When to Wage War, and How to Win: A Guide - The New York Times - 0 views
-
What is “grand strategy” as opposed to simple strategy?
-
It denotes encompassing all the resources that a state can focus — military, economic, political and cultural — to further its own interests in a global landscape.
- ...24 more annotations...
-
Gaddis keeps pounding — to the point of monotony — the seemingly self-evident: The grand strategist must prune away emotion, ego and conventional wisdom to accept that “if you seek ends beyond your means, then sooner or later you’ll have to scale back your ends to fit your means.
-
Their implicit idea is to remind America’s future best and brightest how the mostly successful grand strategy of the past saw America become the pre-eminent world power of the 20th century by winning two world conflicts along with the Cold War.
-
The case studies are variously drawn from some 16 years of co-teaching a well-regarded seminar on “Studies in Grand Strategy” at Yale
-
Paul Kennedy’s edited “Grand Strategies in War and Peace,” Charles Hill’s “Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order” and more recently Linda Kulman’s “Teaching Common Sense: The Grand Strategy Program at Yale University.”
-
His repetitious observation about proportionality might have been banal — if so many leaders, many of them geniuses, had not forgotten it
-
A recurrent theme is the danger of omnipresent hubris. Even a great power cannot master the unexpected and uncontrollable — from the great plague at Athens, to the harsh Russian winter, to I.E.D.s and tribal factionalism in Iraq
-
The book is as much personal remembrance as strategic reflection, and is chock-full of aphorisms and enigmatic adages.
-
Gaddis believes the best way to hone strategic thinking is not just by mastering the advice of Machiavelli or Clausewitz (who both figure prominently in the class), much less contemporary high-tech wizardry, but also by understanding the interplay of history, literature and philosophy over 2,500 years of Western civilization — with occasional insights from Sun Tzu and other non-Western thinkers
-
In some sense “On Grand Strategy” is a traditional argument for the value of classical education in the broadest sense.
-
The student of strategy learns to balance a grasp of detail with proper humility: It is, of course, wise to have a plan and contingencies. But how will these prompt rival counter-responses? Do such agendas have the means adequate for their ends? Or are they more dreams, warped by ego and emotion
-
In contrast, the often arrogant neglect of grand strategic thinking has led to postwar quagmires, stalemates and the assorted misadventures that often drained American resources for either impossible or irrelevant aims, while tearing the country apart over the last 70 years.
-
Understanding the underappreciated role of irony is essential for a leader, and might have prevented the disasters of both 415 B.C. and 1588.
-
Tolstoy and Clausewitz appreciated that bad things can come from good intentions and vice versa. The best generals live with and react to paradoxes, Gaddis argues. The worst ignore or seek to undo them.
-
Gaddis sees these more successful global strategists as rope-a-dope pragmatists who remain elastic and patient enough to capitalize on events and opportunities as they unfold, rather than forcing them to fit preconceived schemes.
-
Morality matters, if defined less as self-righteous ardor and more as self-awareness of a leader’s effect on those around him and an appreciation of paradox.
-
A pragmatic St. Augustine has no problem with war — if it is a last resort to save civilization, without which there can be neither calm nor organized religion.
-
The gambler Winston Churchill took chances in 1940, albeit rational ones backed by educated guesses that, for all Hitler’s bluster, the Third Reich had neither the air nor sea power to destroy the Anglosphere
-
Gaddis’s American heroes are Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, who he thinks “rescued democracy and capitalism.”
-
Roosevelt somehow was cognizant early on of how the singular military and economic potential of America might save Europe and Asia, but only if he first prepared reluctant Americans materially and psychologically for the inevitable war to come
-
Gaddis concludes with an invaluable warning that true morality embraces neither messianic interventionism nor the quest for utopianism
-
With regard to the American 21st century, Gaddis’s favorite novelists and philosophers perhaps argue against both optional intercessions abroad and moralistic lead-from-behind recessionals. The better course is to marshal American power to prepare for the often unavoidable existential crises on the horizon, with the full expectation that we do not have to be perfect to be good.
-
“On Grand Strategy” is many things — a thoughtful validation of the liberal arts, an argument for literature over social science, an engaging reflection on university education and some timely advice to Americans that lasting victory comes from winning what you can rather than all that you want.