Jack Watling, Statecraft: The New Rules of Power in a Divided World (Macmillan, 2026)
The war against Iran exposed a multitude of forced errors and own goals in the conduct of statecraft. The purpose of sound statecraft is the integrated application of a state’s tools and its repertoire of governmental instruments of power to gain its desired outcomes in international relations. The yet-to-be-resolved contest against the Islamic Republic of Iran reveals a litany of shortfalls in the conduct of U.S. statecraft.
It is unlikely that the present U.S. government will conduct a candid assessment of its shortcomings. Acknowledging the failure to achieve stated objectives, the higher costs accrued, and fewer benefits gained would be too bruising for the egos of policy officials. An honest and thorough review may lead to accountability, which would be a rare event in U.S. foreign policy failures. So, the U.S. bureaucracy is likely to “encounter” rather than learn and apply corrective lessons from this experience, just as it failed to learn from its ignorance in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
Potential lessons that might be garnered include: the formulation of strategy, the development of a logical theory of success, the realization that our adversaries have options, the examination of alternative futures arising from an opponent’s agency, and the rigorous evaluation of risk. All of these topics come to mind as key insights that could be drawn to enhance the odds of success in future contingencies.
Sound strategy lies at the core of effective statecraft. Any state must integrate and orchestrate the application of its power with a strategic mindset, which should be cultivated into the process of making strategy. Such a mindset should coherently and explicitly link desired ends with feasible ways and means. Such a mindset should be driven by a holistic approach that appreciates the multidimensional aspects of strategy and the connectivity of the different dimensions and the larger international system. To succeed, strategists need to embrace continuous environmental scanning for trends and anticipate potential combinations. A sound strategic framework must also be fed by feedback loops and frequent reassessments of assumptions.
The mindset appreciates a variety of inputs from diverse perspectives and unique mental frameworks to examine problems and to promote creative solutions. To be successful over time, strategists should be tolerant of ambiguity and uncertainty and relentlessly curious about the discovery of the unknown. It helps be both self-reflective and humble about judgments, and self-aware of one’s biases and blind spots. When looking at one’s competitor, it helps to possess strategic empathy of how others think and act.
Knowledge of the past is invaluable when conceiving of solutions, so strategists should employ a historical sensibility to differentiate between past and present continuities and discontinuities. Since resources are always constrained, a strategist must ruthlessly prioritize and align goals and resources. All strategies face external circumstances that generate risks for the state or institution. Ultimately, a true strategy contains a viable strategic logic built around a hypothesis that explains how and why the challenge facing the state is resolved.
Over the course of a few decades of writing, practicing, and teaching strategy in Washington, I picked up some lessons and have come to emphasize three key issues in developing strategies. These areas, where the American way of statecraft often falls short, include theory of success, multiple futures, and strategic risk.
Theory of Success
Good strategy requires an internal logic that ties policy to both ways and means to create desired strategic effects. The most important skill in the strategist’s art is devising the strategic logic that obtains policy goals. Scholars of strategy have stressed the need for a theory of success within a strategy, as has my former National Defense University colleague Jeff Meiser. He noted:
Defining strategy as a theory of success encourages creative thinking while keeping the strategist rooted in the process of causal analysis; it brings assumptions to light and forces strategists to clarify exactly how they plan to cause the desired end state to occur.
As other scholars put it, “cause-and-effect relationships lie at the heart of all strategic decision-making.” That logic is the continuous thread of thinking that animates statecraft.
