On Grand Strategy

by John Lewis Gaddis

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.