On Grand Strategy

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,

Lincoln proclaimed emancipation chiefly for military reasons, but as its moral implications became evident, they simplified his diplomacy. They gave the Union the high ground of conscience:96 just as no Northerner would re-enslave former slaves who’d served in its army, so no foreign state could afford, by the middle of 1864, to recognize the Confe

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

In contrast to Spain’s “new world” colonies—and to the territories that France, more recently, had claimed (but barely settled) along the banks of the St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes, and the Ohio and Mississippi rivers—British America “was a society whose political and administrative institutions were more likely to evolve from below than to be impo

The argument is absurd, but only because it rejects any coexistence of contradictions in time or space: it thereby confirms Berlin’s claim that not all praiseworthy things are simultaneously possible. And that learning to live within that condition—let’s call it history—requires adaptation to incompatibles. That’s where grand strategy helps. For “i

Feria was among the first, but by no means the last, of Elizabeth’s perplexed interlocutors. She could be childlike or canny, forthright or devious, brave or risk-averse, forgiving or vindictive, serene or volcanic, even feminine or masculine: “I have the body but of a weak, feeble woman,” she told her troops as the Spanish Armada sailed for home i

Lincoln’s goal, in each of these instances, was to balance law against military necessity, in the expectation that the passage of time and the success of his armies would stabilize the equilibria. “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong,” he wrote in 1864. “I cannot remember when I did not so think, and feel. And yet, I have never understood tha

Strategy requires a sense of the whole that reveals the significance of respective parts.

Certainty, however, never required haste. From the moment Elizabeth became queen, the historian A. N. Wilson has pointed out, “her advisers and courtiers had been urging her to make decisions: to be Catholic or to be Protestant; to marry; to fight a decisive and expensive war in Ireland or the Low Countries. In almost all cases, Elizabeth had dithe