Recalling the experience of working on the grand strategy volumes of the British Government’s official history of the Second World War, Sir Michael Howard remarked that “the editor never told me what Grand Strategy was, and none of my colleagues seem to have asked.” Finding no definition of the term, Howard was obliged to make up his own.[1] This conceptual uncertainty has been a feature of debates over grand strategy ever since. A recent exchange on Twitter encapsulated the problem. In it, the philosopher and military ethicist Professor Pauline Shanks Kaurin asked for a definition of the term. When asked why she had posed the question, she made the honest admission that, “I sat in on a lecture on [Grand Strategy] and geopolitics today and I realized I’m not sure I understand what [Grand Strategy] is precisely.” Just as Howard had encountered half a century earlier, the resulting replies made clear that reliable definitions of grand strategy are hard to come by.
This lack of a clear or usable definition has prompted a series of attempts to try and provide clarity to discussions of grand strategy.[2] Many of these, including those by Paul Kennedy, Hal Brands, and Lukas Milveski, make an attempt to understand grand strategy by returning to history.[3] By discovering the term’s origins, it is
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