On Grand Strategy

This, then, is how leaders dismantle walls they’ve built separating vital from peripheral interests. 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 abstrac

What he was really doing was giving up the republic, but so gradually and with such tact—while displaying at every stage such self-evident benefits—that the Romans would adapt to and even embrace their new environment, hardly noticing how much it had changed. They themselves would become crops, vines, cattle, and bees. For unlike Xerxes, Pericles,

For apart from war and preparation for war, it’s in competitive athletics that the Clausewitzian combination of a distilled past, a planned present, and an uncertain future most explicitly come together. With fitness more fashionable now than in the age of the great duke, there’s more participation in games than ever before. But what does that get

What Lincoln had shown was the practicality, in politics, of a moral standard. I mean by this an external frame of reference that shapes interests and actions, not—like Douglas’s—an internal one that only reflects them. Lincoln’s didn’t arise from faith, or formal ethics, or even the law, a profession necessarily pragmatic in its pursuit of justice

Leaders, he seemed to be saying, must keep their feet on the ground. Clausewitz thinks similarly.

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

“So we had won after all!” Churchill remembered exulting on getting the news from Hawaii. “[T]he United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death.” “[S]illy people” had thought Americans too soft, too talkative, too paralyzed by their politics to be anything more than “a vague blur on the horizon to friend or foe.” But I had studied

There, unforgettably, was the compromise characteristic of the age: freedom in principle, perhaps even partially, eventually, in practice. But Union—and its requirement that great ends be kept within available means—came first. Only a state at peace with itself could save its soul. For now.

Simón Bolívar, their liberator, suggested an answer as early as 1815: there would never be, he acknowledged, a United States of Latin America.86 One reason was geography. It might be easier to rule an empire from its seaports than from its interior, but this didn’t prepare a nation to rule itself: the internal barriers of climate, topography, habit