The Bourbon trap: military prowess is not a grand strategy

The 250th anniversary of American independence is a time to reflect on the principles that animated the revolution, and to ask how far Americans have come towards achieving their ideals. It is also worth looking back to the beginning to assess the current state of US grand strategy. How did the Founders envision national security when there was barely a nation to secure? How did they understand the purposes of military power at a time in which the American military was in its infancy? And, perhaps most relevant to contemporary policy dilemmas, how did they approach great power diplomacy without getting caught up in great power wars? The early arguments surrounding these questions were fascinating and ferocious, and the answers continue to shape the US debate.

Some of the most important lessons, however, do not come from the American experience in the War of Independence. We should turn our attention instead to Bourbon France, the dominant great power in 18th-century Europe – but a dynasty in decline. France was America’s vital ally in the war, providing a military lifeline when the prospects for George Washington’s fledgling insurgency looked dim. Together, coalition forces achieved an extraordinary victory, but France ended up paying a very high price. While the United States today owes France a debt of gratitude, the French experience is also a cautionary tale. France’s strategic prowess was undeniable, but it masked deeper problems in French grand strategy.

France began providing covert support and limited military assistance to the Americans in 1775, before entering the war as a formal ally in 1778. Years of hard fighting on land and sea culminated in the Battle of Yorktown in 1781. Following a dramatic chase through the southern colonies, American and French troops trapped the British army on the Virginia coast, laying siege and forcing its surrender. The House of Commons voted to end support for the war, and the government dissolved. The mood was a great deal happier in Philadelphia and Paris. General Washington relayed the news of Britain’s ‘definitive capitulation’ to the Continental Congress, taking time to lavish praise on the French army and navy for their critical role in the triumph. The leader of the French expeditionary force, Rochambeau, received a congratulatory letter from Louis XVI in which the king ‘directed [him] to have a public thanksgiving sung at the head of the army, and to order rejoicings on the occasion, as had been done at Paris and throughout France’.

France did not win by accident. Victory at Yorktown was the end result of excellent strategic choices in prior years. French military officers forged durable relationships with their American counterparts, despite cultural and political differences that might have kept them apart. The Southern campaign was a model of joint and combined action, with a multinational land force supported by a French fleet off the coast that blocked British efforts to resupply its besieged army. Meanwhile, French diplomats forged an effective alliance with Spain that tilted the naval balance against Great Britain and forced the Royal Navy to overstretch its forces. Wartime French diplomacy also succeeded in winning over Holland, ensuring the safe passage of supplies from Prussia and the Baltic states, and giving Britain another rival to worry about. The accumulating costs of fighting helped fuel antiwar sentiment in Parliament, setting the stage for the political drama that played out in London after its army was defeated.

But although its wartime strategy was excellent, France’s broader grand strategy was a mess. French national security was built on logical foundations that worked at cross-purposes. These included reducing the national debt, rationalising the country’s patchwork fiscal system, coordinating the country’s cottage industries into something more coherent, focusing diplomacy on shoring up continental alliances, and reducing British power. The problem, as some astute French officials noted, was that challenging the British Empire across the Atlantic risked undermining its conservative economic goals. Military and naval investments were especially costly for France at a time in which it lacked the financial tools that might help it service a growing debt. The extraordinary investment needed to fight the British in America drove the country further into the red, deepening its domestic political turmoil and complicating its relations with European allies. In the years after the American war, these pressures would lead to the end of the Bourbon dynasty, and to decades of convulsive violence on the continent.

France’s exceptional wartime strategy was a disaster for its postwar grand strategy. The irony was tragic at the time, but instructive for the United States today, especially given the Pentagon’s obsession with lethality and the collective impulse to mythologise past military triumphs. Perhaps more than any other conflict, the American War of Independence reveals the difference between strategy and grand strategy, and the danger of mistaking one for the other.

Strategy is a theory of victory. It is the logic connecting military violence with political objectives in any given conflict. An effective strategy helps resolve the fundamental paradox of war: that something inherently destructive can lead to something politically constructive. Successful strategies consider the effects of violence against enemy leaders, soldiers, and civilians. They consider the usefulness of allies, and the value of attacking enemy alliances. Perhaps most importantly, they provide reasonably clear political objectives against which military officers measure progress. Strategy, as opposed to tactics, requires constant attention to politics.

