On Grand Strategy

by John Lewis Gaddis

The date is 480 B.C.E. The place is Abydos, the town on the Asian side of the Hellespont where it narrows to just over a mile in width.

Lord Oxford had come across an intriguing line from the ancient Greek poet Archilochus of Paros. It was, as Berlin remembered it: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”2

Might it become a scheme for classifying great writers? If so, Plato, Dante, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Proust would all have been hedgehogs. Aristotle, Shakespeare, Goethe, Pushkin, and Joyce were obviously foxes. So was Berlin, who distrusted most big things—like logical positivism—but felt fully at ease with smaller ones.4

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.”

The distinction was simple but not frivolous: it offered “a point of view from which to look and compare, a starting point for genuine investigation.”

Having fired off that flare, however, Berlin failed to illuminate much with it beyond Tolstoy. The great man had wanted to be a hedgehog, Berlin claimed: War and Peace was supposed to reveal the laws by which history worked. But Tolstoy was too honest to neglect the peculiarities of personality and the contingencies of circumstance that defy such generalizations. So he filled his masterpiece with some of the most fox-like writing in all literature, mesmerizing his readers, who happily skipped the hedgehog-like history ruminations scattered throughout the text. Torn by contradictions, Tolstoy approached death, Berlin concluded, “a desperate old man, beyond human aid, wandering self-blinded [like Oedipus] at Colonus.”5

By way of an Oxford party, an Archilochus fragment, and Tolstoy’s epic, Berlin had stumbled upon two of the very best ways to become intellectually indelible. The first is to be Delphic, a trick known to oracles throughout time. The second is to be Aesopian: turn your ideas into animals, and they’ll achieve immortality.

Does Xerxes not see that “the god strikes with lightning” only those who attempt big things, while the little ones “do not itch the god to action”? Dismantle the bridges, disband the armies, and send everybody back home, Artabanus urges, where the worst that can await them will be more bad dreams. Xerxes, who weeps for the dead a hundred years hence, has a larger and longer view. If death is the price of life, why not pay the lesser prices that make lives memorable? Why be a forgettable King of Kings? Having tamed the Hellespont he can hardly stop. The bridges have to lead somewhere. Great militaries carry all they need to ensure that what can go wrong won’t, or that if it does, it won’t matter. “It is the god that leads us on, and so, when we of ourselves set about our many enterprises, we prosper.”9

He’ll have no home, other than in the tales the future will tell of the deeds he has done.11

The tragedy of Xerxes and Artabanus is that each lacked the other’s proficiency. The king, like Tetlock’s hedgehogs, commanded the attention of audiences but tended to dig himself into holes. The adviser, like Tetlock’s foxes, avoided the holes, but couldn’t retain audiences. Xerxes was right. If you try to anticipate everything, you’ll risk not accomplishing anything. But so was Artabanus. If you fail to prepare for all that might happen, you’ll ensure that some of it will. VI.

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.

The passage is convoluted even for Berlin, who rarely saw simplicity as a virtue. But I think he’s describing here an ecological sensitivity that equally respects time, space, and scale.

mean, by common sense, the ease with which most of us manage, most of the time.

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.

Common sense, in this sense, is like oxygen: the higher you go, the thinner it gets. “With great power comes great responsibility,” Spider-Man’s uncle Ben reminded him memorably33—but also the danger of doing dumb things.

Massive enterprises must have major incentives. Somebody has to show everybody—or almost everybody—that sacrifices made now will bear fruit later.

Xerxes and Alcibiades didn’t reflect. Artabanus and Nicias did so unduly. Master Sun reflects but then acts, deploying maximum leverage against minimal resistance. Success comes as quickly as the least expenditure of resources and lives allows. “Know

enemy, know yourself,” The Art of War exhorts. “Know the ground, know the weather. Your victory will then be total.”3

Leadership in The Art of War, then, is seeing simplicities in complexity. Some realities are as easily grasped as Sun Tzu’s five fundamental sounds, colors, and flavors: that’s how we know their nature. But when simplicities mix, complexities become endless. No matter how thoroughly we prepare, they’ll always surprise us. If tethered to principles, however, they need not paralyze us. And how might you learn to tether? By having great teachers, I think, for tethering is what they have us do. I.

in the Roman senate—than Octavian

managed. His chief preoccupation

potential ally.”20

For unlike Xerxes, Pericles, Alexander, and Julius Caesar—not the least of whose gifts to Octavian had been to start him early—Caesar Augustus saw time as an ally. As the historian Mary Beard has pointed out, he didn’t need to abolish anything. He used time to grow things.56

You’re aligning aspirations with capabilities, for in Augustine’s thinking justice, peace, and God fit the first category, while order, war, and Caesar inhabit the second.

