On Grand Strategy

by John Lewis Gaddis

“if you were to take account of everything . . . , you would never do anything. It is better to have a brave heart and endure one half of the terrors we dread than to [calculate] all of the terrors and suffer nothing at all. . . . Big things are won by big dangers.”

“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”

Hedgehogs, Berlin explained, “relate everything to a single central vision” through which “all that they say and do has significance.” Foxes, in contrast, “pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way.”

They doubted “that the cloudlike subject of politics” could ever be “the object of a clocklike science.” The best of them “shared a self-deprecating style of thinking” that “elevate[d] no thought above criticism.”

“self-critical thinkers are better at figuring out the contradictory dynamics of evolving situations, more circumspect about their forecasting prowess, more accurate in recalling mistakes, less prone to rationalize those mistakes, more likely to update their beliefs in a timely fashion, and—as a cumulative result of these advantages—better positioned to affix realistic probabilities in the next round of events.”13 In short, foxes do it better.

The choices facing us are less often between stark alternatives—good versus evil, for instance—than between good things we can’t have simultaneously.

We seek certain things now, put off others until later, and regard still others as unattainable. We select what fits where, and then decide which we can achieve when.

We’d need to combine, within a single mind (our own), the hedgehog’s sense of direction and the fox’s sensitivity to surroundings. While retaining the ability to function.

[A] compass . . . [will] point you true north from where you’re standing, but it’s got no advice about the swamps and deserts and chasms that you’ll encounter along the way. If in pursuit of your destination, you plunge ahead, heedless of obstacles, and achieve nothing more than to sink in a swamp . . . , [then] what’s the use of knowing true north?

“You see? Lincoln knows when to be a hedgehog (consulting the compass) and when a fox (skirting the swamp)!”

History, only history, only the sum of the concrete events in time and space—the sum of the actual experience of actual men and women in their relation to one another and to an actual three-dimensional, empirically experienced, physical environment—this alone contained the truth, the material out of which genuine answers—answers needing for their apprehension no special sense or faculties which normal human beings did not possess—might be constructed.

there’s nothing unusual about the simultaneous presence, within our minds, of a short-term sensitivity to surroundings and a long-term sense of direction. We live with these opposites every day.

two kinds of thinking. “Fast” thinking is intuitive, impulsive, and often emotional. It produces, when needed, instant action: it’s what you do to keep from running into things, or to keep them from running into you. “Slow” thinking is deliberate, focused, and usually logical. It needn’t result in action at all: it’s how you learn in order to know.

Same concept with type 1 and 2 thinking popularized by Daniel Kahneman in Thinking Fast and Slow.

Foxes were better equipped to survive in rapidly changing environments in which those who abandoned bad ideas quickly held the advantage. Hedgehogs were better equipped to survive in static environments that rewarded persisting with tried-and-true formulas. Our species—homo sapiens—is better off for having both temperaments.

Which is what grand strategy is meant to prevent. I’ll define that term, for the purposes of this book, as the alignment of potentially unlimited aspirations with necessarily limited capabilities.

Strategies become grander even as they remain within the beholder’s eye. It’s wrong to say, then, that states have grand strategies but that people don’t. Alignments are necessary across time, space, and scale.

Specifying success was never easy, but the finite nature of means helped. For although satisfaction, in the end, is a state of mind, achieving it requires real expenditures. It’s in that fact that the need for alignment, and hence for strategy, has always arisen.

the “intellectual capital” leaders accumulate prior to reaching the top is all they’ll be able to draw on while at the top.37 There’s less time now than Lincoln had to learn anything new.

That leaves it to the academy to shape the minds of its students while it has their attention, but the academic mind is itself divided. A gap has opened between the study of history and the construction of theory, both of which are needed if ends are to be aligned with means.

he values nothing so much “as the knowledge of the actions of great men, learned by me from long experience with modern things and a continuous reading of ancient ones.”

History alone, he argues, is just a long string of stories. That doesn’t mean they’re useless, though, because theory, when conceived of as distillation, keeps you from having to listen to them all again.

what is “training,” as Clausewitz understands it? It’s being able to draw upon principles extending across time and space, so that you’ll have a sense of what’s worked before and what hasn’t. You then apply these to the situation at hand: that’s the role of scale. The result is a plan, informed by the past, linked to the present, for achieving some future goal.

Clausewitz’s concept of training, however, retains its relevance. It’s the best protection we have against strategies getting stupider as they become grander, a recurring problem in peace as well as war. It’s the only way to combine the apparent opposites of planning and improvisation: to teach the common sense that comes from knowing when to be a hedgehog and when a fox.