Grand strategy is a theory of security. It is the logic connecting the instruments of national power to the goal of enduring safety from foreign threats. An effective grand strategy starts with a reasonably cogent idea of how the world works, an assessment of relative capabilities, and an accounting of non-military tools that might be put to good use. It also provides guidance about the relative value of alliances and international institutions. Ideally, this will allow the state to deploy its capabilities so that it can remain secure without having to resort to force, but also in a position to succeed in the event of a conflict. Grand strategy, as opposed to strategy, requires a general understanding about the causes of war, not just the best way to win.

Strategy and grand strategy should be mutually reinforcing. Strategic success should leave the state more secure in the aftermath of war, and grand strategic wisdom should provide the ingredients for future victories. Indeed, it is impossible to measure the value of the political object in any war without reference to grand strategy. The meaning of victory depends in large part on how winning will bolster the state’s larger theory of security. Strategy and grand strategy often come apart, however. What ought to be a symbiotic relationship can become an exercise in frustration. Some wartime strategies leave the state worse off when the shooting stops. Some grand strategies leave the state unready to fight in the first place.

Why is it so difficult to align strategy and grand strategy? Psychology and politics. War is an intensely emotional business, and leaders may not be able to sustain a clear-eyed view of means and ends in the heat of conflict. The understandable desire to destroy a hated enemy may overwhelm the cold logic of restraint. Domestic groups may also prove to be obstructions: doves block necessary military campaigns, and hawks block necessary peacemaking efforts. Similarly, coalition partners may complicate the effort to fight in ways that support a long-term theory of security. Coalition management is especially difficult as war reaches its endgame. States balance together when they all are at risk, but the binding energy of a common enemy dissipates when that enemy goes into decline.

Sometimes the trouble starts with grand strategy. States may be unable to forge reasonably coherent approaches to national security, and their failure has serious consequences on the quality of strategy in war. In some cases, uncertain grand strategies give way to half-hearted wartime strategies, given that no one is quite sure about the ultimate purpose of the war. Military leaders with strong strategic preferences may seek out political champions who support their particular vision, leading to factional conflicts and increasing civil-military dysfunction. At other times, grand strategies may be incoherent or contradictory. In these cases, wartime victory may obscure deeper problems – or make them more intractable. Flush with success, leaders may not immediately understand the real consequences of war. This issue plagued French grand strategy during and after the American War of Independence.

Some historians have argued that France had no real grand strategy before the war. What it had, they contend, was a simple desire for revenge. According to this argument, the embarrassing loss to Great Britain in the Seven Years’ War (1756-63) was intolerable, and French leaders were committed to payback. Samuel Flagg Bemis, the dean of American diplomatic historians in the first half of the 20th century, wrote that French determination ‘to undo the prostration of their country in 1763 by getting revenge on Great Britain as soon as the opportunity should present itself is the basic explanation of French foreign policy from 1763–1783’.

Although French leaders harboured deep antipathy for the British, it is unfair to reduce their grand strategy to the expression of simple loathing. By the early 1770s, in fact, they had developed a reasonably clear theory of security. The theory had three pillars. The first was the need to reform and rationalise France’s tax system, which would help alleviate the national debt and shore up the country’s hodgepodge industrial system. French statesmen had a sense of the country’s latent economic power, but they struggled to extract resources efficiently. Doing so would both strengthen the economy and provide a surer foundation for the French military.

The second pillar was maintaining the balance of power in Europe. France’s alliance with the Habsburg dynasty prevented the rise of a continental hegemon by keeping Austria and Prussia divided while also balancing against Russia. Meanwhile, French diplomats oversaw relationships with a collection of minor states, from the semi-autonomous Austrian Netherlands to the Republic of Genoa, which served as a buffer against possible threats from the east.

The third pillar was reducing the relative power gap to Great Britain. The Royal Navy, already the world’s best, was in the process of administrative reforms that would lay the groundwork for imperial dominance in the next century. French leaders worried about what lay over the horizon. They worried that an overbearing naval power could bully its rivals by controlling commercial sea lanes and blockading ports. In 1766, one contemporaneous observer conveyed the views of the French king to the British chargé d’affaires in Madrid: ‘as Masters of the Sea, [the British were] too powerful not to be oppressive, and [he] is firmly of the opinion that no Peace with them can be secure’.

All the elements of France’s grand strategy made sense individually. There was a clear rationale for bolstering French finances, managing the continental balance, and reducing Great Britain’s relative power. The problem was that these goals worked against one another. Spending more to bolster local allies – or to take on the British – undermined efforts to reduce the national debt. And a large war across the Atlantic could divert attention from politics closer to home, while exacerbating the country’s economic turmoil.

