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 ALSO BY JOHN LEWIS GADDIS

George F. Kennan: An American Life

The Cold War: A New History

Surprise, Security, and the American Experience
The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past
We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History
The United States and the End of the Cold War: Implications, Reconsiderations,
Provocations
The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War
Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy
During the Cold War
Russia, the Soviet Union and the United States: An Interpretive History
The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947
 PENGUIN PRESS
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street
New York, New York 10014
[Link]

Copyright © 2018 by John Lewis Gaddis

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a
vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not
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ISBN 9781594203510 (hardcover)

ISBN 9780525557296 (ebook)

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact
information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for
changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any
responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Version_1
 For

NICHOLAS F. BRADY, ’52

CHARLES B. JOHNSON, ’54

and

HENRY “SAM” CHAUNCEY, JR., ’57

GRAND STRATEGISTS
 CONTENTS

Also by John Lewis Gaddis

Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Preface

ONE

CROSSING THE HELLESPONT

TWO

LONG WALLS

THREE
TEACHERS AND TETHERS

FOUR

SOULS AND STATES

FIVE

PRINCES AS PIVOTS

SIX
NEW WORLDS
 SEVEN

THE GRANDEST STRATEGISTS

EIGHT
THE GREATEST PRESIDENT

NINE

LAST BEST HOPE

TEN

ISAIAH

Notes
Index
About the Author
 PREFACE

The title, I know, risks raising eyebrows. But my Yale History

Department colleague Timothy Snyder has preceded me (On
Tyranny), as has, more distantly, Seneca (On the Shortness of Life).
I’m most worried, though, about admirers of Carl von Clausewitz,
being one myself. His posthumously published On War (1832) set
the standard for all subsequent writing on that subject and its
necessary corollary, grand strategy. My justification for yet another
such book is concision—not one of Clausewitz’s strengths: On Grand
Strategy covers more years than On War, but at less than half the
length.
It grows out of two experiences with grand strategy, separated by
a quarter century. The first was teaching “Strategy and Policy” at the
United States Naval War College from 1975 to 1977, under
circumstances described at the end of chapter two. The second has
been co-teaching Yale University’s “Studies in Grand Strategy”
seminar every year from 2002 to the present. Both courses have
always relied more on classical texts and historical case studies than
on theory. The single-semester Newport seminars, however, are
chiefly for midcareer military officers. The two-semester Yale course
recruits undergraduate, graduate, and professional school students,
as well as, each year, an active-duty Army and Marine Corps
lieutenant colonel.1
Both courses are collaboratively taught: normally one civilian and
one military instructor for each seminar section at Newport, and, at
Yale, varying combinations. My colleagues Charles Hill, Paul
Kennedy, and I began as a troika, attending all classes, arguing with
one another in front of the students, and individually advising them
(not always consistently) outside of class. Remarkably, we’re still
neighbors and close friends.
The 2006 establishment of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand
Strategy allowed us to add practitioners: they’ve included David
