On Grand Strategy

by John Lewis Gaddis

The king doesn’t worry about what he’ll have to accept because he’ll flatten whatever gets in the way. And he trusts only the divine hand that’s entrusted him with such power. The shortsighted

His twists and turns are meant, like those of Odysseus, to get him home. Xerxes, in crossing the Hellespont, becomes Achilles.

The results were unequivocal: foxes were far more proficient predictors than hedgehogs, whose record approximated that of a dart-throwing (and presumably computer-simulated) chimpanzee. Startled

The foxes relied, for their predictions, on an intuitive “stitching together [of] diverse sources of information,” not on deductions derived from “grand schemes.”

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.

All of which suggested, to Tetlock, “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.

“the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”21

only dramatization—free from the scholar’s enslavement to theory and archives—can begin to represent them.30 But

Which is what grand strategy is meant to prevent. I’ll define that term, for the purposes of this book, as the alignment of potentially unlimited aspirations with necessarily limited capabilities.

This worsens 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.

History alone, he argues, is just a long string of stories. That

It’s being able to draw upon principles extending across time and space, so that you’ll have a sense of what’s worked before and what hasn’t.

The result is a plan, informed by the past, linked to the present, for achieving some future goal.

“We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude foreigners from any opportunity of learning or observing.” Athenians found “the fruits of other countries”

Pericles had built his career and his city’s culture on persuasion.31

The Greeks thought of culture as character. It was predictability across scale: the behavior of a city, a state, or a people in small things, big things, and those in between.

Knowing who they were

and what they wanted, the Spartans were wholly predictable. They saw no need to change ...

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

messages. But he didn’t leave behind a functional state: it would take well over two millennia for democracy again to become a model with mass appeal. That’s not farsightedness in a steersman. It’s running your vessel onto rocks, with a long wait for rescuers to arrive.

credibility. But with the completion of the long walls a quarter century earlier, he’d conceded all of Attica, except for Athens and Piraeus, if a war with the Spartans ever broke out. What now made Megara worth that risk?

More than thirty-six thousand Americans died fighting for a country their government had openly deemed insignificant five months before

starting to send them there.47 “Island” strategies require steady nerves. You have to be able to watch smoke rise on horizons you once controlled without losing your own self-confidence, or shaking that of allies, or strengthening that of adversaries.

Reassuring withdrawals, Clausewitz writes in On War, “are very rare.” More often armies and nations fail to distinguish orderly disengagements from abject capitulations—or foresight from fear.

when South Vietnam surrendered in 1975, 58,213 Americans had died trying to save it.55 That made Vietnam the fourth costliest war the United States has fought, the first it clearly lost, and in its rationale the most difficult to explain.

“resist our enemies in any way and in every way.” For, as Kennedy added: “We are still the keystone in the arch of freedom.”

itself? And then: what could the Athenians have been thinking when they sent an army to, of all places, Sicily? At which point there was silence, followed by a falling away of all constraints. Vietnam was not only up for discussion: it was for weeks all we talked about. We were doing post-traumatic stress therapy before it had a name. Thucydides trained us.

“They make us feel less lonely.” Thucydides wouldn’t have put it in that way, but I suspect this is what he meant when he encouraged his readers to seek “knowledge of the past as an aid to the understanding of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it.” For

No single set of beliefs challenged official authority. Except among Jews, for whom feuds among gods were the ambivalences of a single God, who’d complicated things further by choosing them to form a state.3 The

It’s this that leads Christians to entrust authority to selected sinners—we call it “politics”—and Augustine, for all his piety, is a political philosopher.

Checklists pose common questions in situations that may surprise: the idea is to approach these having, as much as possible, reduced the likelihood that they will.

The skills needed are those of imitation, adaptation, and approximation. Machiavelli commends the study of history, “for since men almost always walk on paths beaten by others and proceed in their actions by imitation . . . , 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.”

But where Augustine, who had a job, could spend years explaining divine rationality, Machiavelli was out of a job and trying to get one. So he had to be clear, brief, and humble.

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.” They

“[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.”