Unit 2.9 seems to have generated a lot of discussion on the meaning of grand strategy. I wonder whether the thrust of the discussion would have been different had the question read "Are the setbacks for the West in the Third World during this period best explained on their own terms, or as part of a Soviet strategy?", dropping the grand part of it. Most of the students seem to have taken the view that the "grand strategy" in question needed to cover the Cold War as a whole, rather than just the Third World, which made for some interesting debate, as well as some racing analogies.
Having failed miserably to post in WebCT for the past 2 1/2 hours - the system does not allow me to - I thought I should point those of you interested in taking the debate further to Paul Kennedy's Grand Strategies in War and Peace. You can find an excerpt on Amazon.com.
How does his definition fit with your understanding of the term?
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I'm not sure that, by Kennedy's definition, either side had a Grand Strategy during the Cold War. In a recent (and to me, annoying) book about the Vietnam War, "The Father of All Things", Tom Bissell rather off-handedly quotes Robert McNamara as saying that US policy during the period 1961 to 1968 was "whatever looked like a good idea at the time" (p.186).
I think there was a lot of that going on, on both sides, from 1949 to 1991. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford
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