On Grand Strategy

by John Lewis Gaddis

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.”

hedgehogs, in contrast, shunned self-deprecation and brushed aside criticism. Aggressively deploying big explanations, they displayed a “bristly impatience with those who ‘do not get it.’” When the intellectual holes they dug got too deep, they’d simply dig deeper. They became “prisoners of their preconceptions,” trapped in cycles of self-congratulation. These played well as sound bites, but bore little relationship to what subsequently occurred.

“a theory of good judgment”: that “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.

Ends and means have to connect if anything is to happen. They’re never, however, interchangeable.

their causes were knowable, their consequences were predictable. But only individually, for not even the canniest seer can specify cumulative effects. Little things add up in unpredictably big ways—and yet, leaders can’t let uncertainties paralyze them. They must appear to know what they’re doing, even when they don’t.

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.

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’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.

“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.

a problem Henry Kissinger identified long ago: that 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.

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. Where, though, if not in the military and if only inadequately within the academy or on the job, can young people today get such an education?

Clausewitzian combination of a distilled past, a planned present, and an uncertain future most explicitly come together.

You learn to play the game by having a coach, literally a “trainer,” who does what drill instructors used to do when military service was mandatory: teach the basics, build stamina, enforce discipline, encourage collaboration, show you how to fail and to recover from failure. Once the game begins, though, your coach can only shout or sulk from the sidelines.

With more people watching, practice becomes performance. Reputations now matter, narrowing the freedom to be flexible. Leaders who’ve reached the top—like Xerxes, or Tetlock’s experts—can become prisoners of their own preeminence: they lock themselves into roles from which they can’t escape.

mental Hellesponts that divide such leadership, on one shore, from common sense, on the other. There ought to be free and frequent crossings between them, for it’s only with such exchanges that grand strategies—alignments of means with ends—become possible.

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.

Pericles was not Xerxes. “I am more afraid of our own blunders than of the enemy’s devices,”

One way is to find flows you can go with. Having determined your destination, you set sails, motivate rowers, adjust for winds and currents, avoid shoals and rocks, allow for surprises, and expend finite energy efficiently. You control some things, but align yourself with others. You balance, while never forgetting that the reason you’re balancing is to get from where you are to where you want to go.

There are, after all, two kinds of growth. One proceeds gradually, allowing adjustments to environments as environments adjust to whatever’s new. Skillful growers can shape this process: cultivation, for them, is like navigation for Plutarch’s steersmen—the simultaneous management of separate things. But no farmer or gardener can claim to anticipate, much less to control, all that may happen between the planting of seeds and the harvesting of crops. The other kind of growth defies environments. It’s inner-directed, and hence outwardly oblivious. It resists cultivation, setting its own direction, pace, and purpose. Anticipating no obstacles, it makes no compromises. Like an unchecked predator, an ineradicable weed, or a metastasizing cancer, it fails to see where it’s going until it’s too late. It sequentially consumes its surroundings, and ultimately itself.39

But persuasion, pursued with patience, would have come closer to cultivation, and hence navigation, than the confrontations into which Pericles led the Athenians. That’s the difference, fundamental in strategy, between respecting constraints and denying their existence.

For if credibility is always in doubt, then capabilities must become infinite or bluffs must become routine. Neither approach is sustainable:

Polonius’s pontifications float freely above landscapes, which is why Hamlet mocks him: Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel? Polonius: By the mass, and ’tis like a camel indeed. Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel. Polonius: It is backed like a weasel. Hamlet: Or like a whale. Polonius: Very like a whale.2

No one can anticipate everything that might happen. Sensing possibilities, though, is better than having no sense at all of what to expect. Sun Tzu seeks sense—even common sense—by tethering principles, which are few, to practices, which are many.