Grand Strategy in a Chaotic World

Sunday

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History has always been chaotic and, because chaotic, essentially unpredictable. One of the exciting intellectual developments of our time is the emergence and formalization of a mathematical theory of chaos that has allowed us to considerably refine our untutored intuitions as to exactly what is chaotic and why it is unpredictable. Chaos theory has made us explicitly aware of the role of aperiodicity, sensitive dependence on initial conditions, the possibility of instability at any point in a continuum, and the power of iteration. While these lessons have primarily been applied to natural history, we would do well to heed similar lessons in regard to human history. As I have pointed out in Integral History, human history must be contextualized in natural history so that it becomes a sub-discipline of natural history — or a new synthetic historical discipline that we can call integral history.

There is a sense in which cosmology is the pursuit of knowledge of the initial conditions of the world. Suffice it to say that our knowledge of cosmology is still far from complete. Indeed, I recently wrote (in The Pleasures of Model Drift) that we have seen a genuine case of model drift in cosmology as advocates of the Big Bang Theory attempt to accommodate their dominant model to the discovery that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate rather than the previously expected decelerating rate. Thus we cannot expect anything like a thorough knowledge of the initial conditions of the world any time soon, and given sensitive dependence on initial conditions we cannot therefore expect accurate long-range historical predictions any time soon.

As long as cosmology remains essentially mysterious to us, we will not know the initial conditions of the world, and as long as we do not know the initial conditions of the world our attempts to predict the future course of the world will be problematic at best, futile at worst, and the more futile the farther in the future we attempt to make any predictions.

Recently I mentioned that the perils of prediction had been on my mind because I had just finished with George Friedman’s The Next 100 Years. As a consequence, I have been thinking about the possibilities and scope of prediction. I would not completely forswear the possibility of any prediction, but prediction must be carefully defined and its scope — in space, in time, and in detail — equally carefully circumscribed. This is precisely what has been lacking in strategic and geopolitical thinking: careful definitions. Strategic thinking tends to be a broad-brush activity, or, when made scholarly, pedantic to the point of being soporific.

I had already started to approach this position back in December of 2008 when I posted Natural History and Human History. This little-read post still largely expresses my point of view, though I would write it a little differently now. Since that time I have emphasized a structural approach to history, focusing on the longue durée, and quoting my favorite passage from Braudel:

Events are the ephemera of history; they pass across its stage like fireflies, hardly glimpsed before they settle back into darkness and as often as not into oblivion.

Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Volume 2, Part Three: Event, Politics and People, p. 901

This quote is in the same spirit as the position I began to develop in Natural History and Human History. There I called weather the “news” of natural history; now I would characterize the weather as the ephemera of natural history. But we need not concern ourselves exclusively with ephemera. Both natural history and human history admit of a longue durée, and both of these exhibit some long term patterns that can be clearly and distinctly identified. Since grand strategy rightly concerns itself with the largest formations of history, and addresses them with similarly large and long-term aims, it must take this large scale view of history. Indeed, I suggest that we could define grand strategy as natural history subordinated to human agency. (Remember that; I will come back to it in time.)

Although politics at its highest levels is often a profoundly amoral enterprise, having a grand strategy is a lot like having a moral system: you have a number of purposes you want to achieve, and you go about achieving them as best you can. Often — actually, almost always — events intervene, and, as Bobby Burns prophetically put it:

The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!

Well, the grand strategy of a political entity may not quite promise joy, but, at its best, it does promise something like joy, as in the vision intoned over the infant Elizabeth in the Shakespeare’s The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eight (in the language of the First Folio):

In her dayes, Euery Man shall eate in safety,
Vnder his owne Vine what he plants; and sing
The merry Songs of Peace to all his Neighbours.
God shall be truely knowne, and those about her,
From her shall read the perfect way of Honour,
And by those claime their greatnesse; not by Blood.

Some political entities are so constituted so that the emphasis falls upon “Euery Man shall eate in safety” while in others the emphasis is on “God shall be truely knowne.” Perhaps only Bhutan, with its Gross National Happiness as formulated by former King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, would prioritize the singing of merry songs of peace. Shakespeare here demonstrates his greatness by being able to sum up these diverse attributes of success in a few lines of blank verse.

Grand strategy is the human ambition for the longue durée. It is not the only human ambition, of course. There are a great many human ambitions of shorter term and of more restricted scope, but grand strategy pretty much sums up the master ambitions that men have for themselves, for their fellow man, and for their projects. Thus grand strategy is at the apex of a pyramid that grows in complexity and detail as it descends from the most general ideas of grand strategy to the most particular tactics for achieving a strategy.

The reality of a chaotic world means that our best efforts will be met with repeated reversals. The only way to carry through any purpose is to patiently and consistently guide it through the twists and turns of fate. If we become impatient, or our purposes change, our efforts will never issue in the intended outcome. Unintended consequences will grow over time and will eventually swamp intended consequences. Thus even if grand strategy remains consistent over time, it will always be as much a process as an envisioned end, and the process will be that of keeping focused on the envisioned end despite failures, reversals, and distractions.

I made the claim above that strategic thinking has suffered from a want of clear definitions. It seems that the attempted implementation of strategy also suffers from a want of attention to detail, though the kind of care that must be invested in implementation is distinct from the kind of care that must be invested in arriving at an adequate theoretical framework for strategic thought… but this is a topic for another post.

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