Sublime

As the Athenian historian and general Thucydides concluded twenty-five hundred years ago, conflict is driven by fear and honor as well as interest.

‘Statesmen are not called upon only to settle easy questions. These often settle themselves. It is where the balance quivers, and the proportions are veiled in mist, that the opportunity for world-saving decisions presents itself.’[1]

This ungovernable “post-sovereign” world, in the words of the political scientist Wendy Brown, will go far beyond a sense of near-term fragility; it will be instead a long-term macro-trend toward deep instability grinding away over decades. The first result will be massive new concentrations of power and wealth that reorder society.

To Lyndon Johnson, S.J. Res. 1 was, as he said to Bobby Baker, “the worst bill I can think of,” for reasons that included not only the political (it was, after all, a slap at Democratic presidents, and its passage would be a major Republican victory) but the philosophical (if there was a single tenet he held consistently throughout his political

Marc Ambinder and D. B. Grady’s The Command: Deep Inside the President’s Secret Army (Ambinder and Grady, 2012).

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