On Grand Strategy

by John Lewis Gaddis

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.”

By way of an Oxford party, an Archilochus fragment, and Tolstoy’s epic, Berlin had stumbled upon 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. Artabanus keeps changing his mind.

In an effort to determine the roots of accuracy and inaccuracy in forecasting, the American political psychologist Philip E. Tetlock and his assistants collected 27,451 predictions on world politics between 1988 and 2003 from 284 “experts” in universities, governments, think tanks, foundations, international institutions, and the media. Replete with tables, graphs, and equations, Tetlock’s 2005 book, Expert Political Judgment,

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

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.

Ends and means have to connect if anything is to happen. They’re never, however, interchangeable.

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.

Carl von Clausewitz, in his monumental but incomplete classic On War, develops Machiavelli’s method more fully.40 History alone, he argues, is just a long string of stories. That doesn’t mean they’re useless, though, because theory, when conceived of as distillation, keeps you from having to listen to them all again.

The engagement, however, won’t in all respects follow the plan. Not only will its outcome depend on what the other side does—the “known unknowns,” of which former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld famously spoke41—but it will also reflect “unknown unknowns,” which are all the things that can go wrong before you’ve even encountered an adversary. Together, these constitute what Clausewitz called “friction,” the collision of theory with reality about which Artabanus tried to warn Xerxes, many centuries earlier at the Hellespont.

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.

Xerxes had brought everything with him across the Hellespont except a grand strategy: if his aspirations were his capabilities, why bother to align them? He came to know scarcity only after the land, the sea, the weather, the Greeks, and their oracle introduced it to him.

Thucydides’ distinction between resemblance and reflection—between patterns surviving across time and repetitions degraded by time—aligns the asymmetry, for it suggests that the past prepares us for the future only when, however imperfectly, it transfers.

Thucydides’ “first-rate intelligence” accommodates opposing ideas so effortlessly that he entrusts us with hundreds in his history. He does so within time and space but also across scale: only Tolstoy rivals him, I think, in sensing significance where it seems not to be.

Thucydides makes it a flashback, unusual in his history. He wants us to see the connection, even if distant, between a great war and an almost comic collision of Spartan stolidity with Athenian trickery: small causes can have big consequences.

If Athens were to rely upon the ardor of individuals, then it would have to inspire classes within the city and peoples throughout the empire—even as it retained the cohesiveness of its rival Sparta, still in many ways a small town. That’s why constructing a culture became, for Pericles, a priority.

With their reliance on walls, ships, and rowers, the Athenians had democratized the waging of war.

Why, though, did he have to do that? Why not deviate, as Lincoln would later do, to avoid swamps, deserts, and chasms? Like Lincoln, Pericles looked ahead to the ages. He even left them monuments and sent them 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.

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. There will be public concern and resentment at the fate of abandoned areas; the army will possibly lose confidence not only in its leaders but in itself, and never-ending, rear guard actions will only tend to confirm its fears. These consequences of retreat should not be underrated.48

Few historians would claim that Truman made the wrong choice in Korea; but Pericles’ biographers have always wondered about the Megarian decree.49 He had to tell the Athenians that their credibility was on the line: this would not otherwise have occurred to them. Truman didn’t have to do that with the Americans and their allies. They knew.

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

When one’s own imprecisions pull walls down—as Pericles and Kennedy did when they dismissed the possibility of giving anything up—then fears become images, images become projections, and projections as they expand blur into indistinctiveness.

It’s long been assumed that Machiavelli is in Hell and—worse—content to be there.

Man must manage on his own, but for that he needs princes and princes need advisers. The adviser can’t tell the prince what to do, but he can suggest what the prince should know. For Machiavelli this means seeking patterns—across time, space, and status—by shifting perspectives.

Machiavelli’s great transgression, Berlin concluded, was to confirm what everyone knows but no one will admit: that ideals “cannot be attained.”

“hendiadys”

“NON SUFFICIT ORBIS,”

The war had focused official minds: why then, King George III’s ministers asked, should postwar colonial administration again lose its focus? Shouldn’t the Americans, by some calculations the least taxed of all people, pay more for the security they’d gained? Could the British, however cleverly financed now by the Bank of England, indefinitely accumulate debt? Shouldn’t someone regulate trans-Appalachian settlement, preventing collisions between imported and indigenous Americans? What good was it even to have an empire if you weren’t running it?23

Paine’s pamphlet was the literary equivalent of Elizabeth’s fireships: an incendiary device meant to unnerve an enemy, rally a defense, and make history pivot.

