Policy and Strategy in practice

If we review the recorded wars of human history, it is rarely, if ever, possible to point to any precise dividing line between politics and the use of armed force as its tool. Much writing about Strategy presupposes that there is none: the ideal for Guibert, Clausewitz and many others was a Strategy-making process in which the supreme political decision-maker was identical with the supreme military commander, in the tradition of Alexander the Great, Gustavus Adolphus, Frederick II of Prussia or Napoleon. Once it became clear that the norm was that the two were not identical, many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century military men, led by Prussian military thinkers, postulated that politics (and diplomacy) had no role to play once war had been declared, and could only resume its functions once war had been ended by victory/defeat or armistice (Lossau 1815: 7). This assumption (which originated in Prussia, but was not confined to it) was largely a function of the contempt in which the age of militarism held politics, politicians, ministers, diplomats and civilians in general. The Second World War would prove a watershed in this respect. Since then, the demands of politics and technical possibilities and limitations of warfare have had too many mutual implications to be seen as separable, particularly when with the spread of democracy, public opinion matters more than ever before.

The one-time strategic adviser and US Secretary of Defense Henry Kissinger, himself a historian of the nineteenth century, wrote in the Cold War:

Nor did he believe in the existence of ‘purely’ political considerations (Kissinger 1957: 422).