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Sure, in the sense that planning is a good practice. However, bad planning can easily produce results worse than no planning, especially when built on bad foundations, such as understanding one's own strengths, surrounding contexts, and how others respond. For a more modern example of a failure of this, Russia indisputably has a national strategy, is led with people with very deliberate intent for national-interest maximization, and the invasion of Ukraine was well within the scope of that vision, but it has been the biggest national strategic disaster for the Russians since 1941.
The importance of contextual understanding matters to strategy just as much, and that includes acknowledging costs and benefits. DEI as a policy is unpopular with substantial parts of the US public.... but it's also popular with other substantial parts of the public, and there are a variety of strategic benefits of a DEI 'strategy' that acrue from the sort of mentality/policy considerations making that generates DEI, such as how corporate-demographic interest behind DEI is also what drives how the US relates with population inflows that will occur regardless and to structure relations with the sources sending them.
For all the political tension and contortions it brings- and there are arguments that the costs of migration outweigh the benefits, or that actively facilitating illegal migration against established laws undermines popular support- if in the Cold War the US had a strategic opportunity to take 5% of the Soviet population in a 3 year and incorporate them into the Western coalition, few would fail to see that as a meaningful strategic shift. Well, that hasn't happened with China- but that is basically what happened with Cuba in the last four years, and similarly anti-American Nicaragua since Ortega got back in power in 2007, while something like 3% of the Venezuelan population has left the Bolivarian revolution for the US alone- and the US is far less than the migration into Latin America. While DEI didn't cause that, DEI-mentality is behind the sort of policy construct of the sort of people to accept that migration flow and try to incorporate it.
So when you say DEI is a strategy, you allude terms of its more pejorative/unpopular form of discriminatory hiring policies. But when I hear DEI as a strategy, a DEI-strategy for the US entails the US's most bitter and ideological foes losing or even sending their own people to be part of the US's labor and potential military pools, the built-in cultivation of loyalist interests more interested in the DEI-archetecture than in their source country interests, while coincidentally closing one of the more significant gaps between the US and the PRC.
Is DEI worth it, on a strategic level? That could be an interesting discussion, but it's not the one that was being raised.
Similarly, just as understanding strengths is important, so is understanding weaknesses behind strengths. A common failure of armchair strategizing is to treat states like they exist in strategy games, where the populace is implicitly supportive of the controlling player and where the agent only has to get the Technologies and Industry and all the good metrics just go up and up and up. There's almost no reflection on the implications of the Tang Ping subculture growth, how that relates to the Chinese demographic trajectory, and how that (or both of those) relate to the unfolding property debt crisis, and how that is likely to rebound on both of those.
And just the property crisis alone- no matter one's politics- has significant implications for Chinese strategic strengths and vulnerabilities, as the loss of private consumer life savings at a nearly unprecedented scale is almost certain to neuter the prospects of a Chinese consumption-based economy, and thus it's dependence on a maritime-blockadable export economy, which in turn drives a number of third and fourth order effects on how the Chinese economy is structured, it's external-trade and financial dependencies the US could target, demographic pressures, and so on.
(And while the PRC certainly isn't seeing the sort of demographic outflow that, say, Latin America is, in the last two years the Chinese have become the largest extra-hemispheric source of southern border migration the US receives, with an exceptional growth rate, and the Chinese private-capital flight from the country has been leagues ahead of it. These are consequences not only of current strategic policies, but almost certain to increase as a result of the housing investment crisis.)
Will that make it a net negative? It doesn't really matter. The point is that it's a factor of consideration, and evaluation, and something someone else could benefit from.
Finally, to return to the starting question, there's always the metacontext that not having a strategy is, itself, a strategy, it just is one that is far more reactive and non-deliberate and these are rarely good things in and of themselves. A bad strategy can be worse than no strategy, but a lack of strategy is rarely as good as a competent strategy.
Not really, though this is more structural to the argument, and as a consequence most of your follow-on arguments fail.
Edit: And also, as revealed down threat, because you never actually read the national strategy for the United States.
