John Lewis Gaddis, "On Grand Strategy"

you know one of the better-known and hardest to get into courses at Yale is a year-long seminar called studies and grand strategy relying on classical texts and historical case studies the class explore strategic thinking which essentially is how to achieve large ends with limited means whether in military conflict foreign policy domestic politics or social movements John Lewis Gaddis has been co-teaching this course for about a decade and a half and he taught a somewhat related course called strategy and policy at the Naval War College in the mid-1970s these days he brings to the subject a lifetime's worth of academic study as one of the preeminent diplomatic historians of our time his specialty of course is the Cold War in fact six of his past ten books have the words cold war in the title and his last book a biography of George Kennan famous for advocating a policy of containment of Soviet expansion during the Cold War won the 2012 pew litter prize in biography now in his new book on grand strategy professor Gaddis helpfully distills into a single volume some of the teachings of the Yale course while analyzing the processes and complexities involved in devising grand strategies as he says in the preface the book is a quote informal impressionistic and wholly idiosyncratic treatment of strategy in world history it consists of 10 essays arranged in chronological order from King Jersey's invasion of Greece to Isaiah Berlin's thoughts on world war 2 and the Cold War with discussions in between of facilities st. Augustine Machiavelli Elizabeth the first Klaus wits told story Lincoln Wilson and FDR to name just a few but mixed in with the historical analyses references to literature and reflections on strategy or number professor Gatos his own reminiscences and the observations of his students over the years giving the work a very personal touch so ladies and gentlemen please join me in welcoming John Lewis Gaddis well thank you so much and I really will try to give equal time to both sides of the audience I feel like this is some kind of a 90 degree lecture or something but it's great to be back at politics and prose and great to be back in the new digs of politics and prose which are certainly new to me and it certainly seems to be a lively part of town from what Toni and I have seen walking up and down the sidewalk so I thought I would just say a few words not too many about how this book came to be what I hope this book might achieve and leave room for your questions which are always really the most interesting part of discussions like this but this is a curious almost accidental book in the sense that when I finished the kenan book which i had worked on some of you may know for 30 years because that's how long that was in the works it was always intended to be a posthumous biography but neither George nor I realized that he would live it to be a hundred and one and so that was a surprise to both of us and it stretched out the length of that project so after that book came out and did reasonably well I figured that's a good place to stop that's book number ten that's enough a lot of these titles have had Cold War in the title right what is their new to say about that probably not very much and so people will come up and say what's the next book going to be and I said there isn't gonna be one I'm gonna stop while I'm ahead yeah and then they would say but you can't do that and enough people said but you can't do that they didn't explain why I couldn't do it but they just said you can't do that that I decided I at least had to come up with a good cover story so I would say okay just for you I will do a book on foxes and hedgehogs and I was not serious it was a cover story but then when I said this the more the foxes and hedgehogs started rumbling around in my imagination and I became somewhat transfixed by these critters actually and began looking into some of the history of that idea which of course does go back to the ancient Greeks to our Killick us of Pharaohs who said in what is only a fragment that survives that the Fox knows many things and the Hedgehog knows one big thing and that's all he said or that's all that survives so we don't know what he meant well we do know that many years later Isaiah Berlin then a young Oxford Don went to a party in Oxford 1939 and he loved parties and proposed a party game he had heard about the Fox Hedgehog distinction and he said let's have fun let's divide great writers into foxes and hedgehogs and so I mean he had obviously Shakespeare was a fox Dostoyevsky was a fierce Hedgehog and so on and so forth you know so and then he took up the story again and wrote an essay about it after the war 1953 which was called the hedgehog in the Fox but it was about Tolstoy and his point about Tolstoy was that Tolstoy could never make up his mind whether he wanted to be a fox or a hedgehog and therefore Tolstoy went through life tortured and died in obscurity all of this you know tragic end because he could not decide which he wanted to be I don't agree with any of that I think Tolstoy is much more complicated than that but I got interested in Berlin's distinction and I'm not the only one because when he wrote that article which came out in 1953 it went viral not by means that we're familiar with it went viral through the old-fashioned way of just people reading the article and talking about it but the Fox and the Hedgehog really became iconic fairly quickly and people started arguing are you a fox are you a hedgehog which should I be students were asking their professors