We are pleased to share with you the first issue of the Texas National Security Review produced by our new publisher, the University of Texas Press. We are excited about this new partnership and gratefully acknowledge UT Press’s contribution to our ongoing work.
Under this new arrangement, many things about the journal will not change—especially TNSR’s commitment to a distinctive blend of scholarly rigor, policy relevance, and public accessibility, which has defined our aims since we began. This new partnership, however, also has the potential for some new opportunities—for example, for junior scholars who seek to publish with us—and we are excited about the path ahead.
In the week that I write this, President Donald Trump has taken the oath of office for the second time. Each inauguration marries old traditions with the particularities of the outgoing and incoming administrations amid a moment of transition—in this case, including a ceremony moved inside to accommodate unusually cold weather. Similarly, the second Trump administration is likely to echo the first, but not exactly copy it; the country and the world are watching to identify places of likely continuity versus change.
History does not repeat; it rhymes. Unless we have the vocabulary developed from familiarity with our own history and that of others, however, we are at risk of missing the rhymes that pattern our world—and that might caution us about approaching danger or alert us to the opening of new opportunities.
This issue of the Texas National Security Review attempts to catch those rhymes as we read them in history, and draw them to our attention in order to improve American national security policy as well as international security.
Kevin D. McCranie draws on British naval historian Julian S. Corbett’s theories of naval power to describe lessons for the United States and its use of sea power to pursue the national interest today. McCranie cautions that lessons learned from Corbett emerged from a deep understanding of the historical successes and failures of British attempts to apply naval power to achieve strategic ends. We should learn from Corbett, he argues, both about the unique advantages conferred by the latent ability to exercise command of the sea, and also—critically—about the limits of naval power, especially the reality that combining naval and land power with other instruments of national power, including coalition partners, is essential to avoiding squandering the unique advantages that maritime power confers on the United States today.
Reaching further back into the history and theory of strategic thought, Michael P. Ferguson warns that the writings of ancient Greek historian and general Thucydides illuminate the fundamental difficulty of controlling war. In an era in which American military and political leaders might be tempted to assume that technology will allow them an escape from such current challenges as manpower and recruitment, Ferguson draws from Thucydides a stark warning: Any belief that technological advances will remove the human elements that lead wars to escalate is likely to be fundamentally misguided.
And in his article, “Negotiating Primacy,” James Cameron argues that we live today in a world still shaped by America’s success in embedding its preferred ideas of strategic stability into the arms control agreements negotiated between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Other contributions in this issue emphasize that these historical choices matter not only for global security, but also for the societies from which these strategic choices emerge. In their article, Jessica D. Blankshain, Theo Milonopoulos, and Derek S. Reveron analyze new data on the witnesses that Congress—in particular the House Armed Services Committee—calls to testify. The patterns they describe give us new insight that who Congress calls upon can both inform and legitimate (or question the legitimacy of) the application of American military power around the world; their testimony can also be used to evaluate the defense policies and resource allocation choices that generate and sustain that power now and into the future. This article illuminates not only a process that is at the heart of American global strategy and its impact on the world but also a fundamental principle of American democracy: civilian oversight over the armed forces.
In our Strategist essay, Marina E. Henke draws on a broad range of examples, both historical and contemporary, to argue for a set of “best practices” that leaders and statesmen can use to formulate grand strategy more effectively. She argues that the uncertainty of today’s geopolitical environment makes sound formulation of grand strategy essential—not just for strategy and national security, but for democratic accountability.
Together, these articles draw from the long sweep of history to illuminate how American strategic choices, and the strategic choices of other powers, are inextricably entwined with global and international security. The international security environment has and will continue to structure America’s strategic choices, and those of other nations. But both American and international ends have also been shaped, over time, by the United States figuring out how to deploy its unique strategic advantages to structure the international security environment. The use of American strategy to structure global politics, whether at sea or in the nuclear realm, has been one of the most enduring ways to exercise American power for American advantage and for global stability.
In many ways, the pages of this journal reflect a dialectic similar to the one that exists between grand strategic statecraft and international order. Scholars write for a field that already has a certain shape at the time of writing, but they also try, over time, to reshape these intellectual landscapes through their arguments—hopefully for the better.
This issue of the Texas National Security Review illuminates, perhaps more than anything else, that how to craft a grand strategy that rhymes with these past lessons—but fits the particular conditions of this present moment—is the task that will both define the foundation of American power for future generations, and shape America’s democratic future.
Sheena Chestnut Greitens is editor-in-chief of the Texas National Security Review. She is associate professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where she also directs UT’s Asia Policy Program. She is concurrently a visiting faculty member at the US Army War College and a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Her work focuses on security, strategy, and authoritarian politics in Asia.