My Amazon Review of Henry Lewis Gaddis' "On Grand Strategy"

Strategy Rules

 I wish I could take Yale history professor’s grand strategy course. Reading his book is the next best option. At the heart of Gaddis’ book is Isaiah Berlin’s parable of the hedgehog and the fox. Simply put a successful strategist has to have the strategic focus of a hedgehog with the tactical flexibility of a fox.  The strategist can’t view evolving events through the lens of a fixed ideological view and must be flexible enough to adapt to the changing environment. The enemies of flexibility are ego and hubris.

Gaddis teaches us that there has to be a relationship between means and ends. As the Rolling Stones taught us we can’t always get what we want. He continually invokes Carl von Clausewitz’s maxims especially that war is the extension of politics by more violent means. As such he understands Bismarck’s view the “politics is the art of the possible. So too is strategy.

Gaddis’ work here is also a paean to the liberal arts. He brings out the strategic thinking of Tolstoy, Saint Augustine and my personal hero Niccolo Machiavelli. He prefers intuitive thinkers over experts the latter of whom are more locked into rigid thinking. His favorite American strategists are Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Lincoln understands how to use his technological and manpower superiority over the South by aggressively attacking in the Mississippi Valley and Roosevelt for understanding that the axis would be defeated by the factories of Detroit and California. Gaddis goes overboard, in my opinion, in giving too much credit for Roosevelt’s 1933 diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union as a harbinger of the World War II alliance with Stalin against Germany and Japan.  

As an aside I wish Gaddis would have discussed the grand strategies of Bismarck, Lenin and Stalin. All three were masters of tactical flexibility with very strong strategic goals.

So for those of us who can’t take Gaddis’ class, read his “On Grand Strategy.”

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My Amazon Review of William Hitchcock's "The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s"

The Eisenhower 50’s

University of Virginia history professor, William Hitchcock has a written a very sympathetic, and I think accurate, history of the Eisenhower era of 1944 – 1961. I grew up as a child of the era in a middle class apartment neighborhood in Queens. To us the 1950’s was not an era of blandness and racism as liberals would describe it, but rather it was one of hope and optimism. It was truly a time of a broadly shared prosperity. We were well aware of Jim Crow in the South, but every day Jackie Robinson took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers we cheered him on and knew that the world was becoming a better place.

Eisenhower’s opening acts were to make peace in Korea and to stay out of France’s war in Indochina. To be sure his time represented the heyday of the CIA with successful coups in Guatemala and Iran. Further he deftly dealt with Senator Joe McCarthy watching him burn out.

Just before the election of 1956 Eisenhower faced the dual crises of the Hungarian Revolution along with the Anglo-French/Israeli invasion of Egypt during the Suez crisis. Hitchcock calls Eisenhower a realist in failing to intervene in Hungary after the Soviets invade. I am not so sure, The U.S. could have done more. As to the Suez crisis he completely ignored the reason for Israel’s participation. Namely it was a reaction to the Egyptian sponsored fedeyeen raids from the Sinai into Israel attacking civilians. He is too casual in lumping Israel in with Britain and France with respect to motivation.

The Russian launching of their Sputnik satellite in 1957 triggered a major crisis in the administration and led to calls of a missile gap. Although there may have been one in 1957, by 1960 the U.S. had clear military superiority over the Russians with the development of the Atlas, Titan, Minuteman and Polaris missiles. The missile gap that JFK talked of in 1960 was a myth.

Throughout his administration Eisenhower concentrated his efforts on building up U.S. strategic forces and trying to reach a modus vivendi with the Soviets. He tried with a Summit meeting in 1954 and tried again with the planned summit meeting in 1960. That summit blew up when Eisenhower was caught lying about the failed U-2 over-flight mission over the Soviet Union. Here Hitchcock is particularly acute in going through the “tick-tock” of the entire episode.

One of the heroes of the book is Attorney General Herbert Brownell who was leading the charge on civil rights. It is here where Hitchcock differs from Caro in his telling of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. According to Caro Johnson was the prime mover, but according to Hitchcock it is Johnson who so waters down the bill to make it far less relevant. Remember the Senate was voting on the Eisenhower Administration’s bill. It is also here that Hitchcock makes an error in recounting that it took 60% of the Senate to over-ride a filibuster. That is true today, but in 1957 it took 67%.

Although many historians are critical of Eisenhower’s slow walking civil rights in the 1950s. Hitchcock rightly notes that Eisenhower used federal troops to integrate Little Rock’s Central High School in 1957 and was vilified throughout the south. Kennedy was no different as he also slow walked civil rights until 1963.

Hitchcock notes that Eisenhower leaves Kennedy with crises in Laos and Cuba where a CIA sponsored invasion is on the offing. Unfortunately Kennedy got caught up in the momentum of the moment with disastrous results. But that all takes place prior to Eisenhower’s farewell address where he warns of the power accumulating in the military-industrial complex he largely created.

All told William Hitchcock has offered a terrific history of the era and foreign policy of the Eisenhower Administration. I highly recommend it for both lay and professional readers.

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My Amazon Review of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's "Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life"

Not another “Black Swan”

I was disappointed with Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s “Skin in the Game.” It is more a stream of consciousness than a path breaking work. It would have been much better as a long magazine article. That, at least, would have avoided his ceaseless repetitions as to why he hates academics, economists, Robert Rubin, Goldman Sachs and Monsanto.

That said there are real kernels of the book that are important. First as the title suggests that advice coming from those who have who have no skin in the game is, at best, useless and at worse harmful. Simply put those advisors suffer no consequences if they give bad advice. Simply put this is Taleb’s “BS” detector. He next notes how tiny minorities have the ability to enforce majoritarian preferences. For example making most foods in the West Halal compliant is very important to Moslems but is not material for non-Moslems so non-Moslems have no problem eating Halal compliant foods.

Finally, and this is really important, Taleb notes the difference from what I would characterize as inter-temporal probability with cross sectional probability. His example is Russian roulette. If 100 people played Russian roulette for a million dollars the expected value of the individual payoff would be $833,000 (5 chances in 6 of surviving and thus winning). However if one person played the same game with the same payoff 100 times, he/she would be dead. Thus the risk of ruin is understated in most financial models. In other words you have to stay in the game in order to ultimately win.

Thus if Taleb edited down his book into a much smaller format I would have rated it much higher. However in its current form it is a slog.

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