Sublime

We should favor those who seek peace over those who have shown a preference for war. We should favor those who are not seeking to destroy a U.N. member state over those who are.

Taylor was soon off the reservation, arguing that the United States should abandon massive retaliation and the New Look in favor of what he called Flexible Response. Much to Eisenhower’s consternation, Taylor argued that a future war between the United States and the Soviet Union could be fought with conventional weapons.

Our job was to provide the president with options and integrated strategies that combined elements of national power with efforts of like-minded partners to make progress toward clearly defined goals. The work, however, should begin with identifying challenges and understanding them on their own terms and from the perspective of “the other.”

The hour may be growing late. Just before retiring at the end of 2022, Admiral Charles Richard, head of the U.S. Strategic Command, declared that “this Ukrainian crisis that we’re in right now, this is just the warmup.” Citing the decline in America’s military capability relative to China’s in the western Pacific, he added: “The big one is coming.

The historian Andrew Roberts reminds us that, although the most common understanding of ‘leadership’ connotes inherent goodness, leadership ‘is in fact completely morally neutral, as capable of leading mankind to the abyss as to the sunlit uplands. It is a protean force of terrifying power’ that we must strive to orient toward moral ends.[14]