On Grand Strategy

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

We’d need to combine, within a single mind (our own), the hedgehog’s sense of direction and the fox’s sensitivity to surroundings. While retaining the ability to function.

The Constitution and The Federalist share the qualities of having been pressed by time in composition, but liberated from time in lasting significance. The paradox gets at the heart of what it means to hold opposing ideas in the mind simultaneously while retaining the ability—here brilliantly—to function.

Heroics drain you. Offensives slow as supply lines lengthen. Retreats invite counterattack. Russia is big and its winters are cold. Dogs that catch cars never know what to do with them. Why, then, did Napoleon forget what most fools remember? Perhaps because common sense is indeed like oxygen: the higher you go, the thinner it gets. As each triumph

Roosevelt didn’t so much distrust experts as lament their limited horizons. It irked him that his own agents—the diplomats and military attachés in the Moscow embassy, the Washington officials who read their reports, even his beloved navy—were close to considering Stalin worse than Hitler: they failed to see the larger possibilities that came with

The proposed Constitution “forms a happy combination in this respect; the great and aggregate interests being referred to the national, the local and particular to the State legislatures.”67 Madison thus deployed scale across space to reverse time: history would henceforth strengthen his republic by allowing factions to compete at all levels, so th

Why don’t you ever see tightrope walkers without long poles? It’s because they’re stabilizers, as critical to the reaching of destinations as the steps taken toward them. And yet, the poles work by feel, not thought: focusing on them risks falling. Temperament functions similarly, I think, in strategy. It’s not a compass—that’s intellect. But it is

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

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