An effective grand strategy requires setting priorities and remaining clear-eyed about trade-offs. At first, French leaders tried to finesse the contradictions in their grand strategy by offering only covert support to the American rebels. But when it became clear that limited support was not enough, France signed a treaty with the Americans and entered the war overtly. Doing so invited enormous economic and political risks, potentially exposing the contradictions in French grand strategy. But France’s strategic brilliance in the war allowed the monarchy to ignore these contradictions – at least temporarily.

The fledgling colonies could not defeat Great Britain on their own, and they knew it. The American land force in 1776 was a cobbled-together army of former British officers and amateur patriots. Facing them was a much larger force of seasoned British regulars and professional mercenaries. The British also enjoyed naval supremacy. Absent a strong competitor, the Royal Navy could patrol the coast and use the network of rivers to effectively turn North America into a series of islands. Control of the sea allowed Britain to move and resupply armies quickly, reinforcing their inherent advantages and compounding the problem for the upstart Americans. As the military historian Russell Weigley put it, ‘Washington’s was a generalship shaped by military poverty.’

French material support, then, was enormously important for the American cause. An injection of manpower, money and guns was a vital lifeline for the Colonial Army, and American diplomats in Paris went out of their way to make sure that aid continued to flow. But France did more than bankroll the revolution. It offered an effective strategy that blunted British strength and enabled the Americans to exploit their comparative advantages.

The decision to join the Americans immediately changed the landscape of the war at sea. Great Britain could no longer take maritime supremacy for granted. France possessed 60 fighting ships at its ports at Brest, Toulon and Rochefort, and Spain brought another 50 when it joined the war soon after. The combined Bourbon force was a threat-in-being to the British, who suddenly had reason to fear an amphibious operation across the English Channel while simultaneously threatening its possessions in the Caribbean and Mediterranean. France wanted to protect its lucrative Caribbean colonies and threaten other British holdings as bargaining chips. Spain, for its part, wanted to claim Minorca, West Florida and Gibraltar. All of this complicated Britain’s war.

The French priority in North America was the maintenance of reliable communications with the Continental Army and French expeditionary force. It did not need any glorious victories in Trafalgar-style battles. Its basic goal was supporting the land war by keeping the Royal Navy at bay, and at key moments an indecisive draw might be enough. However unsatisfying to admirals with a desire for decisive victory, this approach made a great deal of strategic sense. France’s cautious approach also reflected its understanding of the tactical and technological balance at sea. The Royal Navy used more powerful short-range cannon to fire at enemy hulls, but the French warships targeted British sails and masts. The point was not to engage the Royal Navy and try to sink its fleets, but to hamper British naval operations.

On land, France orchestrated exceptional joint operations with Washington’s Continental Army. Successful coordination was far from inevitable, given the profound religious and ideological differences between the two countries, and French officials deserve credit for managing what might otherwise have been a very fraught relationship.

French officers did not try to dominate operational planning, despite the fact that the Americans were desperate for help. The Comte de Rochambeau led the French force but accepted a subordinate position to Washington, and made no effort to undermine the American general. Allowing Washington to lead signalled his deference to local knowledge and hard-won experience. It also pre-empted any concerns about coalition disunity and enabled the culminating victory at Yorktown.

The Yorktown campaign itself was a model of strategic flexibility that would have been impossible if the French and Americans had not learned to trust one another.

Washington had planned operations around New York in May 1781, but Rochambeau urged him to march south instead, sensing an opportunity to defeat the British force under General Charles Cornwallis. As late as July, Washington still believed that New York should be the primary target, but intelligence suggested an opportunity to trap Cornwallis against the Virginia coast. Rochambeau’s view prevailed.

As the French and American armies prepared to march towards Virginia, they concocted an elaborate deception campaign to convince the British officers that New York remained their ultimate goal. They also coordinated with French Admiral François Joseph Paul de Grasse, who would sail his fleet up the coast to block the Royal Navy from reinforcing Cornwallis. De Grasse arrived at Yorktown while the combined army was still on the march.