Adams’s pen hadn’t slipped when he wrote “Continent,” not “Country,” for the authors of independence regularly fortified themselves with geography. Paine saw “something very absurd, in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island.”

The Federalist’s fame rests elsewhere: as the most enduring work of political grand strategy since Machiavelli’s The Prince.

Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other.

The Federalist’s arc bent toward a Lincoln, not a Nero.

The options he faced, however, were irreconcilable: the Founders could have Union or Emancipation but not both, at least not in their generation.

That was the purpose of the uneasy Missouri Compromise of 1820, which equally apportioned new territories as future free or slave states. Adams went along, convinced that the Constitution’s “bargain between freedom and slavery” was “morally and politically vicious, . . . inconsistent with the principles upon which alone our Revolution can be justified”—but also knowing that the bargain was keeping the Union from civil war.

Only a state at peace with itself could save its soul.

For not only do Tolstoy and Clausewitz see the practice of war similarly: they also construct theories, drawn from their own military experiences, about the limitations of theory itself.

The battle weakened both sides, but the Russians had more territory even than the Americans into which to retreat, abandoning Moscow as they did so. The French, far from home, advanced farther when Napoleon couldn’t resist taking the city, hoping to shock Tsar Alexander I into making peace. When that didn’t happen, the greatest military genius since Julius Caesar assumed the attributes of a dog who’d chased a car and caught it: what do you do next? Meanwhile, as his humblest private could have reminded him, winter was coming on.

War’s “grammar,” Clausewitz writes in On War, “may be its own, but not its logic.”10 With training, discipline, and superior leadership, armies can suspend temporarily the all-too-human instinct to flee from danger: combat, as Clausewitz’s novice discovers, defies common sense. In time, though, logic surrounds, confounds, and supersedes such grammar. Heroics drain you. Offensives slow as supply lines lengthen. Retreats invite counterattack. Russia is big and its winters are cold. Dogs that catch cars never know what to do with them. Why, then, did Napoleon forget what most fools remember?

for characters like Napoleon, Hellesponts are there to be crossed.

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

Which led Clausewitz to his first and most urgent finding: that if war, in this sense, reflects politics, it must be subordinate to politics and therefore to policy, the product of politics.26 Otherwise it’s senseless violence,

War required redefinition, therefore, as “a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, carried on with other means. . . . The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and means can never be considered in isolation from their purpose.”28

Two Russian generals—“Famine” and “Frost”—had completed the destruction, so that “[i]n all human probability the career of Napoleon’s conquests is at an end. France can no longer give law to the continent. . . . A new era is dawning upon Europe.”37

Napoleon, in theory, knew this. That’s why, despite his limited objectives, he crossed the Niemen with such an enormous force: Xerxes at the Hellespont did the same. Both sought to overcome friction by intimidating their enemies. Neither saw, though, that the retreat of a foe can become resistance, owing to the ascending costs of protracted pursuits.

Where, then, did Xerxes and Napoleon go wrong? They failed, Clausewitz would probably say, to perceive “truth at every point,” which in these instances meant landscapes, logistics, climates, the morale of their troops, and the strategies of their enemies. They missed what their own soldiers understood: that Greece and Russia were traps, just as the English Channel was for the Spanish Armada. “The good general,” Clausewitz concludes, “must know friction in order to overcome it whenever possible, and in order not to expect a standard of achievement in his operations which this very friction makes impossible.”47

Clausewitz sees theory, then, as training. It’s what “hardens the body for great exertions, strengthens the heart in great peril, and fortifies judgment against first impressions.” It’s the “lubricant” that reduces friction. It “breeds that priceless quality, calm, which, passing from hussar and rifleman up to the general himself, will lighten the commander’s task.”54

Clausewitz especially despises the “jargon, technicalities, and metaphors” that “swarm” at high altitudes, a “lawless rabble of camp followers” torn from context and enlisted as principles.

If I’ve got this right, then Tolstoy has used scale to solve an ancient problem: how, if God is omnipotent, can man have free will? Being Tolstoy, though, his answer didn’t satisfy him, and he soon reverted to the belief in God he’d once derided as the habit of primitives. He even tried, not very successfully, to become primitive himself.69 But if considered, alongside Clausewitz, as a commentary, in advance, on F. Scott Fitzgerald—on how to hold opposing ideas in mind at the same time while retaining the ability to function—then Tolstoy’s reasoning has significant implications for strategy in the largest sense.