On the longform website ‘Ribbonfarm’ in February this year, American academic Adam Elkus wrote: “One possible, if depressing, conclusion to draw from the current state [of grand strategies], is that strategy is just an illusionary abstraction that we have invented to give meaning to that which has none. We use it as a retrospective framing device to explain a complex series of events (of our own making but mostly of external provenance) that we do not understand”. Ultimately,