On Grand Strategy

by John Lewis Gaddis

“if you were to take account of everything . . . , you would never do anything. It is better to have a brave heart and endure one half of the terrors we dread than to [calculate] all of the terrors and suffer nothing at all. . . . Big things are won by big dangers.”

“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”2

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.” The distinction was simple but not frivolous: it offered “a point of view from which to look and compare, a starting point for genuine investigation.” It might even reflect “one of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in general.”

for it suggested irreconcilable differences between foxes and hedgehogs. You had to be one or the other, Berlin seemed to be saying. You couldn’t be both and be happy. Or effective. Or even whole.

two of the very best ways to become intellectually indelible. The first is to be Delphic, a trick known to oracles throughout time. The second is to be Aesopian: turn your ideas into animals, and they’ll achieve immortality.

The shortsighted Artabanus sees so much on the immediate horizon that complexity itself is the enemy. The farsighted Xerxes sees only a distant horizon on which ambitions are opportunities: simplicity is the searchlight that shows the way.

most rigorous study ever done on why some people get the future right and others don’t. “Who experts were—professional background, status, and so on—made scarcely an iota of difference,” Tetlock concludes. “Nor did what experts thought—whether they were liberals or conservatives, realists or institutionalists, optimists or pessimists.” But “[h]ow experts thought—their style of reasoning—did matter.” The critical variable turned out to be self-identification as “foxes” or “hedgehogs” when shown Berlin’s definitions of those terms. 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.

The foxes relied, for their predictions, on an intuitive “stitching together [of] diverse sources of information,” not on deductions derived from “grand schemes.” They doubted “that the cloudlike subject of politics” could ever be “the object of a clocklike science.” The best of them “shared a self-deprecating style of thinking” that “elevate[d] no thought above criticism.” But they tended to be too discursive—too inclined to qualify their claims—to hold an audience. Talk show hosts rarely invited them back. Policy makers found themselves too busy to listen. Tetlock’s 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.

“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. IV.

as is the habit of hedgehogs, to establish a proper relationship between his ends and his means. 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.

He lived only in the present, cutting himself off from the past, where experience resided, and from the future, where the unforeseen lurked.

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.

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.

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

We resolve these dilemmas by stretching them over time. We seek certain things now, put off others until later, and regard still others as unattainable. We select what fits where, and then decide which we can achieve when. The process can be difficult:

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.

[A] compass . . . [will] point you true north from where you’re standing, but it’s got no advice about the swamps and deserts and chasms that you’ll encounter along the way. If in pursuit of your destination, you plunge ahead, heedless of obstacles, and achieve nothing more than to sink in a swamp . . . , [then] what’s the use of knowing true north?28

an infinite number of possibilities exist at an indeterminate number of levels, all simultaneously.

Foxes were better equipped to survive in rapidly changing environments in which those who abandoned bad ideas quickly held the advantage. Hedgehogs were better equipped to survive in static environments that rewarded persisting with tried-and-true formulas. Our species—homo sapiens—is better off for having both temperaments.32

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. If you seek ends beyond your means, then sooner or later you’ll have to scale back your ends to fit your means. Expanding means may attain more ends, but not all because ends can be infinite and means can never be. Whatever balance you strike, there’ll be a link between what’s real and what’s imagined: between your current location and your intended destination. You won’t have a strategy until you’ve connected these dots—dissimilar though they are—within the situation in which you’re operating.

what is “training,” as Clausewitz understands it? 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.

This, then, is a book about the 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.

But by analyzing how others since that monarch have managed oppositions of logic and leadership, we can perhaps coach ourselves for the crossings we’ll sooner or later have to make.

Thucydides wrote, to have his history judged useful by those seeking “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.”9

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.

couldn’t concede a molehill—the Megarian decree—without a mountainous loss of credibility.

This, then, is how leaders dismantle walls they’ve built separating vital from peripheral interests. For the abstractions of strategy and the emotions of strategists can never be separated: they can only be balanced. The weight attached to each, however, will vary with circumstances. And the heat of emotions requires only an instant to melt abstractions drawn from years of cool reflection. Decades devoid of reflection may follow.

because we’re the progeny of progressions across time and space that shift from small scales to big ones and back again. We know these through narratives, whether historical or fictional or a combination of both.

Sun Tzu, in contrast, sets forth principles, selected for validity across time and space, and then connects them to practices, bound by time and space. The Art of War, therefore, is neither history nor biography. It’s a compilation of precepts, procedures—and

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. He fits the mix to the moment, as if setting sound levels on a synthesizer, or color combinations on a computer screen. He leaves enough options to satisfy any fox, while retaining the purposefulness of a hedgehog. He keeps opposing ideas in his mind by projecting them across time, space, and scale.

Leadership in The Art of War, then, is seeing simplicities in complexity. Some realities are as easily grasped as Sun Tzu’s five fundamental sounds, colors, and flavors: that’s how we know their nature. But when simplicities mix, complexities become endless. No matter how thoroughly we prepare, they’ll always surprise us. If tethered to principles, however, they need not paralyze us. And how might you learn to tether? By having great teachers, I think, for tethering is what they have us do.

“He who knows the art of the direct and the indirect approach will be victorious,” Sun Tzu writes, appearing as usual to cover all possibilities. But then he tethers: “Such is the art of maneuvering.”

Insufficiency demands indirection, and that, Sun Tzu insists, requires maneuver: [W]hen capable, feign incapacity; when active, inactivity. When near, make it appear that you are far; when far away, that you are near. Offer an enemy a bait to lure him; feign disorder and strike him. . . . When he concentrates, prepare against him; where he is strong, avoid him. . . . Pretend inferiority and encourage his arrogance. . . . Keep him under a strain and wear him down.

Maneuvering, thus, requires planning, but also improvisation.

It’s all the more interesting, then, that Augustus understood so much of Sun Tzu while knowing nothing of him. The explanation may lie in a logic of strategy that undergirds cultures—much as grammar does languages—over vast stretches of time, space, and scale. If so, common sense, when confronting uncommon circumstances, may itself be another of the contradictions held simultaneously in the minds of first-rate intelligences. For the practice of principles must precede their derivation, articulation, and institutionalization. You may be looking at clouds, like Polonius, but you’ll need to have both feet firmly planted on the ground.

Augustine shows that reality always falls short of the ideal: one can strive toward it, but never expect to achieve it.

Machiavelli is careful to add: “so as not to take free will from us and that part of the glory that falls to us.” Wasn’t free will God’s idea? Wasn’t it supposed to lead to redemption, which would be glorious for those who achieved it? Questions like these, in Augustine’s thinking, had run up against his belief in God’s omnipotence: how could freedom exist in a predetermined world?

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.”

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.

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

Machiavelli this means seeking patterns—across time, space, and status—by shifting perspectives. “[J]ust as those who sketch landscapes place themselves down in the plain to consider the nature of mountains . . . and to consider the nature of low places place themselves high atop mountains, similarly, to know well the nature of peoples one needs to be prince, and to know well the nature of princes one needs to be of the people.”

“it is on earth that we live, and it is here that we must believe and act.”