From the editors

The articles in this issue of The Journal of Strategic Studies illustrate the importance of history to strategic studies by examining key episodes and themes in international relations since the late Nineteenth Century.

In the first article, Jack S. Levy (Rutgers University) and William Mulligan (University College Dublin) take a different approach to the question of whether commercial ties promote peace. They examine the trade-force relationships of great and small powers, in particular Prussian strategies to influence German states before the Franco-Prussian War, and Austro-Hungarian and Russian influence strategies in the Balkans before 1914.¹ They conclude that in a competition for support among smaller states, a great power at a competitive disadvantage in economic means may adopt more militarised strategies. In general, great powers well situated in networks of interdependence benefit from their advantages, including coercing small powers, but interdependence may also incentivise less well-situated great powers to resort to military posturing, threats, and even force.

Next come two articles that offer insights about strategy drawn from the Second World War. Grant Golub (now at Harvard University) challenges the long-accepted view that in 1940–41 American war planners advocated a direct Germany-first strategy whereas their British counterparts preferred a peripheral or indirect strategy, and that after Pearl Harbor the US adopted the latter approach. Based on a close study of the sources, Golub argues that in fact the Americans also appreciated that the path to victory was indirect. In the next essay, Woody Wu (Renmin University) sheds light on a neglected aspect of China’s war. He argues that the Yangtze was not just central to the Kuomintang’s strategy, but that it also became integrated into the broader Allied war effort. The Sino-American effort to interdict iron shipments on the river, for instance, contributed to the collapse of the Japanese wartime economy. Both essays demonstrate that there is still much to be learned from the study of strategy making during the Second World War, particularly from archival sources.²

The next three articles in this issue analyse the Cold War to cast new light on key issues in strategic studies such as credibility, alliance politics and arms control. Dan Altman (Georgia State University) analysed declassified sources concerning the Cuban Missile Crisis to show how decision-makers exploit the ambiguity of ‘red lines’ and their enforcement in a diplomatic crisis. Jeffrey Michaels (Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals) studies the archives to explore what NATO officials thought about how the alliance should make decisions about using nuclear weapons.³ To avoid undermining Alliance cohesion, he argues, the process was kept deliberately vague, despite the predictable problems that would have arisen in the event of a nuclear war.⁴ Finally, Aaron Bateman (George Washington University) uses newly declassified documents to explore how Washington and Moscow navigated the boundaries of secrecy concerning space reconnaissance to create a robust arms control verification regime to reinforce controls on the nuclear arms race.⁵

Our last essay by Robert G. Angevine and Jeffrey S. McKitrick (both of the Institute for Defense Analyses) focuses on the intellectual life of Andrew W. Marshall, the long serving Pentagon official who founded the discipline of net assessment.⁶ The authors examine the intellectual foundations of Marshall’s approach to evaluating international competition, his basic beliefs about human endeavours, and his strategy for exerting influence in the US government. As their article amply illustrates, Marshall’s deep interest in the history of strategy informed his understanding of potential shifts in the security environment.

In this issue’s review essay, Claire Yorke (University of Southern Denmark) poses the question, is empathy a strategic imperative? Yorke’s analysis of the existing literature on the topic offers an intriguingly yet provisional affirmative answer that promises to transform our understanding of strategy, and she suggest further lines of research to confirm that proposition. Susan Colburn (Duke University) reviews Jussi M. Hanhimäki’s Pax Transatlantica and Mary E. Sarotte’s Not One Inch, two timely studies of NATO policy making that have particular relevance since 24 February 2022.⁷

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Also see Jack S. Levy and William Mulligan, ‘Shifting Power, Preventive Logic and the Response of the Target: Germany, Russia, and the First World War’, Journal of Strategic Studies 40/5 (2017), 731–69.

² For other studies of the two world wars, see Aleksandr Vershinin, ‘My task is to get into the French army’: Soviet strategy and the origins of Soviet-French military cooperation in the 1930s’, Journal of Strategic Studies 44/5 (2021), 685–714; Matthew S. Seligmann, ‘The special service squadron of the Royal Marines’: The Royal Navy and organic amphibious warfare capability before 1914’, Journal of Strategic Studies 44/5 (2021), 715–36; Matthew Heaslip, ‘Britain’s armed forces and amphibious operations in peace and war 1919–1939: A Gallipoli Curse?’ Journal of Strategic Studies 44/5 (2021), 737–59.

³ Also see Stéfanie von Hlatky & Thomas Juneau, ‘When the coalition determines the mission: NATO’s detour in Libya’ Journal of Strategic Studies 45/2 (2022), 258–79; Or Rabinowitz & Jayita Sarkar, ‘“It isn’t over until the fuel cell sings”: A reassessment of the US and French pledges of nuclear assistance in the 1970s’, Journal of Strategic Studies 41/1–2 (2018), 275–300.

⁴ Jeffrey H. Michaels, ‘Visions of the next war or reliving the last one? Early alliance views of war with the Soviet Bloc’, Journal of Strategic Studies 43/6–7 (2020), 990–1013.

⁵ For his earlier contribution on a similar theme, see Bateman, Aaron, ’Mutually Assured Surveillance at Risk: Anti-Satellite Weapons and Cold War Arms Control’, Journal of Strategic Studies 45/1 (2022), 119–42.

⁶ For another study of Marshall, see Dmitry (Dima) Adamsky, ‘The Art of Net Assessment and Uncovering Foreign Military Innovations: Learning from Andrew W. Marshall’s Legacy’, Journal of Strategic Studies 43 (2020), 611–44.

⁷ Hanhimäki, Jussi M., Pax Transatlantica: America and Europe in the Post – Cold War Era (Oxford: Oxford UP 2021) and Sarotte, M.E., Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post – Cold War Stalemate (New Haven: Yale UP 2021). Also see Susan Colbourn, ‘Debating détente: NATO’s Tindemans Initiative, or why the Harmel Report still mattered in the 1980s’ 43/6–7 JSS (2020) 897–919