corporations might be directed in the service of really ambitious goals: European peace or the fiber-speed transformation of telecommunications or billion-user financial grids. It’s thin air up at this level, honestly, by which I mean that at these elevated heights you see the most ambitious athletes of human power at work: The maniacal CEO, the egotistical statesman, the mad dictator. Hundreds of millions of lives are in play; even more in some cases. By a “grand strategy” we mean the very peak of this sort of consideration. It represents, in the world of global affairs, the construction of a strategic idea that suggests how military, diplomacy, markets, and politics might be harnessed, firmly, in service of a singular aim. Grand strategy is a basic stance towards the world. If it works, it liberates creativity and national energy. It sets a clear direction*‘. It protects against the steep price of surprise. Grand strategy holds, in a single concept, the nature of their age and our plans to use that nature for the aims - security, prosperity - that gird a nation’s life and decide its future. Like it or not, we all live under the umbrella raised by grand strategic choices. “Containment” of the Cold War period, “Balance of Power” from Europe’s 19 Century Age of Revolutions, or the “Tributary Alliances” that shaped a thousand years of Chinese power - these were all big, essential organizing grand strategic concepts. They shaped security decisions for durable empires. Each balanced ideal aims like freedom or the preservation of dynastic continuity against technological revolution, economic crisis, ideologies and the numberless other forces that can crack empires. Each idea reflected the demands of the age, and as a result each tells us something about power in those eras. The Chinese strategist General Liu Yazhou observed a few years ago in a widely circulated essay, perhaps a bit too eagerly, “A major state can lose many battles, but the only loss that is always fatal