Brooks, Walter Russell Mead, John Negroponte, Peggy Noonan,
Victoria Nuland, Paul Solman, Jake Sullivan, and Evan Wolfson. The
course has also attracted other Yale faculty: Scott Boorman
(Sociology), Elizabeth Bradley (formerly School of Public Health,
director of the Brady-Johnson program in 2016–17, now president of
Vassar College), Beverly Gage (History and, from 2017, Brady-
Johnson program director), Bryan Garsten (Political Science and
Humanities), Nuno Monteiro (Political Science), Kristina Talbert-
Slagle (Epidemiology and Public Health), and Adam Tooze (formerly
History, now at Columbia University).
Together these colleagues have taught me a lot, another reason I
feel obliged now to try to say what I’ve learned. I’ve done so in a way
that’s informal, impressionistic, and wholly idiosyncratic: my
teachers bear no responsibility other than for setting me off on paths
they couldn’t control. Because I seek patterns across time, space, and
scale,2 I’ve felt free to suspend such constraints for comparative,
even conversational purposes: St. Augustine and Machiavelli will
occasionally talk with one another, as will Clausewitz and Tolstoy.
Who is, in turn, the imaginer I’ve found most helpful; others include
Virgil, Shakespeare, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Finally, I’ve returned
often to the ideas of Sir Isaiah Berlin,3 whom I got to know slightly
while visiting the University of Oxford in 1992–93. I hope he’d be
pleased to be considered a grand strategist. I know he’d be amused.
My agent, Andrew Wylie, and my editor, Scott Moyers, had
greater confidence in this book than I did when I began writing it.
Working with them again has been a pleasure, as it has been to
benefit once more from the efficiency of the entire Penguin team:
Ann Godoff, Christopher Richards, Mia Council, Matthew Boyd,
Bruce Giffords, Deborah Weiss Geline, and Juliana Kiyan.
I owe special thanks to the Yale undergraduates in my fall 2017
“Foxes and Hedgehogs” seminar, who’ve tough-mindedly test-driven
every chapter of this book: Morgan Aguiar-Lucander, Patrick Binder,
Robert Brinkmann, Alessandro Buratti, Diego Fernandez-Pages,
Robert Henderson, Scott Hicks, Jack Hilder, Henry Iseman, India
June, Declan Kunkel, Ben Mallet, Alexander Petrillo, Marshall
Rankin, Nicholas Religa, Grant Richardson, Carter Scott, Sara
Seymour, David Shimer, and Jared Smith. I’ve also had the help of
accomplished undergraduate research assistants: Cooper D’Agostino,
Matthew Lloyd-Thomas, David McCullough III, Campbell Schnebly-
Swanson, and Nathaniel Zelinsky.
Yale presidents Richard Levin and Peter Salovey have strongly
supported our teaching of grand strategy from the beginning—as has
Ted Wittenstein, their special assistant and one of our early students.
Associate directors in International Security Studies and the Brady-
Johnson program have kept us on course: Will Hitchcock, Ted
Bromund, the late Minh Luong, Jeffrey Mankoff, Ryan Irwin,
Amanda Behm, Jeremy Friedman, Christopher Miller, Evan Wilson,
and Ian Johnson; as have the staff we share at 31 Hillhouse: Liz
Vastakis, Kathleen Galo, Mike Skonieczny, and Igor Biryukov. My
wife, Toni Dorfman, teacher, scholar, mentor, actor, playwright,
director of plays and baroque operas, manuscript critic and copy
editor, gourmet chef, nightly therapist, and the love of my life, now,
for twenty years (!), keeps me together in every way.
The dedication celebrates the two great benefactors of our
program, along with one wise facilitator: their vision, generosity, and
unvarying good advice—not least that we “teach common sense”—
have been our anchor, our compass, and the vessel itself in which we
sail.

