Sublime

I am pragmatic. I am prepared to look at the problem and say, all right, what is the best way to solve it that will produce the maximum happiness and well-being for the maximum number of people?12

To ensure that we did not repeat the Vietnam War mistake of confusing activity with progress, our staff would institute “framing sessions,” which I believed were necessary to foster understanding, before we developed options for the president. These sessions would result in succinct analyses of a particular challenge to national security; the “so w

In the face of instability, uncertainty, and rapid change, relying upon pure analysis will likely not

Here, we conclude with a few of the strategic insights that we find most instructive from this quiet, articulate, supremely confident, yet remarkably modest man from whom we have learned so much.

to ensure that the president received the best assessments, we would include measures of effectiveness for every approved strategy. Assessments would go to the president periodically or when an event occurred that presented a new hazard or an opportunity. And we would scrutinize the assumptions on which the strategies were based and be prepared to

As president-elect he recruited a cabinet of frustrated first lovers or, as the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin has called it, a “team of rivals.” They included his major competitors at Chicago—the indignantly disappointed Seward as secretary of state, the transparently ambitious Salmon P. Chase of Ohio as treasury secretary, the corrupt but politic

“in the 21st century, power is easier to get, harder to use, and easier to lose.”

England’s maritime superiority had relied, since the Tudors, on rivalries within continents to prevent projections of power beyond their shores. But now, Mackinder was arguing, consolidations of continents were taking place that, if used to build fleets, could empower an “empire of the world.” Probably Russia would run it. Or maybe Germany allied w

The key to unlocking the implications of megapolitical change is understanding the factors that precipitate revolutions in the use of violence. These variables can be somewhat arbitrarily grouped into four categories: topography, climate, microbes, and technology.