professors were asking their students and the whole thing was getting somewhat out of hand much the amusement of Isaiah Berlin who I got to know slightly when I was in Oxford as Harmsworth professor back in 1992 he found this funny that this thing had taken off to the extent that it did and when asked late in life which he was in which any intelligent reasonable person should be he admitted to being having the proclivities of a fox over a hedgehog but also said why not both why can't people be both in the zone because it's important to know many things yes but it's also important to have a focus yes so that you're not distracted and dithering away chasing many things you have a larger purpose in life but on the other hand if all you do is pursue the larger purpose in life you may miss what's going on around you the classic expression of this sentiment actually in my opinion took place in Steven Spielberg's great movie Lincoln in 2012 you may remember the scene where Daniel day-lewis is being upgraded as playing Lincoln by Tommy Lee Jones who's playing fattiest Stevens and Lincoln is being upgraded for making so many compromises to get the 13th amendment abolishing slavery through the House of Representatives and Stephens says mr. president how can you in pursuit of such a noble aim use such ignoble methods to get there bribery lying deception stealing pretty much everything short of murder and Lincoln in what is as far as I can tell just a fake scene that was made up for the movie but it's true to life Lincoln drew himself up and talked about reminisced about his days as a Surveyor it was very useful in those days to have a compass because a compass would tell you where true north was but if all he had done was to follow the compass just look at the compass he would have wound up in a swamp or fallen off a cliff or been stranded in the desert so Lincoln is quoted in this movie saying you have to be both things you have to have some larger objective in life but you have to maintain situational awareness as to what is around you and that made great good sense to me so much so that when Tony and I saw the movie that's Tony back there in the in the red conspicuous conspicuous when Tony and I saw the movie I whispered to her I feel like I say about Larry Berlin is sitting on the next you know next to me and that he likes this and he says this is yeah this is the way it should be so I got interested in this whole issue of how can you be both that seemed to make sense compounding this was a cryptic comment a cryptic quotation that one of my yoga and strategy colleagues has been plaguing the seminar with for many years my colleague Charlie Hill is fond at difficult moments in the seminar a fond of drawing back and saying portentously as f scott Fitzgerald once wrote the sign of her first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold opposing ideas in the mind at the same time while retaining the ability to function and then that's all he says Charlie give us no further explanation the students almost go nuts about that but professor Hill what does this mean you know and Charlie's prophets hurry old colleagues Charlie what does this mean you know he won't tell us this has been going on for years this game so I decided that would be an interesting thing to take on as well and maybe I could relate it to the Fox Hedgehog thing because maybe the two opposing ideas held in mind simultaneous were the idea of knowing one big thing while at the same time knowing a lot of little things would it be possible for somebody to do that is that actually feasible in everyday life and then in thinking about this in the class that we teach and in watching our own students when the end of the class came and they started walking out the door the first thing I've noticed that they were doing was pulling out their cell phones if they're not biologically attached in the first place to their hand as I've often suspected to this pull out their cell phones and they're reading their texts and they're texting them you know all of us and still they're walking down the hall and still they're not running into anything they're not running into each other they're not running into their professors they're maintaining situational awareness while they are thinking about some big issue that is being presented to them by text is it and I thought if students can do this it's it's quite amazing why can't run ups do it and why can't 'national leaders do it and why is this quality of being both so rare at high levels as it is I thought that this was a very very interesting problem that to my mind at least no one had taken on so I think this was yet another reason for pursuing this project how could this be done how could you maintain both kinds of awareness I did some research on this and found that there had been a significant study a classic social science experiment done by the then Berkeley professor Phil tetlock on prediction accuracy in prediction and tetlock back in the 1980s had got together a group of something like 285 public intellectuals and got them to agree that he could track the predictions that they made on major issues and he could follow those predictions and then he could have an independent evaluating group judged the accuracy of these predictions and he could rate each of the to an 82 the 285 professors on the accuracy of their predictions and then by doing comparisons of who they were could actually come out with an explanation for why accuracy is easily more easily achieved by some people than by others and so he did this he studied and in something