At this point he could have simply parked his squadron in the entrance to the River York to prevent the Royal Navy from reaching Cornwallis, but doing so would have put a separate French fleet at risk: Admiral Barras was simultaneously sailing from Newport with siege guns and other equipment needed for the final effort against the beleaguered British force, and the Royal Navy was coming as well. Instead of remaining in the bay, de Grasse sailed out to meet the British ships. The following battle was indecisive tactically, but hugely important strategically. Barras got through; the Royal Navy did not.

Rochambeau was key to the victory at Yorktown. A veteran of siege warfare, he understood its grim combination of engineering, fortitude and arithmetic. He also understood the importance of timing and urged Washington to adopt a persistent approach. This eased the problem of going too fast, which would put the encircling army at risk, and of going too slow, which would undermine morale. The systematic siege ultimately proved too much for the British force, and Cornwallis surrendered in October. Parliament, upon receiving the news, quickly decided the game was no longer worth the candle.

In addition to its naval and joint military prowess, French strategy was a model of coalition diplomacy. France needed powerful allies that could bolster its own forces in multiple regions and overstretch British resources. But gaining their cooperation required a mix of accommodations and exhortations to satisfy partners with very different goals. Spain was particularly important, given the size of its navy, but it proved a hard sell. The Spanish monarchy was understandably wary of challenging the Royal Navy on behalf of a distant republican revolutionary movement. It preferred to keep its distance, despite dreaming of reclaiming Gibraltar and other possessions. France ultimately secured Spanish support through a combination of implicit threats and explicit promises. Breaking relations with Great Britain was a diplomatic fait accompli because it made it risky for Spain to remain neutral: doing so would earn the enmity of whoever won the war. At the same time, France accommodated Spanish requests in the name of coalition solidarity. It reluctantly supported an ill-conceived Spanish campaign to occupy the Isle of Wight and Portsmouth, a plan which was always a long shot given its logistical demands. Disease, foul weather and bureaucratic friction put an end to the imagined armada, which was a blessing in disguise. The French supported their ally without suffering a military catastrophe.

The coalition operated more effectively as the war went on. The governor of Spanish-controlled Louisiana could have retained a portion of de Grasse’s fleet before it sailed for Yorktown, for instance, but he did not. Releasing the whole fleet improved the odds of blocking the British effort to resupply Cornwallis’ beleaguered force in Virginia. In addition, the Spanish official Francisco de Saavedra served as de Grasse’s principal aide, and together they drew up plans for the Yorktown campaign. Their partnership, a neat symbol of effective coalition diplomacy, was a strategic milestone.

Beating the British didn’t come cheap. France nearly quadrupled its annual state-spending during the war, ultimately raising over a billion livres in support of American independence. This was less than the British spent, but the French lacked the financial instruments to reliably service its growing debt. Indeed, the amount it paid to service the national debt immediately after the war far exceeded its annual appropriations. The French monarchy turned to exotic loans at higher rates to stay afloat, but its economy was quite precarious in the years before the French Revolution. There were multiple causes of the French economic crisis in 1786, to be sure, but the war played a major role. The increasingly costly strategy against the British worked against French grand strategy, which required a dose of austerity.

Nor did the victory signify a long-term reduction in relative British power. Calving the colonies from the metropole did little to impact the strength of British commercial or military power. Indeed, the aftermath proved that Great Britain could profit from American trade without having to occupy American territory. British exports to the colonies dipped very slightly after 1783, and by the 1790s they exceeded pre-war levels. Moreover, increasing global demand for British goods led to a surge in British shipbuilding. The Royal Navy grew in numbers to protect the surge in commercial shipping, and France fell further behind in relative naval strength.

As the French headed towards political calamity, the British headed toward the apogee of imperial power. The British naval reform programme, put on hold during the war, was revived in the aftermath with great energy. Parliament enthusiastically supported the effort; in the first two years after the war, about 40 per cent of the entire national budget went to rebuilding the Royal Navy. Critically, naval modernisation also included efforts to improve the underlying bureaucracy required to organise a globe-spanning fleet. This administrative revolution put the force on a more stable foundation. It also laid the groundwork for a move from mercantilism to a more productive economic regime. The Royal Navy acted as a shield for domestic innovation and enabled a shift to trade liberalism. The economic historian Patrick K. O’Brien emphasises the ‘benign loops’ that emerged over the following decades, linking the navy with commercial, banking and shipbuilding interests. These relationships proved durable.

