China’s Security Concerns and Grand Strategy

Abstract

Analysts have provided various definitions of grand strategy. According to Michael Swaine and Ashley J. Tellis, a grand strategy is a country’s “basic approach to politico-military security.”1 More specifically, Avery Goldstein notes that “what distinguishes grand strategy as a concept is not its nature, but rather its scope. It is labelled ‘grand’ because it refers to the guiding logic or overarching vision about how a country’s leaders combine a broad range of capabilities linked with military, economic, and diplomatic strategies to pursue international goals.”2 Christopher Layne clearly details “a three-step process” that leads to the implantation of a grand strategy—“determining a state’s vital security interests; identifying the threats to those interests; and deciding how best to employ the state’s political, military, and economic resources to protect those interests.”3 Peter Feaver is more sophisticated, saying that grand strategy is a term of art from academia, and refers to the collection of plans and policies that comprise the state’s deliberate effort to harness political, military, diplomatic, and economic tools together to advance that state’s national interest. Grand strategy is the art of reconciling ends and means. It involves purposive action—what leaders think and want. Such action is constrained by factors leaders explicitly recognize (for instance, budget constraints and the limitations inherent in the tools of statecraft) and by those they might only implicitly feel (cultural or cognitive screens that shape worldviews).4