like 27,000 different predictions I found no correlation that seemed to make any sense at all running differences in political affiliation ethnicity background gender all of this none of it made any difference at all except for one thing that Locke had thrown into the questionnaire this question do you self-identify as a fox or a hedgehog and he had berlin's definitions of these terms and it was quite astounding the ones who had said they considered themselves foxes had a far better prediction record than the ones who considered themselves hedgehogs in fact the prediction record of the hedgehogs was so bad that a dart throwing chimpanzee could have done better tetlock concluded so this was a very intriguing it was an unexpected finding in social science of major significance and tetlock speculated as to why this is why our Fox is better at prediction than hedgehogs and concluded that it has to do with presentation when a fox gets up and is addressing a group of people or appears on television or is trying to do an interview somewhere the Fox will generally keep qualifying things the the Fox knows so many different things that are relevant to this question at hand that he will say something like well on the one hand this and then on the other hand that and on the third hand that and so on you know that pattern hedgehogs on the other hand knowing one big thing we're very good at having one big focus in there television appearances are on their PowerPoint slides or whatnot hedgehogs could do TED talks foxes were hopeless at TED talks and so this was fly this was the paradox hedgehogs were less accurate in prediction than foxes but hedgehogs rose more rapidly in organisations in bureaucracies than foxes did and so the world is Ted Locke concluded to oversimplify ruled by hedgehogs who have the predictive accuracy of a dart throwing chimpanzee now how did we get from my super sophisticated students who managed both of these things at the same time completely natural in without having to think of it how did we get to these leaders of our civilisation country and culture who are so out of touch with reality that they cannot do any better than chimpanzees this was a really interesting question which like shout by simply saying it was the presentation skills it was the ability to present the information in short compass not to qualify it and so on and this was a commentary on our age on the way that our media work in these days and age but I got curious as to whether this pattern holds up historically and so I thought it would be interesting to go back through the classics that we teach in the course and apply those plastics to this question why are hedgehogs less adept at prediction than foxes are in fact is that generalization accurate throughout history and so that's where the book really came from it's got a complicated series of origins but it was I can tell you quite a lot of fun to write so the first case and one of the best cases I think comes out of Herodotus who describes the beginning of the Persian invasion of Greece in 480 BC and Xerxes the Persian king of kings has actually built two bridges across the Hellespont pontoon bridges and has amassed an army of about a million men on the Asian side and they are all just about ready to cross over in this great scene that Herodotus describes when Xerxes uncle his advisor art de baños tugs at the sleeve of the King of Kings and says sire are you really sure you want to do this invade Greece you know and he goes on to point out that the supply lines are going to get overstretched it's a long way to Athens the climate is not in every case propitious winter is coming on in that will affect of weather in the Aegean there will not be enough food to sustain an army of that size the Greeks are themselves fierce fighters and all of these things are possible so sire before you do anything you must think of everything and then as Herodotus tells the story Xerxes draws himself up in a regal manner and says art upon us if I took the time to think of everything I would never do anything and so the invasion proceeds however it does outrun supply lines the armies found that they were drinking rivers dry before the last units of the army had actually crossed the rivers even they were running out of food to supply the armies one thing that had not been expected was that there were lions in the mountains of Macedonia at that time and the Lions developed a taste for the camels that were in the supply train so the camels would get eaten by lions and so there was a whole series of problems that came down did not prevent the Persians from ultimately wiping out the Spartan 300 at Thermopylae and from taking the the capital of athens and burning the Acropolis but then what do you do so you take Athens so you burn the Acropolis the Athenians had fled you have an empty capital it's burned out what do you do next there is no plan it's like Napoleon and Moscow in 1812 it's like what we used to discuss at the Naval War College the dog and car syndrome dogs frequently chase cars but rarely know what to do with the car when they catch one so it was something like that and so this became a classic case of the planned rational leader determinately pursuing a fixed of Jeopardy running into unexpected realities as former Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld said there are known unknowns and there are unknown unknowns and he was certainly right and that distinction certainly bears and holds up in this particular case the biggest unexpected unknown was that the Delphic Oracle prophesized an Athenian