‘No operational plan extends with any certainty beyond the first clash with the main enemy forces’, taught Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke, architect of military victory in the wars of German unification that Bismarck triggered between 1864 and 1871. Or, as Field Marshal Slim put it more laconically: ‘I should have remembered that battles, at least the ones I had been engaged in, very rarely went quite according to plan.’ It is another military adagio that applies to grand strategy as a whole. The other players have a strategy too, hence implementing one's own strategy requires agility: the willingness and the decision-making structures to rapidly and flexibly adapt strategy to changing circumstances. Deciding on grand strategy usually requires long debates and complex procedures, however, involving many entities within the state: different parties or factions, different ministries, the armed forces. Once the decision is taken, those players usually are reluctant to make great changes, for fear of upsetting the equilibrium between them, or of domestic political consequences. It is only human that the people who have signed off on the strategy become attached to their ‘beautiful’ strategic concept and their ‘perfect’ plans – but that is a decidedly unstrategic attitude. The principles of grand strategy may be summarised in ten words and carved into stone (or so I pretend), but actual strategy should be subject to constant assessment and review. ‘A little more time, a little more help, a little more confidence, a few more honest men, the blessing of Providence and a rather better telephone service – all would have been well!’: every scheme can be a close run thing, as Churchill indicated. And if it does go wrong, one needs to adapt fast.

One way of ensuring a regular review is to institutionalise it, and to enshrine in law that a new grand strategy must be adopted at fixed intervals. As seen in Chapter 1, every US president has a legal obligation to present a National Security Strategy. In China, the five-yearly congress of the CCP provides a regular framework. No equivalent obligation exists in Russia, but Moscow issues new strategies regularly.