As head judge of Wikistrat’s International Grand Strategy Competition, I wanted to update everybody on what has unfolded across the third week of the contest. As you may already know, the competition brings together approximately 30 teams comprised of PhD and masters students from elite international schools and world-renowned think tanks. Those teams, evenly distributed over a dozen or so countries (so as to encourage intra-country as well as inter-country competition), were challenged in Week 3 to come up with grand strategies in relation to their country-team assignments (Brazil, China, EU, India, Iran, Israel, Japan, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, South Africa, Turkey & US).

As head judge, I assign points to teams based on their activity throughout the week. Coming off this crucial third week (after all, we’re all about grand strategy at Wikistrat), I wanted to highlight some of the lessons that I think the participants should take away from this collaborative competition when it comes to crafting and selling strategic visions.

1) Survival is never enough

Every regime wants to survive, and that’s always objective #1, but it cannot take up significant space in a strategic vision, because the more it centers the strategy, the less wiggle room ensues. Remember: strategy is more about keeping choices available than shutting them down. Worse, a fixation on sheer survival tends to obviate exploration of motive, and rationales matter plenty. For example, if I were to ask you where you want to be as a person in 2020, you wouldn’t answer that you want your heart, lungs and brain to still be working, because those baseline goals are taken for granted. And even if your response started with your health, the real purpose of that statement is to mark off possibilities that you want to keep in play (“I want to be healthy enough to . . .”). So no matter how bad a situation is for any country, their leaders are always thinking beyond just getting by, because some vision of progress is required to maintain morale among the “troops,” who, if they sense no purpose or way forward, will turn on leadership that seeks only personal survival.

2) Recognize internal pain but speak to external possibilities

The best grand strategies acknowledge what is wrong with their nations but don’t get stuck on that point – or let their strategies become overwhelmingly “internalized” on that basis (e.g., “Only after we comprehensively fix our country can we hope to address this complex world.”). Whatever reforms or internal “housecleaning” is required are but a stepping-stone to expanding and exploiting external opportunities, thus the grand strategy’s (hopefully) compelling logic is added to whatever domestic impetus exists for necessary change. Plus, external opportunities are often the cure for what ails internally, or at least a crucial part of the overall solution. This is the basic logic of comparative advantage and effective grand strategies are all about maximizing that exchange for the nation as a whole. In their best forms, the twin efforts at reshaping the internal and external environments are conducted in a co-evolutionary fashion that recognizes valuable interdependencies, with neither strategy holding strict superiority over the other.

3) The sale needs to be both internal and external

Grand strategies need to be so organic to the nation’s ethos that they are less “sold” than virally spread (they just feel right – right now), with the key being to tap into the society’s natural tendency toward this or that vision of its place in the world. Every nation has its capacities for “depressive” isolationism and “manic” evangelicalism, and depending on the desired course correction, hot-button memes are typically employed to fire-up the faithful. The best grand strategies recognize this deep-connection requirement at home, but likewise understand that it’s just as important to market the desirability of the vision to the outside world (or as much of it as will be immediately affected). Hegemony is a mixture of fear (hard power) and attraction (soft power), so the external sale cannot be neglected. In today’s interconnected world, influence resembles respect: it cannot be imposed but must be earned.  

4) Modeling yourself on a pathway that worked

Grand strategies are stories at heart – national narratives. Experts say there are only so many stories in this world (boy meets girls, the quest, etc.), and the same can be said of grand strategies. The most coherent entries this week all evoked some past power’s rise and choices they made along the way. One China team’s grand strategy, for example, read an awful lot like Alexander Hamilton’s 1790 vision of future American power. Yes, Hamilton was most definitely interested in the survival of the United States, but he also aimed to replace Britain as the global power by the mid-19th century and used that grand measuring stick in every major decision he pursued. Of course, not every nation can aim that high all the time, and America itself, in its turn-of-the-20th-century rising phase, often took to arguing the rules of the system (see the arbitrationism of Theodore Roosevelt and Elihu Root) as a means of covering its hard power deficiencies and – later with Woodrow Wilson – expressing its sheer idealism. We see some of the same impulses in today’s India and Brazil, and good entries from those teams ably captured that mindset.

5) Choices must be made

The best grand strategies presented last week made clear choices versus simply enunciating broad goals. They all passed the “as opposed to . . .” quip/test (“You say your nation’s number one goal is to expand its influence regionally, as opposed to . . . diminishing its regional influence?”). They offered just enough specificity to make clear that alternatives were considered and passed over. For example, the absolute survival of the North Korean regime is one thing, but North Korea achieving international acceptance of its status as a nuclear power is quite another, because the latter involves a number of real choices while the former appears to accept none. And yet clearly the two goals can be cast in co-evolutionary terms.

6) Stick with the big picture

The best grand strategies aren’t just about justifying the here-and-now but about shaping the there-and-then. They are a roadmap to a future region/world you want your country to inhabit at a particular perch, and that perch must be better than the one you occupy today, because unless you’re aiming for better, you’re not likely to keep what you’ve got in this increasingly competitive landscape. But because any future comes replete with uncertainties, tactics will invariably change over time. As much as every government seeks to bring “all elements of national power to bear” on this or that goal, you don’t want the tactics to overwhelm the strategic logic – the means determining the ends. The best entries last week left the tactics for Week 4’s stress-testing exercise and stuck with the high road of elucidating the essential choices made.

7) Some boldness is required

Good grand strategy is not simply waiting for events to fall your way, but neither is it trying to shape everything. The former replaces choice with expectation while the latter represents no choice at all. The best entries last week struck a balance between realism and idealism, typically without mentioning either because their logic was plainly apparent.

8) Fidelity versus flights of fancy

The most trapped teams last week were those deeply committed to representing their nations as honestly as possible, meaning they erred on the side of “fidelity” – a war-gaming term for realistic portrayal (“Is this like it would happen in the real world?”). Clearly, every team needed to keep its vision grounded in reality (i.e., you have to be able to get there from here), but the highest performing ones consistently leaned forward into likely events, key trends, etc., sensing maximum flexibility in the earliest phases rather than endgames. They persistently sought opening-move opportunities, and when they chose caution over boldness, it wasn’t because they were uninformed about the choice.

9) The necessity of a happy ending

Like General David Petraeus entering Iraq in 2003 (“Tell me how this ends.”), I as judge perused last-week’s entries for some semblance of what I like to call a “happy ending.” As I wrote in The Pentagon’s New Map, “Everybody needs that happy ending, that sense of hope in the future, otherwise you are simply trying to sell people diminished expectations – not a great motivator.” The best grand strategies presented compelling roadmaps to futures worth creating, sometimes for the larger world but always for the society in question. They were worth sacrificing for; they created a sense of something better that could be left to future generations. They were – in a word – simply grand.

10) Locating the essence of strategic opportunity

The top entries last week all portrayed once-in-a-lifetime regional/global dynamics that required bold responses (and yes, they are locatable for any country portrayed in this competition). Those teams made compelling arguments for action over caution on this basis, essentially flipping those arguments on their heads: by deeply grounding their strategies in keen analyses of future trends, they spotted unique openings that must be exploited because not to do so would cost too much over the long run. This is the essence of good grand strategy: spotting tomorrow’s inevitabilities and translating them into today’s proper tactical guidance, however “inconceivable” it may seem when judged by yesterday’s comfortable bias.

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