Grand-Strategic Thinking in History

Abstract

Something that is recognizably and consciously “grand strategic” emerges in British political and foreign policy debates from the late nineteenth century onwards, but this chapter argues that certain grand-strategic assumptions were present even earlier in the century. A clearly identifiable British grand-strategic rationale—an understanding of the country’s “place in the world”—emerged out of the Napoleonic Wars and developed across the middle decades of the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, this grand-strategic thinking was key to the “soft landing” Britain sought to engineer in the aftermath of the Second World War as its position began to contract rapidly and radically from a world power into a Continental power. The examples discussed here are Lord Castlereagh, George Canning, and Viscount Palmerston in the nineteenth century; and several Foreign Office officials in the twentieth, but most notably Gladwyn Jebb. In its early incarnations, grand strategy is better thought of not as a process (leading to the production of plans) but as a habit of mind: a conscious attempt to look beyond the confines of short-term requirements of national defense or immediate foreign policy dilemmas.