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,...
