On Grand Strategy

by John Lewis Gaddis

Instead, Thucydides records, they “put to death all the grown men whom they took, and sold the women and children for slaves, and subsequently sent out five hundred colonists and settled the place themselves.”

Modern israeli strategy

Strategy requires a sense of the whole that reveals the significance of respective parts.

Thucydidean resemblances, I think, suggest an answer. Megara might look like a trifle, Pericles told the Athenians in 432 B.C.E., but if they yielded on that small matter “you will instantly have to meet some greater demand.”

For if credibility is always in doubt, then capabilities must become infinite or bluffs must become routine.

“neither a borrower nor a lender be.”

They’ll avoid battles until they’re sure they can win them.

Contrary to Alexander

he started out with relatively little. He was born into the family of a respectable but forgettable Roman senator in 63 B.C.E.

senseless praise the cousin of Julius Ceasar

Caesar, in turn, appears never to have explained to Octavian why he was being taught.11 That spared him the hang-ups of knowing he’d be son, heir, and commander.

Octavian had the sense this time to delegate his authority, not to try to exercise it where he doubted his own competence.

Sun Tzu writes, appearing as usual to cover all possibilities.

who today would model a state on Xerxes’ Persia, or Pericles’ Athens, or Alexander’s Macedonia? Rome, though, is different—as is China.

i doubt you have much of a choice.given what propels and propeled was their uncounciouss sweep and remodelling it is an illusoun for those who thinks they can replicate.all but a mere illusion

Having navigated himself into unchallenged authority, he used it to turn a failing republic—as if it were a Virgilian vine—into an empire that flourishes,

its like squeezng an almost empty toothpaste tube when it spurts out the paste it seems like ithas replenished the content while in realiyy ot was wht was left.so are despos and emperors

Kennan concluded, “are governed not so much by what he intellectually believes as by what he vividly realizes.”

God, who’d complicated things further by choosing them to form a state.

Determining obligations to Caesar and God becomes, then, the grandest of strategic tasks, for it requires aligning limited human capabilities with an aspiration—an afterlife—that has no limits.

An idea eft from slavery

Seeking, therefore, is the best man can manage in a fallen world, and what he seeks is his choice.

Take, for example, the question of why states are necessary: if God is all-powerful, who needs Caesars? Without Caesars, Augustine replies, there’d be no Christians, and that can’t be God’s will. To be a Christian is itself to choose, freely, to follow Christ; but that choice would have left little behind if all Christians had been fed to lions.

Morr a justification of ceasars than anything ele

Augustine’s targets were deviations from orthodoxy, which he attacked with an almost Leninist zeal as if the only way to advance a faith is to purge it of all nuance.

Thus even unjust wars, if fought for Christ, can become just.

Justificus magnus cristus

I think it’s proportionality: the means employed must be appropriate to—or at least not corrupt—the end envisaged.

“no less dangerous to discover new ways and methods than to set out in search of new seas and unknown lands.” This is not, however, because of God’s wrath, but human envy. Augustine worried about both. Machiavelli, recently imprisoned and tortured, fears God less than he does man.34

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

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.”

Machiavelli outs his own monotheism by seeking, above all, to minimize mess. If he praises duplicity, it’s because it’s efficient: how else, if you’re not going to pray, can you reconcile, within your own mind or policy, contradictions?

“[T]he belief that the correct, objectively valid solution to the question of how men should live can in principle be discovered,” Berlin finds, “is itself in principle not true.” Machiavelli thus split open the rock “upon which Western beliefs and lives had been founded.” It was he “who lit the fatal fuse.”

Faith in single solutions, Berlin shows, has led “both Catholics and Protestants, both conservatives and Communists, [to defend] enormities which freeze the blood of ordinary men.”

“[T]he dilemma has never given men peace since it came to light,” Berlin lightly concludes, “but we have learnt to live with it.”78

“NON SUFFICIT ORBIS,” a medal struck for Philip proclaimed in 1583, after he’d taken over Portugal and its overseas colonies: “The World Is Not Enough.”

He failed to see incompatibles, and hence the need to pursue certain objectives at the expense of others.

Philip ordered him, nonetheless, to proceed: “I am so attached to [the invasion] in my heart, and I am so convinced that God our Savior must embrace it as His own cause, that I cannot be dissuaded. Nor can I accept or believe the contrary.”53 Having told God what to do,

Mary was lucky, after this, to retain her head; but it was henceforth precariously positioned.

God did indeed test Philip. But Philip didn’t put himself beneath testing God.

For if, as Thucydides warned two thousand years earlier, words in crises can lose their meaning, leaving in the “ability to see all sides of a question [an] incapacity to act on any,”

British America “was a society whose political and administrative institutions were more likely to evolve from below than to be imposed from above.”

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.11 New political worlds work similarly.

Had they been, independence might never have been attempted, for details dim the flames fireships require.

They disconnect ends of arguments from their beginnings.

Spain had so tightly controlled its territories as to keep them in a “permanent infancy,” unable to command self-respect.

America “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy,”

The novice cannot pass through these layers of increasing intensity of danger without sensing that here ideas are governed by other factors, that the light of reason is refracted in a manner quite different from that which is normal in academic speculation.5

What really obsessed them, I think, was irony, which my dictionary defines as “an outcome of events contrary to what was, or might have been, expected.”

a recurring human peculiarity: that, for characters like Napoleon, Hellesponts are there to be crossed.

War is . . . an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.

That’s what Tolstoy’s Clausewitz meant by extending the war in space to weaken the enemy: no army strengthens itself by outrunning its supply lines. Retreat in turn extended the war in time: the farther the French advanced, the longer it would take for them to get back.

So did history pivot, here, on a hare? Probably not, just as Clausewitz didn’t really ride into a novel on a horse. Turning points do often originate, however, below historians’ radars.

The machine itself begins to resist, and the commander needs tremendous willpower to overcome this resistance.

“one always falls far short of the intended goal.”42

Xerxes at the Hellespont did the same. Both sought to overcome friction by intimidating their enemies.

And he distrusts novices who, without theory, will lack judgment, which must work “like a ship’s compass,” recording “the slightest variations” from courses set, “however rough the sea.”

Likely each epoch has limited number of theories and as well as men ot is these theories are ones fighting so it wuld be helpful to know oneanother but this is besdes the point.

That’s why war—explicitly in Clausewitz, implicitly in Tolstoy—must reflect policy. For when policy reflects war, it’s because some high-level hedgehog—a Xerxes, or a Napoleon—has fallen in love with war, making it an end in itself. They’ll stop only when they’ve bled themselves bloodless. And so the culminating points of their offensives are self-defeat.