Other scholars use the term “theory of victory,” but this connotates the necessity of defeating an opponent and tends to overemphasize the military instrument. The recent experience in Iran is indicative of this. A theory of victory can precondition strategy to exclusively focus on the military dimension, and sidestep more holistic, integrated, and comprehensive solutions to the problem. This is readily seen in the conduct of Operation Epic Fury, where political decapitation and military decimation were seen as naturally leading to Tehran’s capitulation. U.S. leaders continue to be astounded that 13,000 sorties and targets hit did not induce an unconditional surrender. The president has on several occasions extolled a “military victory” in Operation Epic Fury, and the combatant commander claimed a “generational military defeat.” Both failed to assess which policy aims — if any — were obtained. Adm. Brad Cooper’s claim that the United States achieved “all our military objectives” indicates a strategic gap between policy and military strategy. Strategic failure, historians have noted, is “more likely to reflect mistaken theories of success.” Our experience against Iran confirms that conclusion: Shock and awe was a flawed causal hypothesis.
Multiple Futures
Because the future is ultimately uncertain, strategists must accept that the future is plural. As I noted in that article, this is where scenario-based planning comes into play: helping strategists and policy makers break out of rigid mental frames and open up a discourse among senior leaders about trends, assumptions, and potential shocks. Scenarios covering multiple futures help policymakers foresee possible inflection points and bring uncertainty into account. Scenario-based analysis facilitates the incorporation of critical drivers and trends that might fundamentally change the future environment in significant ways. By identifying key trends and drivers along plausible alternative paths from the present to different futures, scenarios can, in one futurist’s words, “help Pentagon leaders avoid the ‘default’ picture by which tomorrow looks very much like today.” They can uncover the inevitable surprises that institutions refuse to deal with when they embrace only the familiar. In particular, when used during the diagnosis and formulation phases of strategy development, scenarios can sharpen diagnosis as well as shape options for trade-offs in strategy options.
The discourse within a leadership team about multiple futures enhances its decisions, clarifies strategic options like investments, divestments, and hedging, and better prepares them for future adaptation. They enhance the chances for leaders to apply informed and robust good judgment. Multiple futures are also helpful in testing the robustness and adaptability of a strategy.
Strategic Risk
One of the issues that led to the incoherent U.S. intervention into Iran this year was a failure to understand potential risks. The implementation of any strategy generates internal risks that must be mitigated and external risks to the success of any strategy. Joint doctrine examines risk in two dimensions: to the mission and to the joint force. This has a somewhat inward orientation. At the National War College, the faculty recommends thinking at the strategic level about potential risks from the strategy and to the strategy. In the case of Iran, the risks from the strategy included missile attacks on partners, mining of the Strait of Hormuz, and economic impacts. Risks to the strategy — activities that would undermine its success — could be Chinese naval intervention in the Gulf and Russian opportunism in the Baltics or elsewhere. This “From/To the Strategy” method of evaluating potential risk is central to sound strategy and could have provoked consideration of the need for allies, posture of mine-clearing assets, and lowered deterrence from depleted precision munition inventories. As noted in these pages, risk assessment can prove to be invaluable for challenging assumptions and testing strategic logic.
Watling on Statecraft
How then can states exert their influence and leverage to better protect their interests and secure prosperity for themselves in an intense, competitive context? In a dynamic and unpredictable strategic environment, how can states gain better outcomes through the tools of statecraft? Those are the central questions animating a new, wide-ranging book titled Statecraft: The New Rules of Power in a Divided World. Given today’s deteriorating security situation, Jack Watling appropriately warns, “there has never been a greater need for statecraft.”
Watling is a senior research fellow with the prestigious Royal United Services Institute in London. Over the past five years, he has earned a sterling reputation for his research from the battlefields of Ukraine. His combat field surveys capture the intensity and monotony of the trenches and chronicle the waxing and waning of Russian prospects. Watling has also depicted the transformative effects of Ukraine’s remarkable adaptations with drones, intelligence synthesis, and electronic warfare. This has made him a leading analyst for the U.K. government and many others about lessons for land warfare from a contest that has now lasted longer than World War I.
