Introduction: Command of the Commons and U.S. Primacy

In 1805, British Admiral Horatio Nelson defeated a combined Franco-Spanish fleet off the coast of Spain that threatened to deny Britain command of the sea around Western Europe. Nelson’s success ensured that the United Kingdom retained what analysts would today refer to as “command of the commons”—the ability to project military power and engage in trade at times and places of its choosing while denying the same privileges to others.

Most nations lack the power and the self-confidence to seek to change the global order and—whether satisfied with it or not—must accept the existing order and seek to adapt to it. Russia is not one of those nations.

Russia’s twenty-first century foreign policy strategy—to the extent that it exists in a coherent form—is not a plan to cope with what may come, but an effort to encourage global trends that officials in Moscow believe will advance their country’s interests.

This essay draws lessons for great-power grand strategy from the history of Great Britain and its effort to manage the hegemonic power transitions that spawned World War I and World War II. It focuses on two main issues. The first is the diplomacy of managing power transitions. At the turn of the twentieth century, Britain faced a rapidly changing strategic landscape. London had to deal with the simultaneous rise of three major powers – the United States, Germany, and Japan.

Since the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, U.S. policies towards Russia have been characterized by a level of hostility which is not justified by Russian threats to U.S. interests. These U.S. attitudes towards Russia have both encouraged and been encouraged by a strategy of the expansion of U.S.