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

This, then, is how leaders dismantle walls they’ve built separating vital from peripheral interests. For the abstractions of strategy and the emotions of strategists can never be separated: they can only be balanced. The weight attached to each, however, will vary with circumstances. And the heat of emotions requires only an instant to melt abstrac

In the Western tradition, the Machiavellian-Hobbesian account departs fundamentally from the Aristotelian-Thomist conception of politics as an art of persuasion and good government, which rests on an idea of right reason in search of ethical ends such as the good life.

So when your troops get sick, or their horses begin to starve, or tsars don’t follow the scripts you’ve written for them, you sketch what you know and imagine—informed by the sketch—what you don’t: this allows recovering from surprises and moving on. Strategists and artists are, therefore, on the same page in Clausewitz, or, more accurately, pages,