Sublime

Thucydides wouldn’t have put it in that way, but I suspect this is what he meant when he encouraged his readers to seek “knowledge of the past as an aid to the understanding of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it.” For without some sense of the past the future can be only loneliness: amnesia is a

It’s not clear whether Lincoln recalled, or even had read, Adams’s message to Congress in 1825. Both shared, though, this central point: that “liberty is power,” and that “the nation blessed with the largest portion of liberty must in proportion to its numbers be the most powerful nation upon earth.”87 To that end, Lincoln

England’s maritime superiority had relied, since the Tudors, on rivalries within continents to prevent projections of power beyond their shores. But now, Mackinder was arguing, consolidations of continents were taking place that, if used to build fleets, could empower an “empire of the world.” Probably Russia would run it. Or maybe Germany allied w

to participate in the great decisions of government. There was, Lippmann brooded, no “intrinsic moral and intellectual virtue to majority rule.” Lippmann’s disenchantment with democracy anticipated the mood of today’s elites. From the top, the public, and the swings of public opinion, appeared irrational and uninformed. The human material out of wh

Because I seek patterns across time, space, and scale,2 I’ve felt free to suspend such constraints for comparative, even conversational purposes: St. Augustine and Machiavelli will occasionally talk with one another, as will Clausewitz and Tolstoy.

The third section is devoted to the Cold War, the four-decade period following the end of World War II that was dominated by the struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. It looks at why the Cold War broke out, why it stayed cold, and why it ended when and how it did. The fourth and final history chapter assesses the post‒Cold War pe

The argument is absurd, but only because it rejects any coexistence of contradictions in time or space: it thereby confirms Berlin’s claim that not all praiseworthy things are simultaneously possible. And that learning to live within that condition—let’s call it history—requires adaptation to incompatibles. That’s where grand strategy helps. For “i