victory the Athenians would have victory by relying on wooden walls and the Athenians very creatively interpreted this to mean their tribe reims their ships and in fact this is where the great naval battle took place in the Bay of Salamis just outside Athens and Persians against the Athenians the only problem here was that the Persians had not tucked their sailors how to swim and so when the first ships went down a panic ensued and that's when the Persians were wiped out so what you've got here is an intersection of contingency with planning in these situations now what comes out of it it seems to me is that both sides were right Xerxes was right you can't possibly think of everything it's going to happen but our table honest was right - you must think of at least some things that are going to happen and you must build into the process a certain resiliency for coping so I got to thinking are there other examples in the past that seemed to fit this pattern and I persuaded myself at least that they're there quite a number the athenians in the Peloponnesian War are going to Sicily the Romans going into the tooten burg forest under Augustus Philip the second going up the English Channel with the Spanish Armada the British thinking that they could occupy America with an army that had to be supplied over 3,000 miles of ocean certainly the Napoleon himself going to Moscow certainly Hitler later also going to Moscow certainly the Japanese in attacking Pearl Harbor and not calculating what the effects of that you can go on and on and on history is full of examples like this of that kind of thinking not taking place and so the question simply for me was how can you somehow teach this subject how can you somehow encourage this kind of thinking how can you somehow encourage the holding in the mind of these two opposing ideas the big idea which is the Hedgehog idea and all the little ideas that are going to surround it which is what the Fox encounters how can you possibly do it and I thought well if the solution to the initial problem can it be done lay in just watching my students as they walked out of class with their iPhones maybe I can learn something else from what my students do you know some one thing they do of course every afternoon many of them is to go out and do sports do atletic s-- and these are increasingly popular and when they do it they of course have a coach and the coach can be fierce the coast coach can be a disciplinarian the coach in some ways is the current replacement for military drill in instructors back when military service was mandatory and the whole idea is to train train train and teach the lore of the game teach the nature of the discipline enforce order bill strength a show how to recover from failure all of these things are things that coaches do and we all see them do this and we know that this is extremely important however once the game gets underway the coach cannot do anything except shout or sulk from the sidelines and maybe tear up a chair or something like that and that's about it the players are on their own and they have to make split-second decisions and it does seem to me that military operations are like that you'll find in Clausewitz is great classic on war a extremely clear illustrations of this principle the value of training on the one hand but the willingness when the come when the the the combat starts if necessary to throw the training straight out the window because the reality is never going to be exactly what you trained for and you must have the resilience to cope with both you see and it seems to me that this is not an impossible idea to get across to students because in their own lives they're doing this kind of thing as well is it a guide to statecraft I think others will have to decide questions like that all I tried to do in this book is to show that the holding of opposing ideas in the mind at the same time while functioning is not impossible to show that it has been not in the past to show that where it has not been done disaster has often resulted but to show also that it's very much an everyday activity and why can't we incorporate everyday activities into higher levels of activity isn't it just common sense that you would try to hold both ideas in the mind at the same time in order to function but if that's true then why is common sense uncommon beyond a certain point and I concluded in the book that it's like oxygen common sense higher you go the thinner it gets and this then ties with the people who rise but somehow someway lose that common sense that people in everyday life sometime maintain if there's any lesson from this book that I hope will be taken away from it I hope it's that that leadership does involve retaining many of the qualities of common sense that operate at what we would consider every to be everyday levels but rarely get translated up to the upper reaches of bureaucracy I found a few people whose conduct of leadership at the upper reaches seemed to preserve the principle so for example Octavian Augustus through most of his long life certainly Queen Elizabeth the first certainly Lincoln no question about that and certainly FDR who I think is still to this day I'm unacknowledged grand strategic genius for his ability to remain focused even as he gave the appearance of complete confusion and chaos even to his closest subordinates but most of the time leadership falls short of this principle and what I hope to leave my students with is some sense that they will remember Henry Kissinger's old premise that the intellectual capital did you bring to positions of