On Grand Strategy (2019): John Lewis Gaddis' portrait of select strategists
by Christopher Giofreda
The baseball catcher Yogi Berra once quipped, ‘It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.’ This tango with the unknown is the crux of John Lewis Gaddis’ On Grand Strategy (Penguin, 2019). What attitude is merited under conditions of ignorance? asks the author, an historian at Yale. He says that we seek ‘the alignment of potentially unlimited aspirations with necessarily limited capabilities’ (21). Standing in our way are the two common attitudes towards thought leadership—each incomplete in its own way. Simply stated, we are foxes and hedgehogs: the first dithers and the second acts rashly.
The fox is an infovore who wishes not to act on imperfect information. The hedgehog hopes to survive on an idea and stretch the means to meet his grand end. Both foxes and hedgehogs can fritter away an enterprise—or an empire. The goal, writes Gaddis, is to blend the ‘hedgehog’s sense of direction and the fox’s sensitivity to surroundings…while retaining the ability to function’ (15-16). It’s an enviable goal we can only meet by reading the lives of the great strategists (e.g., Machiavelli).
Gaddis presupposes a canon of greatness. This is a conservative historical method applied to the field of leadership. We are in a mode that Thomas Carlyle might have praised.
The fox and hedgehog do not actually spring from Gaddis’ historical survey. He borrows the idea from Isiah Berlin who saw it kicking around in Archilocus. However, because Gaddis is such an effective storyteller, the fox/hedgehog distinction is vivid, modern, and useful. Because the narrative is built on rough personality sketches—practical but not exact—the most interesting part of Gaddis’ work turns out to be the relationships between fox and hedgehog. Foxes, especially, seem to need hedgehogs. This is a major jolt from Gaddis. Foxes start off behind in the attention game, with all of the importance that our society places on being seen.
Critical overview, chapter-by-chapter
The book’s first chapter, ‘Crossing the Hellespont’, takes us to Persia’s failed attempts to subdue Ancient Greece. The Persian King Xerxes, a classic hedgehog (and Gaddis’ favourite whipping boy) lost nine hundred triremes and a quarter million men (30) to his Greek rivals. Nor could the fox by his side—a vizier named Artabanus—do much about it. He too became caught up in the hedgehog’s fatal dream. Gaddis makes the lesson clear: We need to align ends and means before we end up with a mental Hellespont, a gap separating our ego and common sense (27). In order to succeed, one needs self-regard to act and respect for the world.
Chapter Two, ‘Long Walls’, takes place after Xerxes’ expedition in the years 479-8. The Ancient Athenians have built long walls connecting the cities of Athens and Piraeus. This protects Athenian access to a port, ensuring continued trade and survival during a siege. The long walls form an artificial island (31). However, Sparta, an ally of Athens as famed for its army as Athens was for its Navy, sees the walls as changing the balance of power. Sparta now has no way to check the upstart Athenians, so envy is in the air. Indeed, Athens takes pains to conceal construction from Sparta until it is too late. Tensions simmer until, many years later, Athens and Sparta go to war.
The great question of this chapter is how, when two actors did align their aspirations with their military capabilities, was so much blood still spilled? Gaddis’ answer rests on Pericles, the arch-democrat and hedgehog. He relied too much on theory (i.e. using liberality as a force for empire). But he would eventually meet a situation where his methods could not help, and the whole enterprise would collapse under the weight of a failed promise. Gaddis does not mention Plato’s ‘Menexenus’, but its condemnation of Periclean Athens was surely an influence.
The chapter also reflects Thucydides’ influence on Gaddis. Thucydides, the great chronicler of the Peloponnesian War (431-404) between Athens and Sparta, believed history had predictive power. What seems new inevitably resembles the old. Self-identified hedgehogs, vulnerable to overconfidence, might discover that what they believed was a seemingly solved problem is but a snare.
Chapter Three, ‘Teachers and Tethers’, takes us to Octavian’s Rome via Ancient China. Informed by Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918, 1922, 1923) and Ecclesiastes (180 BCE?), where events recur in new forms, Gaddis’ framework is about ideas rather than strict chronology. The introduction, where we meet Sun Tzu (of The Art of War fame) is the fascinating part. Tzu is the artful fox who simply allows the ambitions that life grants. Gaddis wonders why Sun Tzu’s ideas do not decay over time: After all, principles rely for coherence upon the time and space where they’re tested. But Gaddis understands Sun Tzu’s wisdom not in the facts of the case but in their ability to tether reasons to plans. A tether ensures practices and principles do not come apart. For example, Sun Tzu’s circular ‘Act expediently in accordance with what is advantageous’ is not an informational statement, in Gaddis’ view, but an exhortation (65). Following it will habituate us to become a fox.
