On Grand Strategy

by John Lewis Gaddis

common sense: if you have to use force, don’t destroy what you’re trying to preserve.

“[J]ustice is no more reasonable than what a person’s prudence tells him he must acquire for himself, or must submit to, because men cannot afford justice in any sense that transcends their own preservation.”

Man must manage on his own, but for that he needs princes and princes need advisers. The adviser can’t tell the prince what to do, but he can suggest what the prince should know.

For Machiavelli this means seeking patterns—across time, space, and status—by shifting perspectives. “[J]ust as those who sketch landscapes place themselves down in the plain to consider the nature of mountains . . . and to consider the nature of low places place themselves high atop mountains, similarly, to know well the nature of peoples one needs to be prince, and to know well the nature of princes one needs to be of the people.”

Sketches, as Machiavelli sees them, convey complexity usably. They’re not reality. They’re not even finished representations of it. But they can transmit essential if incomplete information on short notice. They thus enhance, although they never replace, good judgment.

The “great,” he points out—he means the nobility—will always wish to oppress the people. The people will wish not to be oppressed.

Augustine mapped imaginary cities in a big book. Machiavelli prepared a brief for a prince whose attention span in no way matched that of its subsequent readers.

All related the past to the future: “This worked before—it’s worth trying again.” All employed checklists: “Before you do anything, be sure of what you’re trying to do and make sure you have what you’ll need.” You can’t and shouldn’t do everything, though, so you’ll also select: “Here’s what we can afford,” or “Here’s what’s right.”

Machiavelli’s great transgression, Berlin concluded, was to confirm what everyone knows but no one will admit: that ideals “cannot be attained.” Statecraft, therefore, can never balance realism against idealism: there are only competing realisms. There is no contest, in governing, between politics and morality: there is only politics.

Machiavelli “is interested in public affairs; in security, independence, success, glory, strength, vigour, felicity on earth, not in heaven; in the present and future as well as the past; in the real world, not an imaginary one.”

“[T]here are many different ends that men may seek and still be fully rational,”

Perhaps there are other worlds in which all principles are harmonized, but “it is on earth that we live, and it is here that we must believe and act.”

Posterity has long regarded Augustine and Machiavelli as pivots in the history of “western” thought because each, with enduring effects, shifted long-standing relationships between souls and states.

The king, looking to Heaven, venerates. The queen, feet on earth, calculates. The differences test the ideas of Augustine and Machiavelli against the demands of statecraft at the dawn of the modern age.

In this she followed Machiavelli, for if God didn’t want to do everything, why should she? It was enough to awe, to set limits, and, like Augustus, to let things grow—while retaining, deftly if possible, fiercely if necessary, her own autonomy.

Precision and decisiveness, in each of these situations, could have entrapped her.

She would have seen benefits, though, in balancing opposites: she practiced that art every day. She’d have thought her successors’ efforts to reconcile opposites dangerously foolish.

They disconnect ends of arguments from their beginnings. That’s why Paine and Jefferson thought it necessary first to tilt history, and only at that point to begin to make it. Rhetoric, their lever, had to be clearer than truth, even if necessary an inversion of it.

no strategy anticipates all contingencies, that every solution creates new problems, and that these can, at times, overwhelm.

if “civilized nations do not put their prisoners to death or devastate cities and countries, it is because intelligence plays a larger part in their methods of warfare and has taught them more effective ways of using force than the crude expression of instinct.”

“sketching”—conveying complexity usably.41 Complexity fully rendered would take too long and contain too much, thereby entangling judgment.

“[O]n the contrary, they support each other.”45 That places uncertainty within a universal framework. Or, to put it another way, Clausewitz anticipates, by more than a century, Murphy’s Law: that what can go wrong will. Or, still more succinctly, shit happens.

He values theory as an antidote to anecdotes: as a compression of the past transmitting experience, while making minimal claims about the future. He relies on theory for training, not as a navigational chart for the unforeseen. He trusts coup d’oeil more than quantification: any reduction of war to numbers “would not [stand] up for a moment against the realities of life.”

