Markus Iven is a strategic analyst at HCSS. Earlier this year Iven won the biennial Dwight D. Eisenhower Thesis Prize for his thesis “Grand Strategies in War: Introducing a Dataset to Explore the Interplay between Grand and Military Strategies (Faculty of Military Sciences, Netherlands Defence Academy; MA in Military Strategic Studies).

A new dataset links grand and military strategy. A sample of 38 wars involving the United States and Russia since 1945 offers insights into the past — and the future — of great-power competition.

At the heart of strategic studies lies an infinite debate: Is strategy an art or a science? This question also extends to who might better master this craft: the war-hardened soldier or the scholarly academic. Bernard Brodie, often called the ‘American Clausewitz,’ wrote in 1959: “There is no other science where judgements are tested in blood.”[i] To make the most of these grim and bitter lessons from human history, this article argues that it makes sense to take a scholarly approach and learn from the past. To this end, it proposes a new method for analysing grand and military strategies: the Grand Strategies in War Dataset (GSWD)[ii].

The GSWD introduces, to our knowledge, the first method for large-scale datasets that applies a universal method to analyse all forms of grand and military strategies, regardless of their temporal, geographical, or political-ideological context. While the method can be applied to any war in any period, a demo-dataset was created compiling the cases most relevant to Europe today: all U.S. and Soviet/Russian wars between 1945 and 2024. By integrating a prominent international relations theory (offensive realism) with a structured ends-ways-means analysis, it creates a mixed-methods dataset that enables comparable, falsifiable, and scalable analysis.

This design preserves the theoretical depth of qualitative studies while adding the generalisability of quantitative research. In summary, the GSWD provides a new method for studying grand strategy and military strategy, supporting our understanding and future research on state behaviour in war.

Grand Strategy and Offensive Realism

Theory can sometimes feel tedious to practitioners and scholars alike. Nevertheless, Clausewitz, arguably the greatest strategist, observed: “Not until terms and concepts have been defined can one hope to make any progress in examining the question clearly and simply and expect the reader to share one’s views.”[iii] A qualitative dataset on great-power behaviour must therefore rest on a theory. Accordingly, the GSWD uses John Mearsheimer’s theory called offensive realism to develop its definitions.

Mearsheimer’s world, however, is not a pleasant one to live in. According to him, great powers in an anarchic world without a central authority are forced into a perpetual struggle for power, the tragedy that gave his seminal work its name.[iv] The logic runs as follows: no state can ever be certain what others will do in the future, even if they currently act peacefully. Because intentions can change quickly, it is rational for states to take no risks regarding their survival and rather strike first than last. That, he argues, is why war has been inevitable throughout human history and will remain so. As a result, the way states seek to ensure their survival among the other states defines their grand strategy.

Following American historian Hal Brands, grand strategy is the highest form of statecraft: the intellectual architecture that gives logic to foreign policy.[v] So whereas military strategy explains how a war is fought, grand strategy explains why it is fought and how all instruments of power are orchestrated to that end. Grand strategy is thus the strategy of survival: “a state’s theory about how it can best ‘cause’ security for itself”[vi], which in Mearsheimer’s world means maximising relative power in order to eat and not be eaten. This raises the next question: how does one build a dataset on this?

A Word on Methodology

Existing strategy datasets, for example on counterinsurgency or the use of ultimata, tend to focus on specific types of war.[vii] By contrast, Paul Kennedy’s book Grand Strategies in War and Peace generally links grand and military strategy yet limits itself to ten in-depth cases.[viii] The GSWD combines both approaches: it takes Kennedy’s idea and integrates it with one of the leading datasets on armed conflict, the Correlates of War (COW) project, which covers 654 wars since 1816.[ix]

In its current demo-version, the GSWD starts smaller, focusing on what is most relevant to Europe today: all U.S. and Soviet/Russian wars between 1945 and 2024. Following the COW war definition, it includes only conflicts with at least 1,000 battle-related fatalities. Each case is classified using offensive realism and the AEWMR framework (assumptions, ends, ways, means, and risks)[x]. The result is a clear, shared vocabulary of 56 defined terms that enables systematic comparison of grand and military strategies across time and space.

But what can the GSWD reveal? To show its potential, two examples are presented. The first examines geography, asking where and why the U.S. and Russia have fought since 1945. The second examines time, asking when and why these conflicts occurred.

Example 1: Where and why did the U.S. and Russia wage war?

Starting with geography, Figure 1 illustrates the number and regional distribution of wars fought by the U.S. and Russia between 1945 and 2024, grouped by military ends. Regime survival emerges as the most common military end for both great powers. A geographic contrast also stands out: U.S. wars have been globally distributed and rarely fought in its own region, the Western Hemisphere, whereas Russia’s wars have been concentrated largely in Europe and Asia. This pattern is consistent with offensive realism. Insulated by two oceans and bordered by the weaker neighbours Mexico and Canada, the U.S. benefits from what Mearsheimer calls the “stopping power of water.”[xi] This geographical advantage makes the U.S. virtually immune to conventional invasion and thus a natural regional hegemon, freeing it to prevent rival great powers from achieving regional hegemony in Europe or Asia.

Figure 1: Number and regional distribution of wars fought by Russia and the U.S. (1945–2024), grouped by military ends. Regime change and survival dominate for both powers. Russia focuses primarily on Europe, while the United States acts globally and has a more diverse set of military ends. Data: GSWD.

