...an extraordinary treatise on the need to teach the principles of sound strategy to today’s leaders ... a kind of meta-textbook, an account of how his instruction of successive generations of military officers can in turn train us to think strategically ... Gaddis grasps that writing on strategy has to span world literature and popular culture ... It is a book that cares about liberty, choice and a moral compass, that warns against the hubris of an angry Bonaparte on the turn in a Russian winter, against leaders who do not listen or learn. A training manual for our troubled times.
Gaddis renders nuanced verdicts on an eclectic cohort of thinkers, writers, monarchs and conquerers, including Machiavelli, Carl von Clausewitz, Cicero, the Roman Empire of Mark Antony and Caius Julius Caesar Octavianus, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, the Oxford political philosopher Isaiah Berlin, and the Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu, whom the author marginalizes with sly derision for his imprecise generalizations ... Gaddis has indisputably earned the right to plow different fields of historical inquiry, which he does in On Grand Strategy with self-evident glee and peripatetic curiosity ... examples of misapplied strategic ambition and miscalculated military intervention are the most illuminating in the author’s elegantly composed study. They bind ancient and modern history to provide practical guidance to the contemporary strategist.
Ten lively essays proceed in chronological order from King Xerxes’ invasion of Greece to Isaiah Berlin’s thoughts on World War II and the Cold War. In all of them Gaddis keeps pounding — to the point of monotony — the seemingly self-evident: The grand strategist must prune away emotion, ego and conventional wisdom to accept that 'if you seek ends beyond your means, then sooner or later you’ll have to scale back your ends to fit your means' ... The book is as much personal remembrance as strategic reflection, and is chock-full of aphorisms and enigmatic adages ... On Grand Strategy is many things — a thoughtful validation of the liberal arts, an argument for literature over social science, an engaging reflection on university education and some timely advice to Americans that lasting victory comes from winning what you can rather than all that you want.
Unlike its storied predecessor [Makers of Modern Strategy], Mr. Gaddis’s book has the advantage of being a long walk with a single, delightful mind, which makes it much easier for the reader to comprehend the lessons that cohere across continents and millennia ... On Grand Strategy is not a perfect book. It gives short shrift to the Eastern tradition, with only a brief nod to Sun Tzu, whose writings emphasize indirect rather than direct conflict...And the book doesn’t adequately examine the impact of the nuclear revolution on military strategy ... At a time when conventional war with China, Russia, North Korea and Iran are all very real possibilities, On Grand Strategy is a book that should be read by every American leader or would-be leader.
The author returns often to Tolstoy and Carl von Clausewitz, both of whom respect theory and practice 'without enslaving themselves to either.' Abstraction and specificity 'reinforce each other, but never in predetermined proportions.' Both writers, Gaddis argues, considered the contradictions and irony of history with 'the amplitude, imagination, and honesty' that makes them 'the grandest of strategists.' A lively, erudite study of the past in service of the future.
...a fine summary of the complex concepts explored in his Grand Strategy seminar, full of vivid examples of leadership and strategic thinking ... Gaddis brings a deep knowledge of history and a pleasingly economical prose style to this rigorous study of leadership.
