On Grand Strategy

“if you were to take account of everything . . . , you would never do anything. It is better to have a brave heart and endure one half of the terrors we dread than to [calculate] all of the terrors and suffer nothing at all. . . . Big things are won by big dangers.”

“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”

Hedgehogs, Berlin explained, “relate everything to a single central vision” through which “all that they say and do has significance.” Foxes, in contrast, “pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way.”

stresses prices to be paid—in

The foxes relied, for their predictions, on an intuitive “stitching together [of] diverse sources of information,” not on deductions derived from “grand schemes.”

The tragedy of Xerxes and Artabanus is that each lacked the other’s proficiency. The king, like Tetlock’s hedgehogs, commanded the attention of audiences but tended to dig himself into holes. The adviser, like Tetlock’s foxes, avoided the holes, but couldn’t retain audiences. Xerxes was right. If you try to anticipate everything, you’ll risk not accomplishing anything. But so was Artabanus. If you fail to prepare for all that might happen, you’ll ensure that some of it will.

“the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

We’d need to combine, within a single mind (our own), the hedgehog’s sense of direction and the fox’s sensitivity to surroundings. While retaining the ability to function.

Lincoln keeps long-term aspirations and immediate necessities in mind at the same time.

Which is what grand strategy is meant to prevent. I’ll define that term, for the purposes of this book, as the alignment of potentially unlimited aspirations with necessarily limited capabilities.

Whatever balance you strike, there’ll be a link between what’s real and what’s imagined: between your current location and your intended destination.

“as the knowledge of the actions of great men, learned by me from long experience with modern things and a continuous reading of ancient ones.”

The result is a plan, informed by the past, linked to the present, for achieving some future goal.

“friction,” the collision of theory with reality

Maybe you’ll stick to the plan, maybe you’ll modify it, maybe you’ll scrap it altogether. Like Lincoln, though, you’ll know your compass heading, whatever the unknowns that lie between you and your destination.

capabilities and aspirations in strategy—they

the past prepares us for the future only when, however imperfectly, it transfers. Just as capabilities restrict aspirations to what circumstances will allow.

One way is to find flows you can go with. Having determined your destination, you set sails, motivate rowers, adjust for winds and currents, avoid shoals and rocks, allow for surprises, and expend finite energy efficiently. You control some things, but align yourself with others.

Pericles at first steered with flows—a strategy of persuasion. When not all were persuaded, though, he began steering against flows—a strategy of confrontation.

fundamental in strategy, between respecting constraints and denying their existence.

But strategy isn’t always a rational enterprise.

For the abstractions of strategy and the emotions of strategists can never be separated: they can only be balanced. The weight attached to each, however, will vary with circumstances. And the heat of emotions requires only an instant to melt abstractions drawn from years of cool reflection. Decades devoid of reflection may follow.

Strategy requires a sense of the whole that reveals the significance of respective parts.

But to know the past only in static terms—as moments frozen in time and space—would be almost as disabling, because we’re the progeny of progressions across time and space that shift from small scales to big ones and back again.

principles, selected for validity across time and space, and then connects them to practices, bound by time and space.

What look like platitudes, in The Art of War, are in fact tethers, meant to prevent such separations.

He tethers what’s obvious to what’s much less so: how states, without defeating themselves, can win wars.

The tautology itself tethers, for the “advantages” of which he writes lie in the “advantageous” situations that make leverage possible.

seized opportunities while retaining objectives.

Strategy, therefore, came naturally: he rarely confused aspirations with capabilities.

Direct approaches work, Master Sun suggests, only when capabilities approximate aspirations. Abundance allows all you want: there’s little need for maneuver. Most of the time, though, capabilities fall short—that was Octavian’s problem. Insufficiency demands indirection, and that, Sun Tzu insists, requires maneuver:

Maneuvering, thus, requires planning, but also improvisation.

He was shifting from navigation to cultivation.

saw time as an ally. As the historian Mary Beard has pointed out, he didn’t need to abolish anything. He used time to grow things.

Man’s choices lie between the polarities, but no formulae reveal what those choices should be.

if you have to use force, don’t destroy what you’re trying to preserve.

You proportion aspirations to capabilities. These are opposites—the first being free from limits and the second bound by them—but they must connect.

Spain began a slow decline, and a new world order its gradual ascendancy.

Assuming stability is one of the ways ruins get made. Resilience accommodates the unexpected.

Controlled environments encourage complacency, making it hard to cope when controls break down, as they sooner or later must. Constant disruptions, however, prevent recuperation: nothing’s ever healthy. There’s a balance, then, between integrative and disintegrative processes in the natural world—an edge of chaos, so to speak—where adaptation, especially self-organization, tends to occur.

details dim the flames fireships require. They disconnect ends of arguments from their beginnings.

The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. . . . She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.

although ends can be infinite, means can never be—and

if war, in this sense, reflects politics, it must be subordinate to politics and therefore to policy, the product of politics.

Artists approach truth, he observes, with “a quick recognition” of what “the mind would ordinarily miss or would perceive only after long study and reflection.” His term for this is coup d’oeil, or an “inward eye.”

Something or someone will sooner or later break, but you can’t know how, where, or when. What you can know is that, owing to friction, “one always falls far short of the intended goal.”

Asymmetries in aspirations and capabilities have always constrained strategies,

friction as the cause, while showing that it can occur at any level: the passage of time and extension across space make it more probable.

Just as coup d’oeil links strategy to imagination, so Clausewitz’s concept of friction ties theory to experience.

He values theory as an antidote to anecdotes: as a compression of the past transmitting experience, while making minimal claims about the future. He relies on theory for training, not as a navigational chart for the unforeseen.

Judge Douglas’s amorality, therefore, was not just wrong: it violated the most basic requirements of common sense.

Scale sets the ranges within which experience accrues.

Space is where expectations and circumstances intersect.

Finally, then, time. Lincoln kept it on his side: he knew how to wait, when to act, and where to seek reassurance.

the interdependence of time, space, and scale simultaneously reflects choice and necessity: the illusion of agency causes us to believe in free will even as inexorable laws deny the possibility.

instances at all levels of intentions projected beyond capabilities, a frequent cause of past military calamities. But capabilities, this time, also outran intentions.

It never occurred to them that the failure to make their alliances correspond to rational political objectives would lead to the destruction of civilization as they knew it.