What Tolstoy means here—I think—is: (a) that because everything connects with everything else, there’s an inescapable interdependency across time, space, and scale—forget about distinguishing independent from dependent variables; (b) that, as a consequence, there’ll always be things that can’t be known—breaking them into components won’t help because there’ll always be smaller components; (c) that owing to what we can’t know, we’ll always retain an illusion of agency, however infinitesimal; (d) that while laws may govern these infinitesimals, they make no difference to us because we can’t feel their effects; therefore (e) our perception of freedom is, in practice, freedom itself.

in life generally,” Clausewitz explains, “all parts of a whole are interconnected and thus the effects produced, however small their cause, must influence all . . . operations and modify their final outcome to some degree, however slight.”72 And so he anticipates Tolstoy on infinitesimals.

we have the greater numbers, and the enemy has the greater facility of concentrating forces upon points of collision; that we must fail, unless we can find some way of making our advantage an over-match for his; and that this can only be done by menacing him with superior forces at different points, at the same time; so that we can safely attack, one, or both, if he makes no change; and if he weakens one to strengthen the other, forbear to attack the strengthened one, but seize, and hold the weakened one, gaining so much.

Lincoln defined his nation’s responsibility as one of maintaining in the world, that form and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders; to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all; to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.

“liberty is power,” and that “the nation blessed with the largest portion of liberty must in proportion to its numbers be the most powerful nation upon earth.”

“Somehow he managed,” Lincoln’s most thorough modern biographer has concluded, “to be strong-willed without being willful, righteous without being self-righteous, and moral without being moralistic,”

Scale sets the ranges within which experience accrues. If, in evolution, edges of chaos reward adaptation; if, in history, adaptation fortifies resilience; and if, in individuals, resilience accommodates unknowns more readily than rigidity, then it stands to reason that a gradual expansion of edges better equips leaders for the unexpected than those that shock, leaving little time to adapt, or those inherited, which breed entitlement and arrogance, its companion.

he started small, rose slowly, and only when ready reached for the top. His ambitions grew as his opportunities expanded, but he kept both within his circumstances. He sought to be underestimated.

Tolstoy suggests, in the last pages of War and Peace, that the interdependence of time, space, and scale simultaneously reflects choice and necessity: the illusion of agency causes us to believe in free will even as inexorable laws deny the possibility.

The long shadow of Lincoln loomed over them all, for they would now test his greatest gamble—that liberty and power could coexist—as it had never been tested before.

Instead he improvised, edging forward where possible, falling back when necessary, always appearing to do something, never giving in to despair, and in everything remembering what Wilson forgot—that nothing would succeed without widespread continuing public support. “It is a terrible thing,” Roosevelt once admitted, “to look over your shoulder when you are trying to lead—and to find no one there.”

the English language about to be enriched on a Shakespearian scale over the recently perfected technology of shortwave radio.

Over the next four years, it was Roosevelt, more than anyone else, who rescued democracy and capitalism—not everywhere and in all respects, but sufficiently to stabilize both so that the setbacks they’d suffered in the first half of the twentieth century could reverse themselves in the second. He brought two great wars fought on opposite sides of the earth to almost simultaneous victories at a cost in American lives of less than 2 percent of the total for all the participants in those wars.106 His country emerged from them with half the world’s manufacturing capability, two-thirds of its gold reserves, three-fourths of its invested capital, its largest navy and air force, and its first atomic bombs.107 There were, to be sure, pacts with devils in all of these: strategies, like politics, are never pure. But as historians Hal Brands and Patrick Porter have pointed out, “If this wasn’t a successful grand strategy,” then “nothing would be.”

Roosevelt had “countervailing qualities of a rare and inspiring order.” [H]e was large-hearted and possessed wide political horizons, imaginative sweep, understanding of the time in which he lived and of the direction of the great new forces at work in the twentieth century—technological, racial, imperialist, anti-imperialist; he was in favour of life and movement, the promotion of the most generous possible fulfillment of the largest possible number of human wishes, and not in favour of caution and retrenchment and sitting still. Above all, he was absolutely fearless.