Gaddis’ point is well-formed in a few pages. Octavian’s story is good for its own sake. Marc Antony, a hedgehog, plays the foil. Gaddis’ unifying move is to show that the tether—which is something like good sense—can let us expand our power in many directions rather than just one. The tether is the book’s great concept.
Chapter Four, ‘Souls and States’, is a eulogy for Nicolo Machiavelli. St. Augustine of Hippo, author of Confessions and City of God some one thousand years earlier, is the sacrifice to make the other live again. The necromantic structure is the interesting part of the chapter. An anti-dogmatist like Gaddis has to cheapen Augustine’s early life to get his point across: He calls Augustine a ‘ponderous Pangloss’ (109). City of God becomes the redemptive arc for the excess of piety in Confessions. In one memorable slight, Gaddis compares him to Richard Nixon, and in another he dismisses the Bishop with ‘Enough already!’ after a characteristically prudish passage (104). The ‘strange’ Confessions does show Augustine as absolutely devoted—no doubt a boon for his Church (97). It seems that some hedgehogs defeat their foxy rivals by outlasting them. Some of the finer points—the use of proportionality and the unity of opposites within the City of God—are obscured by pique.
Chapter Five, ‘Princes as Pivots’, once again suggests a pair of opposites: Elisabeth I of England and Philip II of Spain. An extended biographical sketch of the two is performed in service to a broadside against conscientiousness (135, 145). Better, says Gaddis, to have ‘lightness’ like Elizabeth, in a story where she lies for England’s gain (134). Elizabeth could be ‘childlike or canny, forthright or devious, brave or risk-averse, forgiving or vindictive, serene or volcanic, even feminine or masculine.’ She is always performing in the name of statecraft. The issue here is how little flexibility Philip seems to have in comparison. Was he that inflexible? Gaddis’ move is Straussian: Present a pair, and make one character lifeless to elevate the other.
The best part of the chapter is the exploration of hendiadys, a rhetorical figure that subtly disunites what it seems to combine (e.g., ‘sound and fury’ meaning ‘furious sound’). The figures Gaddis praises understand and use hendiadys—a personality trait that he believes animates their personas. Gaddis, however, seems to go a bit overboard in his praise for such figures—tricksters, one might call them—at the expense of, say, those who lacked this playfulness but were no less strategic.
Chapter Six, ‘New Worlds’, takes us from the fall of the Spanish Armada to the birth of the American republic. Gaddis interlinks those two developments between these two via a quotation from Geoffrey Parker (152): ‘The failure of the Spanish Armada “laid the American continent open to invasion and colonization by northern Europeans, and thus made possible the creation of the United States.’ Now, Parker’s is a modest claim—but Gaddis does too much with it.
If Parker’s claim is correct, Gaddis argues, ‘then the future pivoted on a single evening—August 7, 1588.’ However, Parker is not claiming that; he is making two claims: The loss of the Armada opened the invasion of the New world, which made possible the creation of the United States. Parker suggests two separate events, not the one that Gaddis presents. The United States did not spring from the failure of the Spanish Armada. Nobody in the AD 1500s would have welcomed statehood for a continent that they were trying to exploit. Indeed, Gaddis is forced to admit that overseas expansion was already taking place before the Armada (153). Like the Duke of Parma’s fleet, Gaddis’ sixth chapter can’t get here from there!
Chapter Seven, ‘The Grandest Strategists’, is Gaddis’ critique of military ambition. Carl von Clausewitz, a favourite of Gaddis’, guides the novice into war: ‘The novice cannot pass through these layers of increasing intensity of danger without sensing that here ideas are governed by other factors, that the light of reason is refracted in a manner quite different from that which is normal in academic speculation.’ The italics belong to Gaddis. War, it is suggested, can hardly be predicted: Its wisdom is won at a dear price.
