From the Editors

The first article in the final issue of volume 41 makes a compelling case for the importance of history to the understanding of strategy, a message that readers of The Journal of Strategic Studies will know is dear to the heart of the editors.¹

In ‘Wisdom without tears: Statecraft and the uses of history’, Hal Brands of The Johns Hopkins University and William Inboden of the University of Texas go one step further, arguing that the making of American statecraft can be significantly enhanced by a better and more systematic appreciation of the past. They note that other important international actors pay close attention to their histories and that most conflicts today are mired in conflicting historical memories that demand the attention of anyone seeking to alleviate them. History offers no timeless ‘lessons’, but a sophisticated engagement with the past offers policy makers a deep source of wisdom.²

Contemporary statesmen would do well to read Jared McKinney’s detailed and nuanced study of British diplomacy during the July crisis of 1914.³ A PhD student at Nanyang Technological University of Singapore, McKinney challenges the accepted wisdom that British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey’s call for a conference of the great powers that summer might have averted war had Germany agreed to the proposal. McKinney argues that Grey’s achievement in resolving the Balkan crisis in 1912 through conference diplomacy, however, had misled him into believing that this earlier success could be replicated in 1914. Grey’s calls for a revival of the Concert of Europe in fact encouraged international inaction during the first phase of the July Crisis and then tacitly encouraged the fateful step Russia took in ordering mobilisation. A fixation with a past success applied to a new situation can thus lead to a catastrophic failure.⁴

The next article by Brian Hall of Salford University illustrates that the study of strategy is genuinely a conversation with the past. Modern social science concepts such as information management, for instance, can shed light on previously overlooked or misunderstood revolutions in military affairs. In his study of the British army’s use of information during the First World War, Hall shows that an increasingly sophisticated approach to information management helped to transform the British Army into the modern combat machine that marched to victory in 1918.⁵

Thomas-Durell Young of the US Naval Postgraduate School asks why defence planning in Post-Communist European states failed to produce viable defence plans that were based on objective costing and operational planning data? Young shows that this policy-planning failure did not originate from any lack of investment, education and training by NATO or the US Department of Defence, but from the failure to develop an over-arching policy frameworks that directed all the activities of the armed forces and which de-centralisation financial decision-making. Young’s research illustrates the enormous difficulties in transferring the methods of past planning successes from one historically conditioned set of institutions to another different time and place.⁶

The final essay in this volume is a review of four recent books on President Woodrow Wilson, the First World War and the construction of the post-1919 world order by Ross Kennedy of Illinois State University. Was Wilsonian diplomacy from 1917 to 1920 a grand Machiavellian project for American global domination? Was it a fatally flawed and naïve attempt to reshape the world in America’s image that ignored the realities of power politics and imperialism? Was Wilson’s vision of a new order a genuine and viable break from the pre-1914 world order? Or was Wilson but a function of the deeper imperatives driving the US entry into the global age? Kennedy’s judicious and insightful analysis of the literature takes us back to the point made by Brands and Inboden, that the study of the past is a rich, sophisticated and contested intellectual arena from which much wisdom about contemporary statecraft can be obtained.

Finally, the editors wish to thank our contributors, referees and editorial board for making volume 41 a great success. We would also like to thank the team at Taylor and Francis: Alison Campbell, our managing editor, Elliott Finn, our assistant editor, Elaine Roberts, our marketing manager, and Christopher Recamara, our production supervisor, for their outstanding professionalism, dedication and patience.

Notes

¹ Other recent articles have made a similar point in the fields of geopolitics and maritime strategy: Zhengyu Wu, ‘Classical geopolitics, realism and the balance of power theory’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 41/6 (2018), 786–823; R. Gerald Hughes & Jesse Heley, ‘Between Man and Nature: The Enduring Wisdom of Sir Halford J. Mackinder’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 38/6 (2015), 898–935; Beatrice Heuser, ‘Regina Maris and the Command of the Sea: The Sixteenth Century Origins of Modern Maritime Strategy’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 40/1–2 (2017), 225–262. On the importance of counterfactual reasoning and strategy see Paul Schuurman, ‘What-If at Waterloo. Carl von Clausewitz’s use of historical counterfactuals in his history of the Campaign of 1815‘, Journal of Strategic Studies, 40/7 (2017), 1016–1038. The JSS has also published key work on operational experience and learning: Nina A. Kollars, Richard R. Muller & Andrew Santora, ‘Learning to Fight and Fighting to Learn: Practitioners and the Role of Unit Publications in VIII Fighter Command 1943–1944’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 39/7 (2016), 1044–1067.

² For an example of this historically-minded approach applied, see Hal Brands & Peter Feaver, ‘The case for Bush revisionism: Reevaluating the legacy of America’s 43rd president’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 41/1–2 (2018), 234–274.

³ Campbell Craig and Sergey Radchenko demonstrate how Khrushchev’s past experiences shaped his nuclear diplomacy in ‘MAD, not Marx: Khrushchev and the nuclear revolution’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 41/1–2 (2018), 208–233.

⁴ On the problem of when statesmen fail to recognise their own success see Joshua Rovner, ‘Delusion of Defeat: The United States and Iraq, 1990–1998’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 37/4 (2014), 482–507.

⁵ On information management and war see also Colin F. Jackson. ‘Information Is Not a Weapons System’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 39/5–6 (2016), 820–846.

⁶ Also see Thomas-Durell Young, ‘When Programming Trumps Policy and Plans: The Case of the US Department of the Navy’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 39/7 (2016), 936–955.