Wilson, at his postwar triumphs in Paris, London, and Rome, had conveyed something like this, but only briefly: “[I]t disappeared quickly and left a terrible feeling of disenchantment.” He’d been the kind of leader who, possessed by a “bright, coherent dream, . . . understands neither people nor events,” and hence is able “to ignore a good deal of what goes on outside him.” The weak and the vacillating may find “relief and peace and strength” in following such a person, “to whom all issues are clear, whose universe consists entirely of primary colors, mostly black and white, and who marches toward his goal looking neither to right nor to left.”

Roosevelt, in striking contrast, was one of those politicians equipped with “antennae of the greatest possible delicacy, which convey to them . . . the perpetually changing contours of events and feelings and human activities.” Gifted with the capacity “to take in minute impressions,” they absorb and extract purpose from—as do artists—vast multitudes of “small evanescent unseizable detail.”

Statesmen of this type know what to do and when to do it, if they are to achieve their ends, which themselves are usually not born within some private world of inner thought, or introverted feeling, but are the crystallisation, the raising to great intensity and clarity, of what a large number of their fellow citizens are thinking and feeling in some dim, inarticulate but nevertheless persistent fashion.

And yet, the country has reassured as they’ve crossed it. There’ve been two thousand miles of sturdy houses, well-kept lawns, and bright flowers—“a windbreak . . . against the erosion of the times; each one a place where roots go down to hold the soil.” The schools look better than ever before. The people, “habituated to peace,” are unfailingly kind. And never again, DeVoto vows, “would I speak condescendingly of the radio.” For suddenly, “out of advertisements for cereals and shaving lotions, you get an instrument of democracy.” No one this time will be able to say “that the Americans did not know what they were in for, or why.”

For more than three centuries we Americans have been building on this continent a free society, a society in which the promise of the human spirit may find fulfillment. . . . We have built well.

“as we sat on the garden-patio with our drinks, I fell at once under the spell of his brilliant intellect.” Despite having been in the United States for only a few days, Berlin conveyed the sense of “a lifetime of acquaintance with that country.”

[H]e never seemed to stop talking, though he never bored us, even if we did sometimes have difficulty in understanding him. . . . He sparkled and scintillated, yet not one of us who listened to him felt that we were being overwhelmed or left out. One of Isaiah’s most priceless attributes is that he evokes genius in others . . . , giving them the impression that they are really more coruscating and witty than they would otherwise believe themselves to be.

A beautiful gift.

that they were sketching: seeking at least shapes of things they’d have no time to know. Clausewitz would have seen coups d’oeil—“inward eyes” grasping truths ordinarily requiring long reflection.

Both shared the belief—“too obviously to be clearly realized”—that problems could be solved through “the conscious application of truths upon which all men endowed with adequate mental powers could agree.”

That made Roosevelt, for Berlin, “the greatest leader of democracy, the greatest champion of social progress in the twentieth century.”32 So where did his self-confidence come from? Not, I’m sure, from any Polonius-like search for certainty in the shapes of passing clouds. But not from reconciling or eradicating contradictions either: FDR was at once too cynical and too humane to pursue either possibility. Perhaps he was, though, one of those leaders who’d “learnt to live,” as Berlin put it, and in the manner of Machiavelli, with “incompatible alternatives in public and private life.”33 “I am a juggler,” Roosevelt himself acknowledged in 1942, and “never let my right hand know what my left hand does.”

“I may be entirely inconsistent,” FDR went on to explain, “if it will help win the war.”36 Consistency in grand strategy, then, was less a matter of logic than of scale: what made no sense to subordinates could make perfect sense to him. For he saw better than anyone relationships of everything to everything else—while sharing what he saw with no one. Instead he radiated an apparently effortless aplomb, despite spending the longest presidency in American history, and the last third of his life, unable, unassisted, to instruct even his own legs and feet.

what Holmes says after Roosevelt leaves: “A second-class intellect. But a first-class temperament!”

“Any complex activity,” Clausewitz writes, “if it is to be carried on with any degree of virtuosity, calls for appropriate gifts of intellect and temperament. If they are outstanding and reveal themselves in exceptional achievements, their possessor is called a ‘genius.’”