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How Vladimir Putin must have inwardly sniggered. By inviting him to give an interview in which he would forecast the death of liberalism, the _Financial Times_ was offering him the

opportunity to become part of the information campaign that would make it a self-fulfilling prophecy. The doyens of the liberal press in London may not understand the most basic principles

of hybrid warfare, but there’s not much you can teach Vlad about it, and he seized the opportunity with alacrity. His observations covered liberalism in its widest context, and that debate

will be taken up elsewhere in _TheArticle_. This piece will concentrate on liberalism as a strategic construct and where Putin’s comments have got it bang to rights. Even so close to the

time, the liberal strategic interlude of 1991–2012 already has the look of an historical aberration. It was preceded by what the Cambridge historian Eric Hobsbawm described as the short 20th

century (1914–1989), a period of demonstrable historical continuity, centred on Europe, involving the machinations of great powers and classical in the grand strategic sense that it was

defined by the power of states, or alliances of states, in a series of adversarial relationships. There is an unbroken narrative that links German aggression in 1914 to Soviet exhaustion in

1989 that marks the start and finish of a recognisable and unified passage of history. A history, moreover, that in 1989 would have been recognised by the participants of the Congress of

Vienna in 1815, defined as it was by the application of state power in pursuit of competing grand strategic visions. Both Castlereagh and Kissinger would recognise themselves as players in a

grand strategic contest whose rules had changed little between centuries and where state power was both a means and an end in a competitive international system. So what changed between

1991 and 2012 to mark it as an aberration, historically and strategically? At first, very little. The United Nations was at the heart of a unified international response to Iraqi aggression

that President George H W Bush eulogised as indicative of a New World Order. The Iraqi army that invaded Kuwait had the misfortune to find the US forces that formed the core of the coalition

at the height of their post-Cold War powers, with a capacity for military violence shaped by the assumptions of classical grand strategy to fight the Warsaw Pact in northern Europe. The

subsequent mismatch was brief, decisive and entirely contained within the boundaries set by the Security Council. So far, so classical. Yet in the subsequent chaos within Iraq, both Kurdish

and Shia minorities seized what they saw as an historic opportunity to rise against the regime of Saddam Hussein. The response was sufficiently brutal to provoke a reaction beyond the

Westphalian boundaries of grand strategy and into the internal affairs of a state that, however reprehensible its actions, remained sovereign. UN Security Council Resolution 688 of April

1991 did not authorise any specific action but it created an atmosphere sufficiently permissive to allow a ground intervention in Iraqi Kurdistan and the imposition of two no fly zones, to

wide international applause. This represents the first aberrant step away from a classical tradition of war acting as the means to resolve the balance of power between states and to a

liberal instrument used to address the balance of power within states. In 1991, this still had a one-off look, justified by localised and exceptional conditions. However, as the decade

proceeded, those conditions looked increasingly ubiquitous and habitual as the Balkan conflict, East Timor and Sierra Leone saw successive interventions of increasing diplomatic and military

fluency. A process that culminated in Tony Blair’s speech in Chicago in April 1999, laying out a formalised manifesto for liberal intervention, which itself followed a British Strategic

Defence Review in 1998 that had identified the military as a force for good rather than an instrument of national power to be rationally applied in the classical, realist tradition. At that

point, and following a seductive run of military and political success, the Chicago Doctrine was a powerful contribution to the debate about the nature of power in the post-Cold War world

but it did not yet provide the intellectual underpinning for Western grand strategy; after 9/11, it would. The 9/11 attacks created a unifying theme for Western grand strategy that would

have as its centrepiece the Global War on Terrorism. Despite the near universal support for the USA in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, a Global War on Terrorism was always problematic in

strategic terms. To be effective, military strategy needs clear objectives, a definable enemy and a recognisable theatre of operations. In particular, fighting a condition, at best a tactic,

is hardly consistent with the clarity that is the first condition of success. Also, while recourse to war was always understandable at a visceral level, it had the further disadvantage of

making the terrorist groups it targeted cohere in a manner that would have been unlikely had the attacks been regarded as criminal and subject to a civil response. Finally, a global

condition that demanded to be addressed wherever it appeared created an automatic asymmetry between ends and means that would eventually exhaust even the strategic inventory of the US.

Therefore the liberal interventionist grand strategy declared in 2001, after a decade in gestation, contained a series of tensions within it that would test its military dimension repeatedly

in the wars that followed. The Chicago Doctrine was not an immaculate intellectual conception and drew on a long tradition, represented not least by Michael Howard’s seminal book _War and

the Liberal Conscience_. Liberal wars present a philosophical challenge in that being nasty, brutish and not necessarily short they have an inherently illiberal quality. But leaving

semantics aside, they also bring practical problems. Wars in defence of liberal values in this country are what the British people fought throughout the 20th century and these were wars of

non-negotiable necessity. Wars in promotion of liberal values in other people’s countries are what the British armed forces have fought since 1991 and, by their very nature, they have been

discretionary. Because issues of national survival are not involved the means available to strategy are also discretionary and often less than the vaulting ambition of nation building

demands. There was, therefore, always a fundamental weakness at the heart of our wars of liberal intervention: they were always wars of choice, and, as the people lost conviction so did the

politicians, leaving Western soldiers to make the best of a bad job. We also sought to promote liberal values in the least liberal of places. Indeed, there is in the very idea of promoting

liberal values a central conceit that assumes our idea of what a state should be – an entity that dispenses goods and services based on formal procedures such as the rule of law and

democratic process – is a universal model. To impose this in places where the state is a mechanism to pursue patronage on the basis of class, tribe or ethnicity is to invite a further

tension, of which Afghanistan provides vivid testimony. To identify 2012 as the date that the liberal strategic interlude ended is an arbitrary judgement. Osama bin Laden had been killed the

year before and it was in 2012 that Secretary of State Panetta announced the end of US combat missions in Afghanistan. What is clear though is that a period in which the West was as the

height of its strategic powers and spent that power in conflicts it could neither comprehend nor control is now over. Western interventions are now limited and aimed at tactical outcomes in

local geographies rather than strategic outcomes in nations or whole regions. The occupant of the White House operates firmly in the Jacksonian tradition of America First and contemplates

the possibility of conflict with China that has classical grand strategy written all over it, while the author of the Chicago Doctrine hawks his services to despots and snipes from the wings

of domestic politics. The liberal strategic interlude is over and Vladimir Putin is its obituarist.