On Grand Strategy

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 t

shattering certainty, Machiavelli showed how. “[T]he dilemma has never given men peace since it came to light,” Berlin lightly concludes, “but we have learnt to live with it.”78

No one can anticipate everything that might happen. Sensing possibilities, though, is better than having no sense at all of what to expect. Sun Tzu seeks sense—even common sense—by tethering principles, which are few, to practices, which are many. He fits the mix to the moment, as if setting sound levels on a synthesizer, or color combinations on a

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

Nor did Jefferson, any more than Paine, say anything about what kind of government might replace that of the British tyrant. Details weren’t either patriot’s strength. Had they been, independence might never have been attempted, for details dim the flames fireships require. They disconnect ends of arguments from their beginnings. That’s why Paine a

Clausewitz, in one sense, says nothing new here. Asymmetries in aspirations and capabilities have always constrained strategies, which is one of the reasons they’re needed in the first place. He’s highly original, though, in specifying friction as the cause, while showing that it can occur at any level: the passage of time and extension across spac

“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.”

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,

“If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending,” Lincoln told the Illinois Republicans in 1858, “we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it.”38 That required a compass, but Douglas’s aligned itself only with his own maneuvering.39 Too often looking back to cover his tracks, he fell too frequently into the thickets, sw