To fully make the point about ambition, Gaddis puts Napoleon on the chopping block for his failure in Russia. One might think that if Napoleon was a hedgehog, it worked well enough. But Gaddis’ point is that even great commanders fall victim to Clausewitz’s theory of chaos. So, war wisdom is won through blood and eludes the best commanders in the breach. What, then, is left? An argument for softer power. Gaddis’ implication is smooth. If we cannot rely on supremacy of arms, we must seek to make us strong in the ways that geopolitical reality allows. Inevitable failure in war is an advertisement for statecraft.
Chapter Eight, ‘The Greatest President’, focuses on Abraham Lincoln but begins by contrasting the elitist John Quincy Adams with the populist frontiersman Andrew Jackson. Gaddis highlights how the ‘hedgehog’—embodied byAdams—struggles to maintain a unifying narrative. Adams clings on to his patrician ideals—believing that leadership is a responsibility of the well-bred and well-educated rather than something to be fought over by the masses; however, he also sees the prospect of losing the presidency as a national rebuke of his service. Gaddis also suggests that J.Q. wished to redeem his father John Adams as well: J. Q.’s ambitions (e.g., a national university, stronger navy, etc.) outstrip his ends. The interesting rhetorical move comes when Gaddis tries to turn Lincoln into a fox. If Lincoln—the best among us by acclamation—sanded down his morality, then we need not bother being pure. The stakes are high with this move.
Perhaps the best fox of the 19th century was actually J.Q.’s grandson Henry, who shook off the influence of two presidential relatives—aristocratic models he was trained to follow—and learned to accept the democratic world of the 19th century. What followed was a career in history, ‘science’, and journalism that few could have predicted from the station of his birth.
Chapter Nine, ‘Last Best Hope’, will contain much that is entirely new to readers. The last quarter of the 19th century usually gets ignored due to its lack of calamitous events (though Gaddis races to get to the hits.) Gaddis’ new victim is Halford Mackinder, a geopolitical hedgehog who thought he saw a paradigm shift in how societies would develop: consolidation within continents rather than, as per usual, rivalries within continents. Gaddis suggests that Mackinder, as a hedgehog, misunderstood the run-up to WW1: Specifically, Mackinder underestimated the potential of air power in his 1904 paper, ‘Geographical Pivot of History’, presented at the United Kingdom’s Royal Geographical Society. However, it wasn’t until many years later—perhaps when William Mitchell challenged an Army Air Service carrier in 1921—that air power was the world-changing force we know it to be. So, Mackinder should be indemnified here.
The remainder of the chapter details opposition between Germany and England in the run-up to WW1. Because of Mackinder, the world was aligned in a network of strategic partnerships that became, in Henry Kissinger’s famous phrase, a ‘diplomatic doomsday machine’ (263-4). As we know, mutual defence pacts pulled in country after country after the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand—though, of course, some alliances are designed to deter conflict rather than escalate it. Gaddis’ lesson is clear enough: A fox’s friendships are expedient. What, then, is the value of an enduring alliance? I suspect that the ethos of the friends themselves has something to do with it, and a reliance on mere utility can only diminish this.
Chapter Ten, ‘Isaiah’, ends the book. Gaddis struggles to harmonize the strategists from earlier chapters with something of a commitment to human life: ‘The contradiction between the living and the dead is the greatest we’ll ever hold, in mind or in spirit, whatever the “present” within which we function.’ It’s the closest Gaddis comes to admitting an absolute (i.e. the sanctity of life). But such a claim would require a hedgehog, not a fox. The fox prefers digression to devotion, performance to simplicity, and being the master to being the slave of the good. Rule by foxes leaves us in a state of exception where the moral ought will be subordinate to temporal reasons.
The verdict
On Grand Strategy promises a meeting between fox and hedgehog. However, the vision of the latter is seldom allowed to shine, though it should have been. How can we seek the means of doing the best things without admitting that they might be found in some abiding sense? Most readers will believe in a world that can be understood—at least partially—and not the sort of Hericlitean flux that profits the fox in every case. I wish Gaddis understood what every billiard player does: Let the other sucker win sometimes. Fortunately, none of this confusion hangs on Gaddis. The book is playfully ironic with its subject. He would not have us praise men and women of action only to have it all end in lassitude. This book can be recommended carefully if one will read it carefully.
Christopher Giofreda teaches courses in Philosophy and Ethics at Old Dominion University, Virginia. If you wish to contact him, please let us know here. For an extensive interview with Giofreda on his pedagogy, click here. For Giofreda’s review of Shadi Bartsch’s book Plato Goes to China (2023), click here.
