On Grand Strategy

How, though, do you “prune” theory? By not asking too much of it, Clausewitz replies. “[I]t would indeed be rash” to deduce, from any particular reality, “universal laws governing every single case, regardless of all haphazard influences.” But those who never rise “above anecdote”—those indefatigable repeaters of pointless stories—are equally usele

It’s not clear whether Lincoln recalled, or even had read, Adams’s message to Congress in 1825. Both shared, though, this central point: that “liberty is power,” and that “the nation blessed with the largest portion of liberty must in proportion to its numbers be the most powerful nation upon earth.”87 To that end, Lincoln

What Lincoln had shown was the practicality, in politics, of a moral standard. I mean by this an external frame of reference that shapes interests and actions, not—like Douglas’s—an internal one that only reflects them. Lincoln’s didn’t arise from faith, or formal ethics, or even the law, a profession necessarily pragmatic in its pursuit of justice

But Xerxes failed, 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 t

The test of a good theory lies in its ability to explain the past, for only if it does can we trust what it may tell us about the future.

For apart from war and preparation for war, it’s in competitive athletics that the Clausewitzian combination of a distilled past, a planned present, and an uncertain future most explicitly come together. With fitness more fashionable now than in the age of the great duke, there’s more participation in games than ever before. But what does that get

Roosevelt had “countervailing qualities of a rare and inspiring order.” [H]e was large-hearted and possessed wide political horizons, imaginative sweep, understanding of the time in which he lived and of the direction of the great new forces at work in the twentieth century—technological, racial, imperialist, anti-imperialist; he was in favour of l

Elizabeth’s navy, however well trained, was no match numerically for Medina Sidonia’s massive fleet, which appeared off Cornwall on July 29.71 The queen did, however, have a strategy. She’d first brought Drake home, knowing that her admirals could best confront the Armada in the English Channel, where they knew it would have to be. She foresaw no g

This was, in one sense, toleration, for the new queen cared little what her subjects believed. She would watch like a hawk, though, what they did.

“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