War & StrategyBook note
On Grand Strategy
Description. A short description of a book from my bookshelf, not a review.
Gaddis distils decades of teaching Yale's grand strategy seminar into a book that ranges from Xerxes and Thucydides to Augustus, Machiavelli, Elizabeth I, Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. His working definition of grand strategy is the alignment of potentially unlimited aspirations with necessarily limited capabilities.
The book is more a meditation than a textbook, with Isaiah Berlin's fox and hedgehog as a guiding image. Readers looking for a tidy framework may be frustrated, but those who enjoy seeing how great leaders balanced ambition and constraint will find it rich and thought-provoking.
From the bookshelf · read 2019–2020