Alignment, in turn, implies interdependence. Justice is unattainable in the absence of order, peace may require the fighting of wars, Caesar must be propitiated—perhaps even, like Constantine, converted—if man is to reach God.

but what’s the nature of the tether? I think it’s proportionality: the means employed must be appropriate to—or at least not corrupt—the

if you have to use force, don’t destroy what you’re trying to preserve.49

As Machiavelli’s finest translator has put it: “[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.”53 The cagey Florentine might have appreciated, for its literary qualities, Charles Dickens’s

A Tale of Two Cities. But he’d have thought it careless in the extreme for Sydney Carton, that novel’s hero, to submit so gallantly at the end, to the sound of knitting, to his own disassembly.

Geoffrey Parker, his best biographer, finds an answer in late twentieth-century “prospect” theory: leaders, it suggests, risk more to avoid losses than to achieve gains.

The Federalist was an ambivalent clarion call. For how could submergence within a “UNION”—the capitalization was Hamilton’s—not drown its “parts”? Had any “empire” ever functioned without accidents of inheritance and legitimation through force? Could parochial concerns collectively coalesce? Of

what use was “a judicious estimate” if “more ardently to be wished than seriously to be expected”? Wise men were so often wrong, Hamilton acknowledged, that they might teach moderation “to those who are ever so much persuaded of their being in the right.” That made it foolish to insist on consistency: one must remake logic itself. That’s why Hamilton began, as had Augustus, by disarming resistance with humility.

The proposed Constitution “forms a happy combination in this respect; the great and aggregate interests being referred to the national, the local and particular to the State legislatures.”67

us, still almost like a spectacle, and join the nearest division

ordinarily miss or would perceive only after long study and reflection.” His term for this is coup d’oeil, or an “inward eye.”40 It’s what Machiavelli meant by “sketching”—conveying complexity usably.41 Complexity fully rendered would take too long and contain too much, thereby entangling judgment. Complexity as what you want or expect would only confirm what you think you know. You need something in between.

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.46

“The good general,” Clausewitz concludes, “must know friction in order to overcome it whenever possible,

and in order not to expect a standard of achievement in his operations which this very friction makes impossible.”47

Clausewitz tells us, of men who show great determination as junior officers, but lose it as they rise in rank. Conscious of the need to be decisive, they

also recognize the risks entailed by a wrong decision; since they are unfamiliar with the problems now facing them, their mind loses its former incisiveness. The more used they had been to instant action, the more their timidity increases as they realize the dangers of the vacillation that ensnares them.48

“If we then ask,” Clausewitz writes, “what sort of mind is likeliest to display . . . military genius, experience and observation will both tell us that it is the inquiring rather than the creative mind,

the comprehensive rather than the specialized approach, the calm rather than the excitable head to which in war we would choose to entrust the fate of our brothers and children.”49 He elaborates no further in On War, but Tolstoy does, in War and Peace, in the contrast he draws between Napoleon and Kutuzov.

Napoleon appears most memorably in the novel’s portrayal of a real event: his meeting with General Alexander Balashov, t...

on July 1, a week after the French crossed the Niemen. The emperor expects an offer of negotiations, but when Balashov insists that Alexander won’t extend one as long as a single French soldier remains on Russian soil, Napoleon’s face starts twitching and his left calf trembling: “[H]e began to speak in a higher and more hurried voice than before.” The more he speaks the less he controls ...

so as to prove his rightness ...

Mistakes, Tolstoy notes, are no longer possible for him: “[T]o his mind everything he did was good, not because it agreed with any notion of what was good and bad, but because

he did it.” And so Napoleon winds up “exalt[ing] himself and insult[ing] Alexander, . . . the thing he had least wanted to do at the beginning of the meeting.”50

Here, for example, is Lincoln, in a note probably prepared for his Springfield speech: If A. can prove, however conclusively, that he may of right enslave B.—why may not B. snatch the same argument, and prove equally, that he may enslave A?—You say A. is white, and B. is black. It is color, then; the lighter, having the right to enslave the darker? Take care. By this rule you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with a fairer skin than your own. You do not mean color exactly?—You mean the whites are intellectually the superiors of the blacks, and, therefore have the right to enslave them? Take care again. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with an intellect superior to your own. But, say you, it is a question of interest; and if you can make it your interest you have the right to enslave another. Very well. And if he can make it his interest, he has the right to enslave you.31 Then, in that speech, Lincoln quoted the Declaration of Independence: “[A]ll men are created equal.” Did

But we do know that Athens, the model for all subsequent democracies, defeated itself in the end because it bore deaths more easily than questions about the purposes of its wars.60

The price of victory, therefore, would be the denial of justice, because the price of justice could be the denial of victory.