In short, France and Britain both invested heavily in the American war, but the French margin for error was much thinner. Some observers sensed the problem in advance, including the French comptroller, Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, who warned against intervention. Rather than gamble on the Americans, Turgot urged the regime to focus on bringing order to its unwieldy tax system and boosting French revenues. He also opposed expanding the navy until France achieved fiscal stability. However sound his economic reasoning, Turgot was outmanoeuvred in court politics, and was forced to resign in 1776 after Louis XVI authorised one million livres for the American cause.

Turgot’s fate raises a key counterfactual. What might France have done differently to ensure that its strategy aligned with its grand strategy? One option was continuing to provide limited assistance to the Colonial Army without intervening directly. Covert and limited assistance began in 1775; continuing this modest contribution would not have had a serious impact on French finances. Moreover, although French leaders came to believe that they had reached the limits of limited intervention by 1777, there was reason to believe that the Continental Army could hold its own. The Battle of Saratoga, which threw British strategy into disarray, occurred before the French formally joined the American cause. For all their material weaknesses, the Americans had learned how to take advantage of terrain and superior local knowledge to score important battlefield victories. Moreover, the shortcomings in British strategy were clear by 1777. The Redcoats were still formidable, but the aura of invincibility was gone.

None of this is to suggest that the Americans were destined to win without overt French support. The French intervention was hugely important. Without French troops and ships, there would have been no triumph at Yorktown, no dramatic Parliamentary upheaval, no clear and decisive victory. Without French conventional strategy, the American effort was likely to pursue a ragged open-ended insurgency. This might still have led to independence, but only after a great deal of suffering, and with a potentially different political aftermath. From the French perspective, this would probably have made more sense. At least it would have helped align France’s strategy and grand strategy. A limited war in support of the Americans might have slowly bled British forces, while injecting frustration into British policymaking circles, without paying such an exorbitant cost. France could have marginally reduced British power while strengthening the pillars of its own grand strategy.

France is not the only country to confuse wartime victory with national security. Strategy/grand strategy mismatches are common, and the consequences are often severe. Recent examples include Russia’s war in Ukraine and Israel’s war in Gaza.

Russian grand strategy before the invasion of Ukraine seemed designed to erode western cohesion by channelling dissatisfaction with the post-Cold War liberal international order. Anger over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, discomfort with the US global war on terrorism and frustration with global economic inequality gave Russian propagandists plenty to work with. Alliances and international institutions were particularly vulnerable. NATO was sagging under the weight of continuous military action with no satisfying end in sight, and international institutions were becoming the target for ambitious nationalist politicians.

The February 2022 invasion was inconsistent with this grand strategy, however, not least because it breathed new life into NATO and revived arguments about the need for the West to come together against the forces of illiberalism. Why Putin chose this course is unclear. He might have become impatient with his grand strategic approach, he might have become too optimistic about an easy victory over Ukraine, or both. Whatever the reason, the decision to invade has been enormously costly. The numbers are staggering. A recent analysis of open-source reporting suggests that Russia has suffered more than a million casualties in the war, including hundreds of thousands killed. It has also faced international condemnation and escalating sanctions.

Russia’s theory of victory shifted from rapid conquest to a grinding war of attrition, though this was clearly not Putin’s preference. Stout Ukrainian defences stopped the Russian assault on Kyiv, and after a series of offensives in 2022, the war settled along mostly static frontlines. Putin seemed to be betting on the idea that a long war would sap the West’s will to continue supporting Ukraine’s defence. Kyiv is also stuck in a stalemate, after all, and does not have a clear path to victory. This argument particularly appealed to the White House early in the second Trump administration; the president took to social media to bemoan what he characterised as a meaningless loss of life in Ukraine. Yet Trump has proven unwilling to force Ukraine to end the war on Russian terms. Like President Biden, he has increased sanctions on Russia and lifted restrictions on Ukrainian military operations using western-supplied military hardware. Russian strategy has led it to a dismal place: stuck in a horrendously costly war of attrition, increasingly isolated in world politics, and dependent on China as an economic lifeline. Its strategy has become utterly decoupled from its prewar grand strategy – and it is paying the price.

Israel’s war against Hamas is also instructive. Before Hamas’ 7 October attack, Israel had a straightforward grand strategy to deal with militant violence and the broader Arab-Israeli conflict. Its theory of security started with the proposition that Hamas and Hezbollah were unserious about diplomacy, as were their state sponsors. The peace process failed because Israel’s enemies did not want peace. Faced with incorrigible armed groups dedicated to Israel’s demise, Israeli leaders decided to downplay negotiations and focus on physical defences. No lasting peace could come from negotiations with untrustworthy counterparts; the failure of diplomacy made that abundantly clear. Better to make Israel impregnable, prevent Palestinians from uniting under a single party and ‘mow the grass’ in occasional operations against militant groups. Perhaps Palestinian officials would moderate over time, though when, if ever, such a change would occur was a mystery. In the meantime, Israel would harden its defences and contain its foes.

