Abstract Contemporary wars frequently unravel not through decisive battlefield defeat, but through the erosion of purpose, coherence and legitimacy. Existing approaches to strategy struggle to explain this dynamic because they privilege rational calculation and institutional design while marginalizing the moral and justificatory dimensions of strategic behaviour. This article advances a new conceptual framework that understands strategy as a moral economy in which interests and obligations are continually negotiated through shared ideas of legitimacy and purpose. It develops an ideal-type distinction between ‘serious’ and ‘cynical’ forms of strategic behaviour and shows how their interaction shapes the conduct and political sustainability of war. Rather than treating these as binary opposites, the analysis traces the unstable terrain between them, demonstrating how mixed motives can both sustain collective purpose and undermine it from within. Because such tensions cannot be resolved through rationality or organizational control alone, the article turns to narrative as the key mechanism through which coherence is produced. Convincing narratives capable of binding divergent motives to a common purpose emerge as critical to channelling cynicism in constructive directions and sustaining the moral economy of strategy in war.
Thomas Waldman (Wed,) studied this question.