Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake

... and this notion that Stalin personally is responsible for these millions of deaths? There were millions of people pulling millions of triggers for all these deaths. (air whooshing) Initially, Hitler did incredibly well. I mean, his blitzkrieg, incredible. If he had quit right there, he would have gotten away with it and probably be considered a brilliant leader by Germans. (air whooshing) Putin, he's made a pivotal error. He has no back-down plan. He only has a double-down plan. (air whooshing) For the People's Republic to take Taiwan, I presume it's gonna begin with an artillery barrage. I presume that's gonna be leveling Taiwanese cities. Right? We should watch how it goes in Ukraine. I can't imagine the Chinese being less brutal. You're gonna say that's okay?

Okay. Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Sarah Payne. She is a professor of strategy and policy at the Naval War College, and she has written some of the best military history I've ever read. And we're gonna get into history, strategy, all kinds of interesting topics today. My first question, does grand strategy as a concept make sense? So you have these countries, but the people making these decisions are individuals and they have so many individual ambitions and desires and constraints from internal politics to, you know, factions they have to appease. Does it make sense to talk about countries having strategies?

Before I get going, I have to make an obligatory disclaimer, which is, what I'm about to say are my views. They do not necessarily represent those of the US government-

(laughs)

... let alone the US Navy Department, and much less the place where I work, which is the US Naval War College. Okay, so now that that's over, on to grand strategy. Yeah, it is useful. I'm gonna define grand strategy as the integration of all relevant instruments of national power in the pursuit of national objectives. If you think about modern governments in the West, they have cabinets, right? And they sit before the president. Those cabinet portfolios represent the different, uh, instruments of national power. And can you imagine trying to run foreign policy without having those people at your table and coordinating? And if you look at countries that have not coordinated all instruments, for instance, Japan in World War II versus Japan during the prior period of the Meiji Restoration, by the time the Japanese got into World War II, they're really prioritizing the army and the navy too, but the, the military as their main instrument of national power. They are not coordinating with civilians, right? They assassinate those people. And they got into deep, dark trouble. They didn't listen to their finance minister who told them it was unaffordable. So yes, grand strategy is absolutely necessary. And eh, the idea is you have national objectives. You wanna increase security somewhere, you wanna improve your own security, that would be your big objective. You wanna improve trade, whatever. And then you need to think about all of these different instruments of national power and how you're gonna coordinate. Those who don't coordinate get into deep, dark trouble.