-makers. Statesmen must make decisions before consequences are known. Resultantly, grand strategy must calculate the reactions of adversaries and allies. Statesmen engaged in the formulation and execution of grand strategy must guard against “the certainty of the unexpected blow.” They must be able to draw lessons from the past and apply them imaginatively to the present and future they seek to shape. They must also take into consideration their own and other’s economic base, leadership, diplomatic traditions, culture, and world view. Grand strategy is thus the art of comprehending the total assets of your own state and that of its adversaries and allies and deploying those assets to achieve large objectives fundamental to survival and prosperity. All of this asserts Hill, requires an integrative intellect formidably educated, tempered by experience, and capable of applying insights into the human condition to real world problems and issues.

Grand Strategies is also a philosophy of history that sees the advent of the modern world as being heralded by the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. That peace established the nucleus of an international state system that overcame regional civilization systems and forged through war, diplomacy, and commerce, an order of states. This order was challenged, time and again, by utopian ideologies and movements promising to abolish the state system in favor of a harmonious community of man. The order of 1648 was itself the outcome of 30 years of brutal warfare instigated by the universal eschatological preferences of the Catholic Church and the pan-European imperial ambition of the Habsburgs and set the stage for a reaction in which universal churches and empires gave way to a system of sovereign states.

This system, argues Hill, has survived and evolved in the face of severe challenges, ranging from the French Revolution to the First World War, to Nazism, Fascism, and Communism. It is presently threatened externally by a combination of archaic utopian movements (such as Islamism) and globalization, and internally by the growth of pop culture, post-modernism, libertarianism, and other movements that regard the state as passé. Hill maintains that while speaking on behalf of the state may no longer be fashionable it is increasingly necessary for without states the global challenges that we face will overwhelm us for lack of organization to implement things on the ground. Hill insists that our understanding of the state must be historically rooted in order to have context for “there are fundamental commonalities between the states of millennia before and those around today.”

Hill laments the decline of reading serious works in the West and quotes from Kissinger to the effect that “Reading books requires you to form concepts, to train your mind to relationships…but now we learn from fragments from facts. A book is a large intellectual construction; you can’t hold it all in mind easily or at once. You have to struggle mentally to internalize it. Now there is no need to internalize because each fact can instantly be called up again on the computer. There is no context, no motive. Information is not knowledge.”

If we were to apply Hill’s approach to Pakistan, a land full of strategic thinkers and foreign policy experts, it emerges that here by his standards there is precious little strategic thinking in the real sense. Of course, educated Pakistanis parrot glittering western concepts and articulate clever sounding doctrines but they know very little of their own history and are hardly acquainted with the region’s own tradition of grand strategy. One wonders, for instance, how many of Pakistan’s strategic thinkers have really read the Arthashastra, the classical Indian compendium on statecraft, administration and diplomacy that matches in complexity and substance the finest works of western classical political thought? Or then, how many Pakistani would-be grand strategists have digested Ibn Khaldun’s Muqqadimah or Tusi’s Siyastnamah or Abul Fazl’s Ain-i-Akbari or Al-Beruni’s Kitab-ul Hind? Still, to be fair, it appears that even Western strategists operating on the policy side of the equation are increasingly out of touch with their own classical tradition of thought.

This brings us to the fundamental challenge of grand strategic formulation, which is to establish a hierarchy of threats that a country is facing, identify the causes of said threats, and work out the policy direction that is needed to address the challenges so identified. It needs to be accepted that this is not an exact science since there might be divergent perceptions regarding what constitutes a real long-term challenge to the survival of a country. It is also often the case that decision-making is captured by elements with an irrational hierarchy of threats in mind or that vested interests can push political leaders to ignore strategically serious threats and focus on kinetics and tactics.

The tragedy of the human condition is that success in politics depends upon cunning, moral flexibility, and the ability to pander to the interests and wishes of the temporarily powerful or relevant. These very qualities, however, are often anathema to the wisdom, clinical detachment, and immense reserves of knowledge and insight that statesmen (and their advisers) engaged in grand strategy must posses. The trouble is that without being adept at politics one isn’t likely to get into a position where it is possible to influence strategic thought, and yet, engaging in such politics is profoundly distasteful to those are actually capable of thinking in strategic and macro-historical terms. This is a paradox as old as human history – those wise enough to comprehend power rarely seek it, while those who seek it are rarely wise enough to wield it. This paradox is normally worse in societies where the voice of reason can be silenced by those in power.

Ilhan Niaz
November 2019
Islamabad.