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Clausewitz himself proposed that war could best be compared with commerce, since both are social conflicts of human interests and activities.
Jessica C. Flack • Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight: The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute, 1984–2019 (Compass)
But “anti-Fascism” or “anti-Communism” is not enough. Nor is even the defense of freedom. What has been gained may not be maintained, against invasion without and erosion within, if we are content to stand still. The peoples who are partially free as a result of what their forebears achieved in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries
... See moreB.H. Liddell Hart • Why Don't We Learn from History?

But "anti-Fascism" or "anti-Communism" is not enough. Nor is even the defence of freedom. What has been gained may not be maintained, against invasion without and erosion within, if we are content to stand still. The peoples who are partially free as a result of what their forebears achieved in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and n
... See moreB. H. Liddell Hart • Why Don't We Learn from History?
How, though, do you “prune” theory? By not asking too much of it, Clausewitz replies. “[I]t would indeed be rash” to deduce, from any particular reality, “universal laws governing every single case, regardless of all haphazard influences.” But those who never rise “above anecdote”—those indefatigable repeaters of pointless stories—are equally usele
... See moreJohn Lewis Gaddis • On Grand Strategy
Tyler Cowen • A few implications - Marginal REVOLUTION
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.
... See moreHenry Kissinger • Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy
Codenamed BOLERO, the plan was stripped to its essentials: Great Britain must be kept secure; Russia must be kept fighting; and the Middle East must be defended. “All other operations must be considered in the highly desirable rather than in the mandatory class.”
Jean Edward Smith • Eisenhower in War and Peace
Stiglitz employs Isaiah Berlin’s positive and negative freedoms, and later threads the needle: neoliberalism believes only in ‘freedom to do’, and disparages the need of government to constrain corporations and the wealthy for the good of the rest: