On Grand Strategy

Leaders, he seemed to be saying, must keep their feet on the ground. Clausewitz thinks similarly.

“Any complex activity,” Clausewitz writes, “if it is to be carried on with any degree of virtuosity, calls for appropriate gifts of intellect and temperament. If they are outstanding and reveal themselves in exceptional achievements, their possessor is called a ‘genius.’”39 I take this to mean continuing adjustments of “intellect”—which sets course

What he was really doing was giving up the republic, but so gradually and with such tact—while displaying at every stage such self-evident benefits—that the Romans would adapt to and even embrace their new environment, hardly noticing how much it had changed. They themselves would become crops, vines, cattle, and bees. For unlike Xerxes, Pericles,

on a five-year plan if he’d asked them for one.93 Instead he improvised, edging forward where possible, falling back when necessary, always appearing to do something, never giving in to despair, and in everything remembering what Wilson forgot—that nothing would succeed without widespread continuing public support. “It is a terrible thing,” Rooseve

Presidential advisers found this frustrating, even frivolous, and some historians since have agreed.35 But follow the metaphor more closely: how do you keep one hand from knowing what the other is doing without having a head instruct both? “I may be entirely inconsistent,” FDR went on to explain, “if it will help win the war.”36 Consistency in gran

“Genius,” Clausewitz writes, “does not consist in a single appropriate gift—courage, for example—while other qualities of mind or temperament . . . are not suited to war.” Instead it requires “a harmonious combination of elements, in which one or the other ability may predominate, but none may be in conflict with the rest.” It demands, in short, an

Sketches, as Machiavelli sees them, convey complexity usably. They’re not reality. They’re not even finished representations of it. But they can transmit essential if incomplete information on short notice. They thus enhance, although they never replace, good judgment. Like Augustine’s checklists, they show the directions in which a prince might le

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.

Like Clausewitz’s magnets, the configuration is triangular, although in two ways. For as you balance knowns, probabilities, and unknowns, you’re also doing so across time, space, and scale. “[I]n war, as in life generally,” Clausewitz explains, “all parts of a whole are interconnected and thus the effects produced, however small their cause, must i

The Augustus was Washington, whose “reflexive restraint in seeking power,” his most recent biographer has suggested, “enabled him to exercise so much of it.” He hosted the 1785 meeting while committing himself to nothing. He allowed two young Agrippas—James Madison and Alexander Hamilton—to lead in public, while making it clear privately where he s