On Grand Strategy

by John Lewis Gaddis

“It is the god that leads us on, and so, when we of ourselves set about our many enterprises, we prosper.”

The test of a good theory lies in its ability to explain the past, for only if it does can we trust what it may tell us about the future.

Because ends exist only in the imagination, they can be infinite: a throne on the moon, perhaps, with a great view. Means, though, are stubbornly finite: they’re boots on the ground, ships in the sea, and the bodies required to fill them. Ends and means have to connect if anything is to happen. They’re never, however, interchangeable.

The only constraints Xerxes imposed on capabilities were his own aspirations. He hoped for the best, assuming that it would be the worst. He lived only in the present, cutting himself off from the past, where experience resided, and from the future, where the unforeseen lurked.19 Had Xerxes grasped these distinctions, he’d have seen that his armies and fleets could never have transported all that it would take just to invade Greece.

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.

When Pythius the Lydian provided all the troops and treasure the king had requested for the invasion save only the service of his eldest son, Xerxes found a way to show, unforgettably, his resolve: he had the young man bisected, and then ordered his armies to march between the bloody halves.20 That left no doubt as to Xerxes’ determination, but this literal red line locked him in. He couldn’t have rethought his plans now, even if he’d wanted to. 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.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s test, from 1936, for a first-rate intelligence: “the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

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.

The distinction clarifies what Thucydides keeps trying to tell us: that fear inspired by the growth of Athenian power caused the Peloponnesian War. 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.

a prudent man should always enter upon the paths beaten by great men, and imitate those who have been most excellent, so that if his own virtue does not reach that far, it is at least in the odor of it.” That’s adaptation: Machiavelli’s “odor” is Thucydides’ distinction between reflection and resemblance, which the passage of time sharpens. And approximation? “[P]rudent archers,” Machiavelli points out, knowing the strength of their bow, “set their aim much higher than the place intended, not to reach such height with their arrow, but to be able with the aid of so high an aim to achieve their plan.”41 For there will be deflection—certainly from gravity, perhaps from wind, who knows from what else? And the target itself will probably be moving.

“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.

The “higher glory,” Augustine reminds us, is “to stay war itself with a word, than to slay men with a sword.” But Machiavelli points out how rarely this is possible, for “a man who wants to make a profession of good in all regards must come to ruin among so many who are not good.”

“learn to be able not to be good,” and to use this proficiency or not use it “according to necessity.”51 As fits man’s fallen state, Augustine sighs. As befits man, Machiavelli simplifies. “Don’t sweat it. Move on.”

It was Augustine, though, who said of babies that they did no harm only through “lack of strength.”70

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. And no state respects Christian teaching on saving souls. The incompatibilities are irreconcilable. To deny this is, in Berlin’s words but in Machiavelli’s mind, to “vacillate, fall between two stools, and end in weakness and failure.”71

“The World Is Not Enough.”14 The phrase dates from Alexander the Great, but it couldn’t have been said of his empire, as it was now of Spain’s, that the sun never set on it.

memorable victim was the Earl of Oxford,44 who, one day while bowing respectfully, farted loudly. Elizabeth said nothing and seemed not to notice, but Oxford, humiliated, went into exile for seven years. At last he reappeared, bowed again, this time silently, and waited anxiously. “My Lord,” the queen responded (I like to think after a slight pause), “I had forgot the fart.”

The problem lay in Locke’s opposed supremacies: the people must obey the government, but the government must reflect the will of the people. He’d meant that tightrope, though, for a small island. When stretched across a great ocean—where distance impeded reflection and empowered disobedience—it was too thin a thread. Burke saw the difficulty as early as 1769: The Americans have made a discovery, or think they have made one, that we mean to oppress them: we have made a discovery, or think we have made one, that they intend to rise in rebellion. Our severity has increased their ill behaviour, we know not how to advance, they know not how to retreat.26

Revoking liberty would be a remedy “worse than the disease.” But curing it through equality would leave no one safe: [D]emocracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.

Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other.

That inspired Adams’s contemporary Henry Clay, who ardently advocated United States support not only for Latin American independence movements, but also those of the Greeks, then rebelling against Ottoman rule.91 Adams himself, though, understood how quickly such help could overstretch resources, material and moral. America “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy,” he admonished the House of Representatives in a speech of his own on July 4, 1821:

She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. . . . She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners, . . . she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. . . . She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.

War is . . . an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will. . . . Attached to force are certain self-imposed, imperceptible limitations hardly worth mentioning, known as international law and custom, but they scarcely weaken it. Force—that is, physical force, for moral force has no existence save as expressed in the state and the law—is thus the means of war; to impose our will on the enemy is its object.

The outgoing president, James Buchanan, had refused to risk anything: hence his terrifying passivity as seven slave states seceded after Lincoln’s election, seizing federal facilities as they did so. Anxious senators—among them Seward, Douglas, and John Crittenden of Kentucky—tried stitching together compromises, but after briefly considering a few, Lincoln returned to the fundamentals:

I am for no compromise which assists or permits the extension of [slavery] on soil owned by the nation. And any trick by which the nation is to acquire territory, and then allow some local authority to spread slavery over it, is as obnoxious as any other.54