As authority increases, however, so does self-consciousness. With more people watching, practice becomes performance. Reputations now matter, narrowing the freedom to be flexible.

But by analyzing how others since that monarch have managed oppositions of logic and leadership, we can perhaps coach ourselves for the crossings we’ll sooner or later have to make.

The past and future are no more equivalent, in Thucydides, than are capabilities and aspirations in strategy—they are, however, connected. The past we can know only from imperfect sources, including our own memories. The future we can’t know, other than that it will originate in the past but then depart from it.

To know one big thing or many little ones is, therefore, not enough: resemblances, which Thucydides insists must happen, can occur anywhere along the spectrum from hedgehogs to foxes and back again.

The assembly functioned by divorcing virtue from status. If a man wished to participate—a virtue—then “the obscurity of his condition”—status—wouldn’t prevent his doing so.

The Greeks thought of culture as character. It was predictability across scale: the behavior of a city, a state, or a people in small things, big things, and those in between.32 Knowing who they were and what they wanted, the Spartans were wholly predictable. They saw no need to change themselves or anyone else.

The Athenians’ strategy of walling their cities, however, had reshaped their character, obliging them restlessly to roam the world. Because they had changed, they would have to change others—that’s what having an empire means—but how many, to what extent, and by what means? No one, not even Pericles, could easily say.

Perhaps he simply got old: flexibility is harder to maintain as that happens.

Strategy requires a sense of the whole that reveals the significance of respective parts.

But he saw the difference, even then, between inheriting a title and mastering the art of command. The first can happen overnight. The second can take a lifetime.

If wise, a commander is able to recognize changing circumstances and to act expediently.

If humane, he loves mankind, sympathizes with others, and appreciates their industry and toil.

He’d called forth courage and composure in a dangerous situation—qualities not evident after Philippi—and so began his own reputational rehabilitation.

Octavian was thinking ahead: how one decision can be made to affect what happens next.

Unlike Pericles, Octavian never tried to forge, from contingent events, causal chains.

Octavian saw constraints while seeking successes, and on those few occasions when he did lose sight of them, quickly self-corrected. Strategy, therefore, came naturally: he rarely confused aspirations with capabilities.

“He who knows the art of the direct and the indirect approach will be victorious,” Sun Tzu writes, appearing as usual to cover all possibilities. But then he tethers: “Such is the art of maneuvering.”49

Insufficiency demands indirection, and that, Sun Tzu insists, requires maneuver:

Victories must connect: otherwise they won’t lead anywhere. They can’t be foreseen, though, because they arise from unforeseen opportunities.

“and therefore your greatness, Virgil, lies in being able to grasp all of life . . . in a single survey, in a single work, in a single glance.” So are strategy and statecraft the ability to grasp interconnections? To know where you’ve been in order to see where you’re going? It’s hard to understand, otherwise, how an indirect approach—whether Odysseus’ twists and turns or Octavian’s probes and shifts—can ever reach Ithaca, or anywhere else.

“[I]f babies are innocent, it is not for lack of will to do harm, but for lack of strength.”

And that was before he, as a teenager, discovered sex. “I was inflamed with desire. . . . I ran wild with lust. . . . I was foul to the core, yet I was pleased with my own condition.”

Love and lust together seethed within me. . . . I was tossed and spilled, floundering in the broiling sea of my fornication. . .

Jupiter “punishes the wicked with his thunderbolts and yet commits adultery himself,” Augustine impertinently points out. “The two roles are quite incompatible.”

That’s because checklists adapt better to change than commandments. Sailors rely on them before going to sea. Soldiers employ them in planning missions. Surgeons demand them, to make sure they’ll have the instruments they need and that they’ll leave none behind. Pilots run through them, to ensure taking off safely and landing smoothly—preferably at the intended airport. Parents deploy them against all that can go wrong in transporting small children. Checklists pose common questions in situations that may surprise: the idea is to approach these having, as much as possible, reduced the likelihood that they will.

States, Machiavelli suggests, operate similarly. If governed badly, men’s rapacity will soon overwhelm them, whether through internal rebellion or external war. But if run with virtù—his untranslatable term for planning without praying40—states can constrain, if not in all ways control, the workings of fortune, or chance.

“Lightness of being,” then, is the ability, if not to find the good in bad things, then at least to remain afloat among them, perhaps to swim or to sail through them, possibly even to take precautions that can keep you dry. It’s not to locate logic in misfortunes, or to show that they’re for the best because they reflect God’s will. That’s for Augustine the hedgehog, the ponderous Pangloss of his day.