Christopher Coker
The Greatest Game
Zbigniew Brzezinski: America’s Grand Strategist
By Justin Vaïsse (Translated by Catherine Porter)
Harvard University Press 505pp £25.95 order from our bookshop
On Grand Strategy
By John Lewis Gaddis
Allen Lane 368pp £25 order from our bookshop
The great powers do not often appear to have a strategy. Caught out admitting that his administration had no strategy for Syria, Barack Obama came back a week later with a ‘game plan’. In her memoirs, his former secretary of state Hillary Clinton insisted that ‘great nations need an organising principle’. It wasn’t enough, she added rather archly, to adhere to such slogans as ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’. But when, a few years later, she was campaigning for the presidency, she didn’t put forward a strategy, only a slogan, ‘Stronger Together’, chosen from a list of eighty-three others. A slogan is a very weak substitute for a strategy. In his very last op-ed piece for the New York Times, Zbigniew Brzezinski stressed that ‘Make America Great Again’ and ‘America First’ were all very well as bumper stickers but that the foreign policy of the USA needed to consist of much more than that if world order was to be secured.
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