Strategy, moral super power & hypocrisy

As I’ve been looking at strategic theory and read a lot of Clausewitz this summer, I’ve now moved on to look at how states use strategy in practice. If they use it. And can they? Should they?
My answer to these questions is Yes. Governments can act strategically, and do, and should (every state needs to do trade-offs); although it can be very difficult and simply having a grand strategy does not guarantee success. It is difficult for a variety of reasons, but mainly because of the constantly evolving international landscape; the uncertainty and inability to predict your opponent’s responses and reactions as well as the challenges of predicting what effects your own actions will have in the long-term.
For governments it is not always easy to make good strategy. It’s easy to ignore your limited resources, to confuse goals for strategy, and not articulate the strategic problem correctly. Porter has written about how Britain is failing to do grand strategy in this article which is a quite interesting read.
While looking at the strategic plans of the UK and the US, I started thinking about what grand strategy, if any, Sweden is adhering to. The American grand strategy could be seen to be to basically preserve the post-Cold War order and thus remain a world leader (recommend Brands writing on it). It might be the case that Strachan is right in thinking that status quo powers are in greater need of grand strategy as it helps them to avert decline and manage/mitigate the impacts of change, whereas emerging states have a lesser need as they are forging their empires and have not yet acquired anything to hold on to. I think that in the case of emerging states, an understanding of what direction they should be heading in seems like reason enough to claim that they too are in great need of grand strategy.
However, Sweden is neither a status quo power nor an emerging one and yet it does do grand strategy I would say. To those arguing that the grand strategies of small states, such as Sweden, are mainly focused on internal affairs, I would say that, at least for Sweden that might not be true. The Swedish grand strategy (even though I don’t even know what ‘grand strategy’ is in Swedish) is quite clear. It wants to become a moral super power.
I would argue that Swedish foreign policy and diplomacy appear to be aimed at marketing Sweden as a moral role model for the rest of the world. It does so by acting through, among other things, foreign aid and generously donating 1% of GNI, making it the the second most generous member of the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee. And it is the reason behind outbursts such as when Wallström, the Swedish foreign minister, condemned Saudi courts which resulted in that Saudi Arabia withdrew its ambassador and stopped issuing visas to Swedish businessmen. But also in headlines such as this “Sweden’s feminist foreign minister has dared to tell the truth about Saudi Arabia. What happens now concerns us all” in The Spectator.
The above Spectator article also points out the Swedish hypocrisy: “Sweden is the world’s 12th largest arms exporter — quite an achievement for a country of just nine million people. Its exports to Saudi Arabia total $1.3 billion.” So if Sweden truly wants to become a moral super power, a good start might be acting in a manner consistent with what you’re saying. Which is exactly what grand strategy is all about. Coherency. But I guess, as I mentioned in the beginning of this blog, strategy is difficult.