Similarly, the Russian focus on regime survival can also be explained by its geography. Its vulnerability lies in the North European Plain, a flat expanse with few natural defences against invasions of Russia’s economic centres in the west. From a Russian perspective, this has necessitated westward expansion to create what it considers territorial buffer zones.[xii] Thus, while the U.S. maintains uncontested regional hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, Russia was—and, following offensive realism, will always be—primarily focused on achieving regional hegemony in Eastern Europe.

Example 2: When and why did the U.S. and Russia wage war?

While the first example focused on geography, the second examines temporal factors, asking when and why the U.S. and Russia have waged war, as shown in Figure 2. Four phases stand out: From 1945 to 1991, the long-run of regime survival reflects the Cold War’s bipolar order, giving rise to the hypothesis that regime survival is the dominant military end in great-power rivalries under nuclear deterrence. With the collapse of the USSR, the U.S. changed from preserving regimes to coercing non-compliant ones, exercising its power during its historic unipolar moment.[xiii]

In the early 2000s, the rise of regime change and weakening military capability likely stemmed from the U.S. strategy in the so-called Global War on Terror. This suggests that in a unipolar system the dominant power maximises its relative power not through territorial expansion but through coercion, regime change, and the degradation of opponents’ capabilities. Looking ahead, the rise of China may mark a return to bipolarity, potentially making regime survival once again the central objective in the wars of the coming decades.

Figure 2: Timeline of U.S. and Russia/USSR wars (1945–2024) by military end. The Cold War (1945–1991) is dominated by regime survival. After 1991, the U.S. shifts toward coercion and in the early 2000s toward regime change and weakening opponents’ military capability; Russia remains regime-centric, largely in its near abroad, with limited out-of-area regime support since 2015. The pattern suggests that bipolarity correlates with regime survival, while unipolarity correlates with the ends: coercion, regime change, and weaken military capability. Data: GSWD.

In contrast to the U.S., Russia continued its regime-centric pattern after the Soviet Union’s fall, which marked the end of its unsuccessful bid for regional hegemony at that time. Thus, since 1945 Russia has consistently used all means of power, including brute force, to control regimes in its near abroad. The most recent, though not exclusive, example is its invasion of Ukraine. Only since 2015 has it deployed limited forces to support anti-Western regimes in Syria, Mali, Niger, and the Central African Republic. This low-cost, opportunity-based balancing against the West arguably signals relative weakness rather than strength.

 Conclusion

Military decision-making is known to consider many parameters: adversary, terrain, weather, time, civil factors, and more. The Grand Strategies in War Dataset does the same. Yet we know that the human brain can juggle only a few variables reliably at once. In the GSWD, even choosing just three out of the 18 parameters offers 816 possible combinations, and just as many figures could be created. Thus, the two figures presented in this article serve only as a demonstration. In total, the GSWD spans 18 parameters, allowing for more than 260,000 distinct combinations. Its real power therefore lies not in static figures for human interpretation but in statistical analysis and machine learning, which can uncover patterns in strategies across actors, regions, time, ends, ways, means, risk, and effectiveness.

However, war as a complex, brutal, and deadly social phenomenon, likely eludes any purely statistical method such as the GSWD promises. As military historian Antulio Echevarria II observes: “No scientific method exists for determining how much military power is enough, or when balance in a strategy is achieved. The answer depends largely on the professional judgment of military commanders, and on what domestic conditions will allow in terms of expenditure of fiscal resources and political capital.”[xiv] As with many of history’s great debates, the truth about strategy likely lies in a balance between art and science. While no dataset can substitute for the judgment and experience of a war-seasoned general, the stakes of war—measured in human lives—are too high to disregard the lessons of theory and history.

This article began with Bernard Brodie’s sobering reminder that “there is no other science where judgements are tested in blood.” The GSWD aims to spare future generations from the tragic necessity of perpetually relearning the lessons of war in war.

[i] Antulio J. Echevarria II, Military Strategy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 6.

[ii] Tim Marshall, Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World (New York: Scribner, 2016), 11-39.

[iii] Charles Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment,” Foreign Affairs 70, no. 1 (Winter 1990/1991): 23–33.

[iv] Bernard Brodie, Strategy in the Missile Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 21. Originally published 1959.

[v| Markus Iven, “Grand Strategies in War: Introducing a Dataset to Explore the Interplay Between Grand and Military Strategies” (Master’s thesis, Netherlands Defence Academy, 2024).

[vi] Carl von Clausewitz, On War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 79–80.

[vii] John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001).

[viii] Hal Brands, What Good is Grand Strategy? Power and Purpose in American Statecraft from Harry S. Truman to George W. Bush (Cornell University Press, 2014), 1.

[ix] Barry R. Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine: France, Britain, and Germany between the World Wars (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 13.

[x] Christopher Paul, Colin P. Clarke, and Beth Grill, Victory Has a Thousand Fathers: Sources of Success in Counterinsurgency (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2010); Patricia L. Sullivan and Johannes Karreth, “Strategies and Tactics in Armed Conflict: How Governments and Foreign Interveners Respond to Insurgent Threats,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 63, no. 9 (2019): 2207–2232; Tim Sweijs, The Use and Utility of Ultimata in Coercive Diplomacy (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2023).

[xi] Paul M. Kennedy, ed., Grand Strategies in War and Peace (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991).

[xii] Meredith Reid Sarkees and Frank Whelon Wayman, Resort to War, 1816–2007 (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2010).

[xiii] Peter Viggo Jakobsen, “Causal Theories of Threat and Success: Simple Analytical Tools Making It Easier to Assess, Formulate, and Validate Military Strategy,” Scandinavian Journal of Military Studies 5, no. 1 (2022): 177–191.

[xiv] Mearsheimer, Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 114.