Joseph Fouche writes in to comment about the confusion of grand strategy, looking at Basil Liddell-Hart's coining of the term. The story of how strategy turned into the very multifaceted term we see today is too great of a story to render here (although I recommend that anyone interested read this book by Michael Howard), but the term "grand strategy" and its evolution is very interesting.
In his book Strategy, Liddell-Hart coined the term "grand strategy" to describe choices pertaining to the overall conduct of great wars. He defines "grand strategy" on page 353 of my 1991 Meridian press version as "war policy." Now, the confusing aspect of this is that this is how we might define "strategy" today in the loose sense--e.g. when talking about Obama's strategy for Afghanistan or in a historical sense about Lincoln's strategy for winning the Civil War.
This, however, is not the understanding of "grand strategy" we have today. Starting with Edward Luttwak's Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire (Luttwak has written a new book about the Byzantine Empire), grand strategy has been used in books to refer to the overall method of a state for producing security for itself or making itself powerful. Paul Kennedy's edited compilation Grand Strategies in War and Peace and Rise and Fall of the Great Powers explicitly uses this framework. The William Murray and MacGregor Knox edited compilation The Making of Strategy: Rulers, States, and War also pioneered it. And the Clausewitzian Colin S. Gray has written a great deal on grand strategy as well.
So, what to say? First, the better works on the subject do not treat grand strategies as linear plans but a coherent or at least related set of practices over a long period of time. This is a good approach to take, as it emphasizes that rulers did not instinctively seek to craft a Seldon Foundation-esque master plan for eternity but discovered, through trial and error, a set of practices, ideas, and concepts of operations that worked for a given period of time. Perhaps a very important question (and one that has been alluded to) is what kinds of political cultures tend to produce these sets of practices, and whether they are imposed top-down, generated in a mixed fashion, or come emergently from below.
The ironic thing about Liddell-Hart's narrow conceptualization of grand strategy is that some of his most well-known books such as The British Way in Warfare, Defense of the West, and Deterrent or Defense, all looked at what we might understand today as "grand strategy." Azar Gat also famously counterfactually argued that Liddell-Hart, not Kennan, was the true father of containment.
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