The Shaping of Grand Strategy
Policy, Diplomacy, and War

The successes as well as failures of great states attempting to create grand strategies that work.

Williamson Murray (Edited by), Richard Hart Sinnreich (Edited by), James Lacey (Edited by)

9780521156332, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 14 February 2011

294 pages
22.6 x 15.2 x 2 cm, 0.4 kg

"Important reading for anyone interested in the shaping of wartime policy." -The NYMAS REVIEW

Within a variety of historical contexts, The Shaping of Grand Strategy addresses the most important tasks states have confronted: namely, how to protect their citizens against the short-range as well as long-range dangers their polities confront in the present and may confront in the future. To be successful, grand strategy demands that governments and leaders chart a course that involves more than simply reacting to immediate events. Above all, it demands they adapt to sudden and major changes in the international environment, which more often than not involves the outbreak of great conflicts but at times demands recognition of major economic, political, or diplomatic changes. This collection of essays explores the successes as well as failures of great states attempting to create grand strategies that work and aims at achieving an understanding of some of the extraordinary difficulties involved in casting, evolving and adapting grand strategy to the realities of the world.

1. Thoughts on grand strategy Williamson Murray
2. The grand strategy of the Grand Siècle: learning from the wars of Louis XIV John A. Lynn II
3. Strategic culture and the Seven Years' War Jeremy Black
4. Strategy as character: Bismarck and the Prusso-German question, 1862–78 Marcus Jones
5. About turn: British grand strategy from Salisbury to Grey Richard Hart Sinnreich
6. British grand strategy, 1933–42 Williamson Murray
7. Towards a strategy: creating an American strategy for global war, 1940–3 James Lacey
8. Harry S. Truman and the forming of American grand strategy in the Cold War, 1945–53 Colin S. Gray
9. Concluding thoughts Richard Hart Sinnreich.

Subject Areas: Military history [HBW], General & world history [HBG]