What is the grand strategy of the United States? Historian James Lacey believes it can be identified in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution’s Preamble. Universal equality, domestic Tranquility, unalienable rights, and the Blessings of Liberty have been America’s “national grand strategy” from its inception, with occasional recapitulations as required by changing circumstances. Lacey, who has written extensively about American strategy in World War II, adds that FDR’s Four Freedoms became the “strategic phrasing” of World War II.
This was the modern parallel provided in Lacey’s new book Rome: Strategy of Empire as he set about to explain the grand strategy of Rome. As this example illustrates, the book struggles with analytical imprecision, but before examining this, I must first acknowledge the book’s merits.
The book takes up the question posed by Edward Luttwak’s Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire in 1976. Luttwak made an argument for what Rome’s grand strategy might have been, but since that time scholars have wrangled more over whether any such grand strategy existed. Grand strategy as a concept is already fraught with controversy in political science circles, and historians are skeptical that premodern states had the administrative capacity for it. Luttwak also suffered criticism from his classicist detractors, who were animated perhaps as much by the fact that he wasn’t a classicist as by their disagreements with his conclusions. Like Luttwak, Lacey is not a specialist, but a self-described historian “whose research and writing range from Plato to NATO.” Nonetheless, Lacey asserts that Rome did in fact engage in sophisticated strategic thinking, and his book is a fine introduction to the topic that should reshape the debate.
