On Grand Strategy

by John Lewis Gaddis

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

if freedom is choosing, as Berlin maintained—then priorities can’t be predetermined.

Leadership in The Art of War, then, is seeing simplicities in complexity.

don’t sweat it. Learn to live with the contradictions.

Controlled environments encourage complacency, making it hard to cope when controls break down, as they sooner or later must. Constant disruptions, however, prevent recuperation: nothing’s ever healthy. There’s a balance, then, between integrative and disintegrative processes in the natural world—an edge of chaos, so to speak—where adaptation, especially self-organization, tends to occur.