Book Review: On Grand Strategy

On Grand Strategy
John Lewis Gaddis
History, politics, warfare

It's not often that I have a hard time describing my reaction to a book. On Grand Strategy is not exactly a military-history book, not exactly a philosophy book (in spite of heavily referencing Isaiah Berlin), not exactly a political-theory book, not exactly a descriptive book, not exactly a prescriptive book, not exactly an analytical book. I'm not entirely sure who the intended audience is, in fact; it's too popular to appeal to academics, and too academic to appeal to the public. Smart undergraduates, maybe?

Gaddis's thesis is that large scale strategy--whether political, military, economic, or what have you--is always a balancing process. If you fix your eyes on your ultimate ambition, you can lose sight of the practical necessities. If you keep your mind firmly on what's realistically achievable, you can narrow your vision to the point where you don't actually achieve much. Aspirations can be limitless; resources can't; to engage in grand strategy is to establish a meeting point. Or, in Berlin's famous formula, "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."

To this end, the book proceeds largely as a series of parallel lives. Usually Gaddis picks out one historical personage who failed to negotiate this balancing act, and contrasts him with another one (either a contemporary, or someone else in a similar situation) who succeeded. These case studies are interesting, but they don't add up to a conclusion. That the tension cited exists is plain; a series of examples doesn't constitute any kind of explanation, much less a theory. Woodrow Wilson at the end of World War I, for instance, was obviously a prisoner of his ambitious ends. He didn't compromise on his means, and so his ends went unachieved. Okay, true. And . . . ?

The real weakness, to put it another was, is that it's all hindsight. Given a taxonomy and 20-20 postdiction, it's always easy to fit your cases into your structure. Whether that really explains anything, much less accurately reflects how the real historical figures thought or worked or acted, is a much more doubtful question.

I should stipulate that there's much to admire in On Grand Strategy. The scholarship is deep, wide, and erudite. The writing is quite fluid. The content is intellectually challenging, ambitious, and thought-provoking. All the same, when you write a thick book that effectively boils down to "good leaders know how to match means and ends," you haven't quite fulfilled your promises.