responsibility is what you have accumulated long before you've had the responsibility so I think that puts an obligation on those of us who are building the capital the intellectual capital that our students will carry away from us to build it in in the right way and to my mind the most valuable way a way which is I think in some ways really quite at risk now is the study of the liberal arts and reliance on the classics which convey these messages so much more drama and so much more precisely and so much more accurately then simply uh Nana litical historical narratives on one hand or unrealistic theoretical structures on the other hand so this is why we've circled back to the classics this is why the classics doing that course at Newport years ago was a valuable to me and this is why one of the things I want to leave behind is some sense of what the urgency is of continuing to teach the classics in this way because it does seem to me that for the reasons I've mentioned they give greater weight greater amplitude greater capital to young people who will later find ways to use it in their own lives very much as when I was a young person I was crash absorbing facilities at the Naval War College but it has never left me and I never will Thanks this has been a dilemma this this definition of as Phil tetlock and as you have just explicate 'add because I in Phil type Phil tetlock has maintained that it's the the the Fox is a kind of a intellectual scavenger and that it's the Hedgehog's that are the idea makers and I disagree with that characterization vehemently because the first of all the last 30 40 years was the was the big idea it was a era of big ideas which I think has has waned within the last 15 20 years and so I I have proposed that in some case that is really the Foxes that are the idea generators are some subsets of them subsets of foxes okay who are more creative and imaginative and it's the hedgehogs that borrow from them and then expand them in the universities what do you think I don't want to give the metaphor too much weight because I think too complicated his imposes significance on it that go beyond perhaps what isaiah berlin himself suggested i do know that professor tetlock has continued his studies and he has actually done a new book on foxes that are good predictors he calls them super forecasters but they turn out to be average individuals they turn out to be not public intellectuals not experts they turn out to be taxi drivers and uber drivers and people who from everyday life simply have somehow intuited the ability that when phil gives them some problem to predict or some issue to predict their track record comes out better than the experts do so again I think it kind of reinforces my sense that somehow down at this level of everyday life there is a common sense that survives we all function within but somehow as we rise in eminence we lose this I don't know whether it's because we see more people watching us we've become self-conscious I don't know whether it's because there's more of a tendency to defend your own ideas and stick to them I don't know whether it's the media I don't know that's for somebody else to work on but I thought it was a fascinating observation and I do think that there's a historical background for it and that's really about as far as I want to go but I I recommend that likes new book which is called super forecasting to you it's a fascinating read for sure hi Thank You professor I have two related questions one is based upon your research on the history of the Cold War do you think we are in the cold war with Russia and China this moment and my second related question is do you think this administration has a grand strategy of restarting a cold war with Russia and China or other rivalries thank you I have made a new year's resolution it still is applying this and that is I'm going to try to stay away from saying anything about the Cold War or having said too much about it already and for fear of not having anything new to say and for the realization there are plenty of people out there who can discuss the Cold War knowledgeably many of them are my students and I am reluctant to get into these questions about the the Cold War just for that for that reason so I will just say that in answer to your question there have been many kinds of Cold War's in the past and the one that had capital letters is not greatly different from others that have been there in the past and no doubt will be in the future these are rivalries that did not automatically escalate tour and on trying to explain the grand strategy of the current administration I will just pass thank you very much for being here today and thank you very much for your words in on grand strategy one thing that I found particularly interesting and read to read about was the Union seizure of the RMS Trent in November 1861 what would you say were some of the most significant long-term effects the effects that that had that have I did read that Lincoln that President Lincoln wanted to avoid conflict with wanted to avoid conflict with Britain and Ferrand articulated that by saying one war at a time yes well the incident for those of you don't know it is the seizure of two Confederate diplomats who were on a British ship going to Europe one to represent the Confederacy in London and the other in Paris and this ship was intercepted by the u.s. Navy captain Wilkes somewhere off the American East Coast the two des plants were interned and the original sense was that they could be charged that this was a great victory for the Union however the British made