The study of US grand strategy has come a long way since John Lewis Gaddis, Paul Kennedy and Charles Hill began teaching it at Yale in the year 2000. To the growing list of titles on this subject now comes Emergent Strategy and Grand Strategy by Ionut Popescu.

In 226 pages Popescu provides a succinct overview of US grand strategy since the end of the Second World War, presented in chronological order, from Truman to Obama. Going beyond a rudimentary retelling of US foreign policy, Popescu seeks to address a more rudimentary question than is often considered with regard to issues pertaining to the development of White House policy. Dismissing the oft-repeated concepts regarding the need for a coherent master plan with which to engage the world at large, Popescu considers the case for “emergent strategy”; that is, the potential for incremental actions to eventually form a successful long-term (“emergent”) strategy with which to address the challenges faced by an American administration.

In a text that deliberately takes aim at established maxims of US grand strategy and the seemingly masterful development of policy, Popescu makes the case that such mastery of events and policy often only appears to be the case in retrospect, and all too often from the vantage point of several decades. In so doing, he is, perhaps unknowingly, channelling the thoughts of one President who gets somewhat less attention than may be deserving in this book, Bill Clinton. As recalled by Strobe Talbott, Clinton believed that the mythology that surrounded US grand strategy during the Cold War “was largely imposed after the fact by scholars, memoirists and ‘the chattering classes’.”Footnote ¹ Instead, he insisted, successive administrations “just made it up as they went along.”

Such insight runs counter to much that is considered within the developing school of US grand strategy, which has, perhaps unsurprisingly, sought to identify patterns of behaviour and to credit Presidents and their advisers with far-reaching insight and strategic acumen. Instead, Popescu argues that of far greater importance is a President's ability to learn and adapt from the inevitable setbacks that beset their time in office. In this regard, Popescu is correctly building upon Lincoln's observation that Presidents are all too often controlled by events, rather than being the controller of events.

Indeed, it is to Popescu's credit that he is the first to recognize that the idea of “emergent strategy” is not new, or indeed without support in the policymaking area: strategists including Kissinger and Kennan, often viewed as quintessential grand strategists, have repeatedly commented upon the absurdity of such a notion.

In an age in which great effort is placed on viewing history as preordained, and on heralding strategists of the past at the expense of today's officeholders, Popescu provides a refreshing dose of reality, and reminds us of the human frailties and ad hoc whims that have all too often guided US strategy, grand or otherwise.