On Grand Strategy

Perusia revealed the pattern. Octavian first reconstituted respect in Rome by navigating the treacherous currents of land redistribution. He then won a battle by entrusting its conduct to others with superior military skills. Finally, he fortified his authority against further insurrections by publicly executing prominent rebels, an act of violence

You control some things, but align yourself with others. You balance, while never forgetting that the reason you’re balancing is to get from where you are to where you want to go. You’re a fox and a hedgehog at the same time—even on water. That was the younger Pericles steering Athens: a polymath with a purpose. Over time, though, Pericles began tr

That’s because checklists adapt better to change than commandments. Sailors rely on them before going to sea. Soldiers employ them in planning missions. Surgeons demand them, to make sure they’ll have the instruments they need and that they’ll leave none behind. Pilots run through them, to ensure taking off safely and landing smoothly—preferably at

Which is what grand strategy is meant to prevent. I’ll define that term, for the purposes of this book, as the alignment of potentially unlimited aspirations with necessarily limited capabilities. If you seek ends beyond your means, then sooner or later you’ll have to scale back your ends to fit your means. Expanding means may attain more ends, but

Something or someone will sooner or later break, but you can’t know how, where, or when. What you can know is that, owing to friction, “one always falls far short of the intended goal.”

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

His country emerged from them with half the world’s manufacturing capability, two-thirds of its gold reserves, three-fourths of its invested capital, its largest navy and air force, and its first atomic bombs.107 There were, to be sure, pacts with devils in all of these: strategies, like politics, are never pure. But as historians Hal Brands and Pa

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

Pfuel was one of those theorists who so love their theory that they forget the purpose of the theory—its application in practice; in his love for theory, he hated everything practical and did not want to know about it. He was even glad of failure, because failure, proceeding from departures from theory in practice, only proved to him the correctnes