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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