Whatever one thinks of this theory of security, it was at least coherent. The problem was that it absolved Israel from having to devise a theory of victory in the event of war. Indeed, overconfidence about the border defences surrounding Gaza made war seem unrealistic. Hamas might employ sporadic rocket attacks and low-level violence, but it could not hope to overcome the technologically sophisticated border wall and associated surveillance system. According to some Israeli intelligence scholars, this was part of a long-term shift in Israel that substituted technological supremacy for early warning analysis. Hamas’s attack was thus a genuine surprise; Israel scrambled to piece together its strategic response. Israeli leaders left no doubt that they would go to war to remove Hamas from power, but they could not say what Gaza would look like in the aftermath. Remarkably, some senior Israeli officials publicly castigated their own government for its unwillingness to imagine the outlines of an acceptable post-Hamas regime. Israel’s grand strategy, however practical in peacetime, was proving to be an obstacle to strategy in war. Having invaded Gaza, it had no ready answers to classic strategic questions: How far do we go militarily? How much do we demand politically? Who will rule the peace?

France was a declining power at the time of the American Revolution, a monarchy confronting radical new political ideas, and a country beset by profound social and economic turmoil. French leaders also faced a complex international landscape. Fears of British naval dominance conspired with anxieties about the European land balance, and alliances built over many years now looked wobbly. France believed that defeating Great Britain would address one problem while restoring its prestige. The irony, however, was that strategic success meant trouble for grand strategy.

What can the United States take from the French tragedy? Can it learn anything? Comparing Bourbon France to contemporary Washington is, at first glance, absurd. France was a monarchy with a rudimentary tax system and an economy driven by agriculture and cottage industries. Extraordinary social and economic inequalities led to deep discontent, fuelling revolutionary notions about the role of the state. While its large population gave it military potential, its navy was clearly inferior to Great Britain’s, both in terms of technology and tactics. It was unclear that France could fight effectively against British forces, which is one reason why some French officials opposed the war in the first place. French troubles in the 18th century dwarfed those faced by the United States today.

Yet there are echoes of the French dilemma in the present. Intense partisan fighting has combined with increasing public disillusionment with government institutions. Declining faith in government has destabilised American politics; longstanding social norms and expectations about acceptable behaviour have lost their power. A generation of politicians, on the left as well as the right, have seized on widespread disillusionment with institutions. Some see an opportunity to build support for vastly expanding social programmes and administrative support for vulnerable communities. Others, including the Trump administration, see an opportunity to break down the administrative state. These opposing visions are playing out in increasingly vitriolic – and sometimes violent – encounters.

There are also echoes in foreign affairs. US officials, like their Bourbon ancestors, are wrestling with the potential consequences of multipolarity. In the Cold War, there were two superpowers; in the post-Cold War era there was one. Defence analysts today, in contrast, cannot agree on how to describe the present balance of power. Some argue that the United States still enjoys pride of place in the international system; some argue that the system has reverted to what Emma Ashford calls ‘unbalanced bipolarity’; and still others argue that multipolarity is already here. France had to grapple with a dominant naval great power as well as a complicated mix of great powers and regional states on the continent. French leaders had to make hard choices about whether to invest in distant wars or husband their resources for conflicts closer to home. This dilemma was one reason why French grand strategy became muddled in contradictions.

Avoiding that fate will require a frank conversation about American priorities today. US grand strategy continues to operate on the assumption that it can sustain a large forward military posture and that it can deal with a variety of scenarios in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Western Hemisphere. But this assumption has faced criticism, especially given the costs of the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the day-to-day demands of patrolling across vast distances. To some extent, growing support for a more restrained grand strategy reflects a kind of exhaustion with American primacy, along with a fear that continuing to station forces abroad increases the danger that US forces will become mired in new conflicts. Yet there remains a powerful bipartisan constituency for preparing for possible conflicts with China, Russia and regional rivals. Advocates of primacy see the rise of other great powers as a warning sign. From their perspective, American restraint will encourage foreign aggression and put American security in jeopardy.