JLG
New Haven, Connecticut
Fall 2017
 CHAPTER ONE

CROSSING THE HELLESPONT

T he date is 480 B.C.E. The place is Abydos, the town on the Asian
side of the Hellespont where it narrows to just over a mile in
width. The scene is worthy of Hollywood in its heyday. Xerxes,
Persia’s King of Kings, ascends a throne on a promontory from which
he can see armies assembled, the historian Herodotus tells us, of
over a million and a half men. Had the number been only a tenth of
that, as is more likely, it would still have approximated the size of
Eisenhower’s forces on D-day in 1944. The Hellespont has no bridge
now, but Xerxes had two then: one rested on 360 boats lashed
together, the other on 314, both curved to accommodate winds and
currents. For after an earlier bridge had broken apart in a storm, the
furious king beheaded the builders and ordered the waters
themselves whipped and branded. Somewhere on the bottom there
presumably lie, to this day, the iron fetters he had thrown in for good
measure.
On that day, though, the waters are calm and Xerxes is content—
until he bursts into tears. His adviser and uncle Artabanus asks why.
“Here are all these thousands,” the king replies, “and not one of them
will be alive a hundred years from now.” Artabanus consoles his
master by reminding him of all the calamities that can make life
intolerable and death a relief. Xerxes acknowledges this, but
demands: “Tell me the very truth.” Would Artabanus have favored
the task at hand—a second Persian invasion of Greece in just over a
decade—had they not both had the same frightening dream? Now it’s
Artabanus who shudders: “I am still full, nay overfull, of fear.”
Xerxes’ dream had come twice after Artabanus dissuaded him
from avenging the Greeks’ humiliation of Darius, Xerxes’ father, at
Marathon ten years earlier. As if in anticipation of Hamlet—still two
millennia into the future—an apparition, regal in aspect, paternal in
attitude, had issued an ultimatum: “[I]f you do not launch your war
at once, . . . just as a short while raised you to be great and mighty, so
with speed again shall you be humble.” Artabanus at first scoffed at
the dream’s significance, whereupon Xerxes made him trade clothes
and sleep in the royal bed. The specter reappeared, so terrifying
Artabanus that he woke up screaming, instantly urging the new
invasion. Xerxes then gave the orders, the great force gathered at
Sardis, sacrificed a thousand heifers at the ruins of Troy, arrived at
the Hellespont, found the bridges ready, and was preparing to cross
them when the king allowed his uncle one last chance to voice
whatever reservations he might yet have.
Artabanus, despite his nightmare, can’t resist. The enemies ahead,
he warns, will not just be Greeks, formidable fighters though they
are: they’ll also include the land and the sea. The march around the
Aegean will traverse territories incapable of feeding so large an army.
There won’t be enough harbors to shelter ships if storms arise.
Exhaustion, even starvation, could set in before fighting a single
battle. The prudent leader “dreads and reflects on everything that
can happen to him but is bold when he is in the thick of action.”
Xerxes listens patiently, but objects that “if you were to take account
of everything . . . , you would never do anything. It is better to have a
brave heart and endure one half of the terrors we dread than to
[calculate] all of the terrors and suffer nothing at all. . . . Big things
are won by big dangers.”
That settles it. Xerxes sends Artabanus back to rule the existing
empire, while turning his own attention to doubling its extent. He
prays to the sun for the strength to conquer not just Greece, but all of
Europe. He has myrtle branches strewn before the bridges. He orders
his priests to burn incense. And he rewards the Hellespont by
pouring into it a libation, followed by the golden cup that contained
it, followed by the golden bowl in which it was mixed, followed as
well by a sword. This clears the way for the crossing, which takes
seven days and nights to complete. As Xerxes himself reaches the
European shore, an awed bystander is heard asking why Zeus has
disguised himself as the Persian monarch, bringing along “all the
people of the world?” Could the god not have destroyed Greece on
his own?1

I.
Two thousand four hundred and nineteen years later, an Oxford don
took a break from tutorials to go to a party. Thirty at the time, Isaiah
Berlin had been born in Riga, brought up in St. Petersburg, and, after
witnessing the Bolshevik Revolution at the age of eight, emigrated
with his family to England. There he thrived, mastering the new
language through a thicket of accents that never left him, triumphing
in his Oxford examinations, and becoming the first Jew ever elected
to an All Souls College fellowship. By 1939 he was teaching
philosophy at New College (established in 1379), developing an
aversion to logical positivism (nothing means anything without
reproducible verification), and hugely enjoying life.
A glittering conversationalist with a sponge-like thirst for ideas,
Berlin relished opportunities to show himself off and to soak things
up. At this party—the exact date isn’t known—he ran into Julian
Edward George Asquith, the 2nd Earl of Oxford and Asquith, then
finishing a classics degree at Balliol. Lord Oxford had come across an
intriguing line from the ancient Greek poet Archilochus of Paros. It
was, as Berlin remembered it: “The fox knows many things, but the
hedgehog knows one big thing.”2
The passage survives only as a fragment, so its context has long
been lost. But the Renaissance scholar Erasmus played around with
it,3 and Berlin couldn’t help doing the same. Might it become a
scheme for classifying great writers? If so, Plato, Dante, Dostoevsky,
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