The Ambassadors:Thinking About Diplomacy from Machiavelli to Modern Times | American Diplomacy Est 1996

Overstretch—the enfeeblement that comes with confusing ends and means—allows enemies to apply leverage: small maneuvers that have big consequences. Themistocles wouldn’t have won at Salamis without spinning a Delphic oracle. Elizabeth trusted her admirals to trust the winds. And Kutuzov could safely slumber after Borodino, certain that geography, t

The first is to preserve their society by manipulating circumstances rather than being overwhelmed by them. Such leaders will embrace change and progress, while ensuring that their society retains its basic sense of itself through the evolutions they encourage within it. The second is to temper vision with wariness, entertaining a sense of limits.

the test of statesmen is the durability of political structures under stress, while prophets gauge their achievements against absolute standards. If the statesman assesses possible courses of action on the basis of their utility rather than their ‘truth’, the prophet regards this approach as sacrilege, a triumph of expediency over universal princip

Leaders can be magnified – or diminished – by the qualities of those around them.

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