The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy calls for setting clear priorities and allocating resources effectively. Blaming previous administrations for avoiding hard choices, it promises the kind of ruthless means-to-ends logic that will avoid overextending American commitments. The president, however, values ambiguity about his true intentions, believing that this allows flexibility and provides bargaining leverage. Policy choices are thus liable to swing wildly. In addition, Trump is deeply suspicious of powerful national security institutions, having made it his mission to ‘drain the swamp’ since his first run for office. This is problematic for a country that chooses war, a gigantically complex bureaucratic enterprise which requires clarity about US intentions and a commitment to bureaucratic professionalism. Trump’s approach to international affairs — a personalist view that sees politics as a series of negotiated bargains among strong men — does not leave any room for clear priorities or organisational continuity.

At the outset of Trump’s second term, I worried that his political instincts might make sense for peacetime grand strategy, but not for wartime strategy. As I wrote in these pages: ‘Trump’s preference for transactionalism and uncertainty, along with his ongoing effort to eviscerate the national security bureaucracy, will make it more difficult to implement strategies with a better chance of success. Because Trump’s approach to grand strategy increases the odds of another strategic quagmire, history may remember his second term as a grim irony.’ While it is too soon to make definitive judgments, the recent war in Iran seems to point in that direction. The president seems to have believed that a rapid bombing campaign would topple the regime, leaving in place a new government willing to bend to US pressure. But the bombing did not lead to regime change; it bolstered hardliners in Tehran. According to some observers, the net result has bolstered other great powers at America’s expense, and given them new opportunities to erode US advantages. Trump’s predilections cut against the logic of his administration’s stated grand strategy, creating uncertainty about American national security policy, and working against coherent strategy in war.

France never quite resolved the opposite impulses that bedevilled its grand strategy. Fiscal conservatives in Versailles made compelling arguments and some diplomats argued for reconciliation with Great Britain rather than conflict. The crown accepted some of these arguments for a long time before the war, but it increasingly became convinced that it could impose costs on Great Britain without undermining its continental diplomacy and nascent economic reform programme. The unwillingness to settle on first principles led to a grand strategy rife with contradictions. The White House would do well to avoid the same trap.

Two other lessons stand out. The first is that battlefield excellence is not a substitute for strategy, and lethality is not the same as security. President Trump revels in military operations that seem to resolve longstanding problems with little cost or risk – witness his victory lap after US bombers targeted Iran’s nuclear programme in June 2025, and when US special forces captured Venezuela’s president in January 2026. Meanwhile, the Pentagon under Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has chosen a back-to-basics focus on improving tactical performance. This is understandable, given the resurgence of conventional war alongside continuing counterterrorist operations. Yet Hegseth’s emphasis on lethality is misguided, because it suggests that the key metric for wartime success is killing power. The ability to destroy is not the same as the ability to translate military force into political results. Increasing the enemy’s body count is not the same as compelling the enemy to stand down – and to accept the idea of losing. Sometimes it has exactly the opposite effect. Lethality run amok is likely to generate lasting antipathy and mistrust among those on the wrong end of the spear, meaning that battlefield victories will, at best, produce only temporary gains. Excessive killing in war will complicate grand strategy in the aftermath.

The second lesson is to avoid military mythology. France’s extraordinary strategic triumph in the American War of Independence hid the real problems of its grand strategy. It was much easier to revel in memories of battlefield glory than to address those issues. The United States has experienced a version of this problem since the end of the Cold War. Its dramatic victory over Iraq in 1991 convinced a generation of leaders that American military power could solve a host of other policy problems: humanitarian crises, terrorist movements, WMD proliferation and rogue states. American military prowess was clearly impressive, and many of today’s defence officials came of age watching nightly news reports of stealth fighters and smart bombs. It is not surprising that every post-1991 administration turned to military force. No other instrument of national power seemed to offer such decisive results.

Yet those results, however satisfying at the time, often left broader grand strategic issues unresolved. American leaders were never sure that they had mitigated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, despite the lopsided victory in Operation Desert Storm. Similarly, high-technology counterterrorism operations before and after 9/11 did not create a feeling of durable safety. And humanitarian interventions led to long-term military occupations that have sometimes frustrated policymakers’ best intentions, along with their hopes for a quick win. Postwar regrets are inevitable because war is a domain of political uncertainty and moral complexity. We should resist the temptation to indulge in myths of past triumphs that paper over those issues. Doing so is a recipe for suffering the same fate.