Implementing Grand Strategy

Abstract This chapter describes the Richard Nixon administration, particularly in its early months. Nixon and his indispensable partner Henry Kissinger took office with a coherent and well-developed grand strategy, based on ideas they had been developing and articulating for years. Much scholarship has been devoted, and rightfully so, to the strategic principles and policies that Nixon and Kissinger pursued while in office. Yet the way they organized their national security system and attempted to implement their strategy has received much less attention—despite the fact that Nixon and Kissinger themselves devoted considerable time and intellectual energy to these organizational issues. In other words, they were concerned not merely with what policies they wanted to pursue and why they would pursue them, but also how they would advance those policies. In the case of Nixon and Kissinger, this “how” included the remarkable centralization of power in the National Security Council, often at the expense of the State and Defense Departments. The chapter assesses how and why Nixon and Kissinger went about this, particularly focusing on how they connected their organizational decisions to their grand strategy.