History, John Lewis Gaddis says in the book On Grand Strategy, is learning to live within the condition that not all praiseworthy things are simultaneously possible. This necessitates adapting to incompatibles. Understanding these ‘incompatibles’, reconciling them (and more importantly, getting everybody else to reconcile to them), using them to your advantage, and adapting to them when one can’t, and doing all of this while never losing sight of the ultimate goal – that is one way of understanding “grand strategy”.
There is a more succinct definition made available in the book, which is that “grand strategy is the alignment of potentially unlimited aspirations with necessarily limited capabilities”. But that sounds uncomfortably close to Lionel Robbins’ definition of economics, and surely there is more to strategy than just plain ol’ textbook economics?
I’m joking, of course. There is more to both strategy and to economics than the reconciliation of wants and means. But I’m also not joking, because even if you know next to nothing about strategy, this simple definition is a useful hook on which to hang our attempt to understand it.
If you keep that simple definition in mind and read the book, you will come across a long list of splendid characters in history who focused more on the highest of indifference curves, and ignored the existence of budget lines… and suffered for it. This list includes Xerxes, whose indifference curves could well have included “a throne on the moon, perhaps, with a great view”. But because he chose to disregard those “stubbornly finite means”, he ultimately came a cropper.
And such, John Lewis Gaddis says, is the fate of all those before and since Xerxes, if they fail to understand that simplest of all lessons: ends and means have to connect if anything is to happen. Utni hi chadar, goes the saying in Hindi, with readily available equivalents in many languages, cultures and civilizations, and yet it is a lesson that Great Men fail to learn, over and over again.
Not all Great Men, and not Always, though. There are those who keep this simple lesson in mind, and they align those incompatibles we spoke of. More, they are Great Men not just because they keep this simple lesson in mind, but because they do so across dimensions of time, space and scale. That, perhaps, is the true definition of greatness when it comes to strategy.
And not just Great Men, of course. In Chapter 5, we learn how Queen Elizabeth managed a thousand different challenges and came out of it even stronger, by responding with quickness of thought to everything ranging from an attack upon England by the Spanish Armada to an Earl who farted while bowing respectfully in court (true story).
Queen Elizabeth is joined on the victorious side of these ten entertaining essays by the younger Pericles, Octavian Caesar, Machiavelli, Elizabeth I, the American founders, Abe Lincoln, Lord Salisbury and Roosevelt.
What is common to them, you ask? All of them had, Gaddis says, “the humility to be unsure of what lay ahead, the flexibility to adjust to it, and the ingenuity to accept, perhaps even to leverage, inconsistencies.”
And on the other side of this book are the older Pericles, Julius Caesar, Augustine, Philip II, George III, Napoleon, Wilson and the twentieth century totalitarians, “all of whom knew with such certainty how the word worked that they preferred flattening topographies to functioning within them”.
What factor, or factors, separates the winners from the losers in Gaddis’ list? F. Scott Fitzgerald’s definition of a first rate intelligence, defined as “the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function”.
What this means in practice, how this relates to Isaiah Berlin’s metaphor of the fox and the hedgehog, and how this has played out on the world stage over thousands of years, over and over again, is what the book “On Grand Strategy” is all about. And for that reason alone, it is a book worth your time.
But there are other reasons to read it too, including Gaddis’ obvious and easy familiarity with a ridiculous range of subjects. The book manages to be broad, breezy and brainy at the same time, which is no mean feat. It is peppered with vignettes from history, and with memorable quips from Gaddis’ many years of teaching an eponymous course, which help in keeping it a light read.
All in all, a most enjoyable read, especially if you know as little about strategy as I do. I still know very little, but considerably more than I did before I read the book, and for that reason, will happily recommend it to you.
EconForEverybody 