Whereas Watling’s more recent frontline work for the institute focused on the operational and tactical levels of war, Statecraft has a far wider scope. Statecraft covers 15 years of analytical research spanning the globe, including chapters on Syria, Nagorno-Karabakh, and Taiwan. The best elements of this crisp and colorful effort lie in its dissection of crises past and present, and how the decision-making mechanisms of competing states could have been employed with agility to gain better outcomes. Watling covers scanning, trend analysis, and multiple futures very well, but does not explicitly address risk.
Watling’s vignettes make Statecraft reminiscent of Robert Kaplan’s The Coming Anarchy. However, Watling deals less with local culture and more with the application — or misapplication — of various dimensions of statecraft. Other recent works, like Arne Westad’s The Coming Storm and Brendan Simms’s The Return of the Great Powers, deal with the complacency they perceive about the risk of great power war. Statecraft acknowledges great power competition as a feature of the current international environment, but focuses more on how to better maintain international order in our increasingly unstable world.
The subtitle suggests “new rules” for a disordered world, but what Watling actually produces is a set of reasonable guidelines and ideas to enhance both strategy formulation and its actual implementation. These include recognition that the future is plural, rather than linear, and subject to critical decision points. Anticipating and being prepared to act when decision points arise can determine the trajectory of events.
Watling’s principal finding is that Western governments’ strategy processes are systemically flawed. They are overcentralized and crisis-oriented, and far too reactive to crises. Foresight via trend analysis is seen as effective but not exploited early enough. As Watling frames the problem:
The issue suddenly moves to the top of the priority list and consumes government capacity at the expense of everything else, even though it is usually too late to do much except limit the disruption, at great expense.
For those who have worked in the upper echelons of the U.S. government, this will sound all too familiar. Too often, the headlines of the day drive decision makers’ attention and actions.
The author’s principles for disciplined strategy, trend analyses, decentralization, and collaboration among competitors are detailed and actionable. The lucidly presented lessons in Statecraft are equally valid for the West Wing or No. 10 Downing St. Statecraft offers a useful lens to examine past and current contingencies. The writing is lively and not adorned with dense academic theory. Statecraft contains no footnotes, bibliography, or index. Yet it is an intellectually rich product with a potent model for statecraft and strategy, stressing timely policy responses in a world that is trending towards fragmentation.
In Statecraft, Watling argues for greater empowerment of designated officials, supported by a team of strategists, to design and conduct campaigns. He deplores the current practice of crafted strategy documents, which “neither have logical coherence nor practical details but [are] entirely inoffensive to all concerned.” He also bemoans strategy teams that complete their efforts, only to see them mangled in execution by the denizens of the bureaucracy. He envisions a series of standing interagency task forces or cross-functional teams that design, brief, and prosecute their campaigns with continuity. This methodology was favored by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to untangle turf fights over issues in the Pentagon in his tenure, with some success. In his book A Passion for Leadership, Gates wrote about the need to break down silos and integrate diverse forms of knowledge to obtain success. The real challenge is to understand how to properly design and staff the task force and empower it. Defense reformers have pragmatic ideas to implement the concept with the right alignment of authority, responsibility, and resources.
Watling is on to something. This method is appealing for gaining strategic effectiveness in decentralized cross-agency missions. Gates’ experience with “breaking down the concrete” between agencies should be prototyped and applied to facilitate fresh and imaginative thinking in Washington. This approach not only improves strategy formulation but the necessary adaptations of strategy. A rigorous post-mortem on the Gulf debacle should examine Gates and Watling’s ideas and refine them for employment. As Sir Lawrence Freedman has underscored, “strategy is an activity,” not simply a process or a product. Strategies are not just written: They have to be implemented, which makes statecraft an applied art founded upon creative and critical thinking.
Frank Hoffman, Ph.D., is a former Pentagon senior executive, defense scholar, and a retired Marine officer. He is a contributing editor at War on the Rocks. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Mars Unbound: Military Effectiveness, 1870-1914 and Today (Georgetown University Press).
Image: U.S. Department of Defense via Wikimedia Commons
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