For one, the US has a public national security strategy, which is the American strategy as far as country strategy goes, and your characterization-summary is really not really reflective of that position. Which itself is helpfully summarized in its own agenda as-
PART IV: Our (US) Strategy By Region -Promote a Free and Open Indo-Pacific -Deepen Our Alliance with Europe -Foster Democracy and Shared Prosperity in the Western Hemisphere -Support De-Escalation and Integration in the Middle East -Build 21st Century US-Africa Partnerships -Maintain a Peaceful Arctic -Protect Sea, Air, and Space
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Biden-Harris-Administrations-National-Security-Strategy-10.2022.pdf
Now, you could argue that the US fails to achieve that (meh), isn't consistently being followed (sure), that it's not the real strategy of the United States (it is), or that Biden has a separate strategy (possible- the Democratic Party is not the US government, and it has its own strategy which itself would have a different success criteria).
But summarizing a strategy down to a pejorative boo-word (DEI) that isn't advanced by the other party in that way* makes as much sense as saying China's strategy is a property crisis. That's a strawman to jouse against, to which the fair refutation would be- no, the property crisis isn't the strategy, it's a consequence of the strategy (industrial development driven by infrastructure investment fueled by local-area land sales). To which the defenders against the DEI-strategy can agree, and say that DEI isn't the strategy, it's a consequence of trying to manage a large number of regional relationships with migratory implications in a way that promotes buy-in to the American international system.
*And to be clear, DEI is referenced in the strategy... but in the following terms-
Note that this is on page 46- sharpening statecraft. As in, as a tool for how to influence other states.
...and now consider how that fits into the 'stealing the enemy's pops' strategy, as part of a series of policies. IF you're going to face mass-migration regardless, THEN you might as well leverage. But how do you leverage demographic dividends, get buy-in from emerging demographic interests/power centers, bolster perceptions of legitimacy from people without historic ties, and frame it in a way that boosts relations with outside powers from across the world?
Well... there's a reason that the DEI mention is in the 'how do we shape our national security workforce to meet our statecraft modernization needs', and not as one of the seven modernizable statecraft tools above it. Because DEI is not the strategy- it's a policy to support a workforce to pursue the strategy.
Which is also the point of structural disagreement two, the difference between policy and strategy.
You fail to draw a distinction between them, treating them as synonyms, but the former are a subset of the later. Strategies will encompass many policies, but a policy should not be the strategy. If it is, this is a red-flag of the weakness of the strategy, as singular policies can dominate all other considerations, or reconsiderations, as those invested in the continuation/growth of the policy have interests distinct from the achievement of the strategic objective.
More prevalent in your post is your handling of DEI, when DEI would be the archetypical policy as opposed to strategy. DEI is a principal of action to be pushed and adopted by bureaucracies, but it's not a national strategy in and of itself, any more than traffic lights are street crossings are. Those are means, a part of a larger strategy (the overarching traffic control system, with overlapping systems of public signals, enforcement, penalization, maintenance, and so on). DEI, in turn, is part of something else- and while 'what' that strategy is a part of is up for debate, if it's being framed as part of an international competititon strategy, then it should probably be framed in terms of how it fits into the overarching picture of racial-diversity organization and co-option, i.e. the idea of a strategy of stealing the enemy's pops and making them your own citizens.
The reason this matters- aside from the accuracy of the merits of a policy in and of itself- when you compare policies to strategies, it's only natural that the strategies are going to come off looking better. Of course they would- they tend to be broader and more comprehensive, because that's what they are by design. But this is as relevant to the relative merits as comparing a horse to a herd- a 1.25 horsepower horse is always going to be out-muscled by a 40 horse-herd, and it also doesn't matter. The policy of 1.25 horsepower horse-breeding can still be a winner as part of a strategy of herd-quality competition. Choosing to frame policy versus strategy is apples to fruit basket comparisons at best, or little more than argument gerry mandering at worse.
The result is not a surprise- and often not an accident per see- but it's not that useful.
