On Grand Strategy
John Lewis Gaddis
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8 quotes
Chapter 6
- Hedgehogs, Berlin explained, “relate everything to a single central vision” through which “all that they say and do has significance.” Foxes, in contrast, “pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way.”Feb 23 2023 5:02AM
- The foxes relied, for their predictions, on an intuitive “stitching together [of] diverse sources of information,” not on deductions derived from “grand schemes.” They doubted “that the cloudlike subject of politics” could ever be “the object of a clocklike science.” The best of them “shared a self-deprecating style of thinking” that “elevate[d] no thought above criticism.” But they tended to be too discursive—too inclined to qualify their claims—to hold an audience.Feb 23 2023 5:06AM
- Tetlock’s hedgehogs, in contrast, shunned self-deprecation and brushed aside criticism. Aggressively deploying big explanations, they displayed a “bristly impatience with those who ‘do not get it.’” When the intellectual holes they dug got too deep, they’d simply dig deeper. They became “prisoners of their preconceptions,” trapped in cycles of self-congratulation. These played well as sound bites, but bore little relationship to what subsequently occurred.Feb 23 2023 5:06AM
- Little things add up in unpredictably big ways—and yet, leaders can’t let uncertainties paralyze them.Feb 23 2023 5:08AM
- [A] compass . . . [will] point you true north from where you’re standing, but it’s got no advice about the swamps and deserts and chasms that you’ll encounter along the way. If in pursuit of your destination, you plunge ahead, heedless of obstacles, and achieve nothing more than to sink in a swamp . . . , [then] what’s the use of knowing true north?Feb 23 2023 5:11AM
- Spielberg’s Lincoln, therefore, shows actions taken across time (Berlin), the coexistence of opposites within a space (Fitzgerald), and a shifting of scale that echoes—why not Tolstoy? For both Lincolns, the one portrayed and the one who lived, grasped intuitively what Tolstoy tried to convey in his own colossal dramatization, War and Peace: that everything relates to everything else. Perhaps that’s why the great novelist, who rarely saw “greatness” in any leader, accorded that accolade posthumously to the martyred presidentFeb 23 2023 5:12AM
- This worsens a problem Henry Kissinger identified long ago: that the “intellectual capital” leaders accumulate prior to reaching the top is all they’ll be able to draw on while at the top. There’s less time now than Lincoln had to learn anything new.Feb 24 2023 1:53AM
- Historians, knowing that their field rewards specialized research, tend to avoid the generalizations upon which theories depend: they thereby deny complexity the simplicities that guide us through it. Theorists, keen to be seen as social “scientists,” seek “reproducibility” in results: that replaces complexity with simplicity in the pursuit of predictability. Both communities neglect relationships between the general and the particular—between universal and local knowledge—that nurture strategic thinking. And both, as if to add opacity to this insufficiency, too often write badly.Feb 24 2023 1:54AM