(here from the QC roundup)
Are you sure about that? To me Putin's behavior is much better explained by the medium-term maximization of his own popularity. Obviously this entails pretensions of national interest, but they are so manifestly absurd that I have a hard time imagining that anybody who matters at the top could take them seriously. Even if Ukraine had crumbled in a week, it wouldn't have benefited Russia's long-term interests, either economic or security ones.
I would disagree with your conclusion, and affirm your opening question. I think the variations you see do exist, as Putin runs a personalist system and so his personal foilables show themselves (including his desire for historical reputation, his propensity for aggression when he perceives it as a safe i.e. easy win), but there is a distinction between someone who is pursuing a strategy badly (Putin is, I have asserted for many a year, strategically inept), versus not having a strategy at all.
Putin is in many respects incompetent at various strategic factors, but that's a matter of capability, not intent.
Hmm, maybe I should try doing an effortpost on this, because it seems to me that in the West both the mainstream and contrarian spaces don't really have a good narrative about why Putin can at the same time be genuinely popular, pursue ridiculous policies, and maintain relative stability for decades.
I mean, a lack of meaningful reliable information doesn't help theory making in a society where it's literally against the law to impugn the good reputation of certain institutions.
What, specifically is Putin's popularity absent the cultural context where various public criticisms can lead one to defenestrate themselves?
Well, the point is that Russia hasn't had any other context basically throughout the entire thousand years it existed, so this isn't held against Putin by anybody other than an irrelevant fringe. This doesn't mean that any tsar is automatically popular, he has to maintain decent standards of living and the kayfabe of Russia as a great power. Especially if the reality is that Russia is in fact a gas station with nukes which is fucked in the long tern regardless of what any likely tsar might do, so going out with a bang instead of a whimper is actually preferable to many nationalists who can see through the kayfabe.
Sure it has. It had so in living memory, even. The rise of the Putin personality cult and the decision to murder dissidents abroad was a policy decision, not a pre-existing or unavoidable fact of nature.
It may not have been unavoidable, but I'd say something like it was extremely likely. That period in Russia is commonly referred to as "evil nineties", and Putin bringing an end to it is certainly a major factor to his genuine popularity, re-establishment of tsarism notwithstanding. And it's not like there was much of a substantial alternative to him in particular. His biggest opponent was Primakov, another ex-KGB goon, not exactly someone to expect kindness to dissidents from.
The unmeasurable concept of popularity is creating a self-referential loop here, which is what avoids the original question. Putin is as popular as he is because he runs personality cult -> Putin runs a personality cult because he was popular -> the propaganda of the personality cult is what creates / proves his popularity. It's not an answer to the earlier question of how popular Putin actually is independent of the suppression state in which anti-popularity factors are squashed.
(One insight would be the result of the Wagner Mutiny. No one joined in on the mutiny against Putin... but there was no mass popular uprising in his favor either. There was no equivalent to, say, Erdogan flooding the streets with his supporters during the failed Turkish coup.)
On the other hand, we could compare Putin's popularity with Russians outside the scope (and reach) of his personality cult. This is primarily Russians abroad, but they do exist as a counter-example of Russians, and Putin is not, shall we say, particularly popular amongst those who are not imbibing on the Russian state-influenced media apparatus. The tendency to murder high-profile dissidents does tend to keep people from wanting to be high-profile, but that's a suppression of dissent, not a popularity, unless the undefined standard of popularity is claiming that people keeping their heads down are actually a sign of popular support.
Putin and his backers actively worked/conspired to undercut all substantial alternatives to them in general and him in particular. It's been one of his more consistent strategies over the decades, both domestically and externally.
This is not surprising on the Russian political front- the Security Services were the most capable and coherent survivors of the Cold War and had the best means of coordinating formally and informally for mutual benefit and a common understanding of a better vision that a critical mass could get behind- but this is and was a political consequence of policy decisions, not an inevitability or even a testament to popularity.
It turns out that a one-party state with no meaningful civil society does not have coherent political party groups to fall back on if the uni-party collapses.
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