it very clear that they frowned on having Her Majesty's ships stopped by anybody and as time went on Lincoln himself came to realize that this was not in the American interest in fact the Americans had protested what was called the policy of impressment taking Americans off of British ships as it was one of the causes of the war of 1812 and it was an issue even back in the American Revolution so what Lincoln did was just change his mind and do so very gracefully citing international law as the reason for changing is that's a great thing about international law you can cite it in any number of different directions but he was citing it in this case to that as being the justification for this and it's generally thought that this was a very clever maneuver by Lincoln which did keep his eye on the main thing the big issue which was to hold the Union together not to get into wars with other countries so I don't think this is any great debate about this I think historians generally regard it that way and it's one of many illustrations of Lincoln's leadership which I think was astoundingly good in that conflict thank you this fascinating presentation a very different question all the sciences Natural Sciences Social Sciences deal with the problem extracting signal from noise yes so on could you relate your take on the extent to which the efforts in the sciences can be have parallels in the kind of history that you stutter well of course are all kinds of parallels because that distinction between signals and noise is the the standard way that we understand the intelligence failure at Pearl Harbor and this is Roberta wolf stutters classic 1962 book on that subject which then can be applied very easily and has been applied to other big intelligence failures like 9/11 or like weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and and so on and the issue is simply you get overwhelmed by information the problem in intelligence is generally having too much information not too little so that you don't know what you're looking for your ability to pick out the needle in the haystack is compromised because there's so many and the haystack is so big so that is a standard problem in intelligence and we do teach that we teach it try to teach it very carefully we want to be sure that our students are aware of this a lot of people very easily jump to conclusions that these things must have been conspiracies of one kind or another but I think that's less often the case then it is just this confusion of signals and noise that was that are talked about in that way so I would say that concept which goes all the way back to the very early days of electronics and radio and one is still very useful in how historians deal with intelligence failures now other questions yes please hi I've not read the book I just read one of the reviews of it so you you analyze l-pad places in history is there is there anything that one can take from what one learns in the book and and and do something with it today today yeah can you take lessons learned or yeah I hope you can take lessons learned but I would not claim that you have to apply them today I'm really much more interested and we have always been much more interested in our course in thinking of it in terms of long-term investment we have never tried to convince ourselves that the students we teach will have any immediate effect on policy or that policy will change as a result of the course that we are teaching or that somehow Washington will suddenly call us up and say ah we've been following your course in Haven we've seen like we will change everything and do what you say that's not going to happen you know but we do think that we can put ideas in students minds we do i I do think that we can actually teach them some way of thinking perhaps teach them how to think about these issues while they are still impressionable while we still have their attention while they still will take our phone calls which they won't later on and our cat because will be dead or whatever but you the this is the time to teach them something and I think if we think of it as skills very much in the way that you would teach athletics gilts which in some ways never quite leave you once you know what they are they're with you very much for your life something like that if we can teach intellectual skills in this way then I think we've earned our pay by doing that and I think particularly if we can do it by way of the classics I think I would make a tetlock like prediction that the lessons that we are conveying will prove to be more durable and more useful there is some reason for why the classics are classics there is some reason for why people of different cultures different locations in different ages still keep coming back to these old books and there's something that's transferable across time and space in classics that is it seems to me is not transferable just in routine historical narratives or in complicated mathematically based social science theories which so they deserve respect they deserve their place in the curriculum for sure and I think that I found worried very deeply about the tendency increasingly to be crowding the liberal arts out of the undergraduate curriculum which is partly pressure from administrators in universities but more often pressure from parents we're saying why aren't you studying something useful like finance why are you a why are you learning why are you doing Shakespeare toning of times this Toni teaches acting at Yale and she finds this as well so this is something that we have to stick up for it seems to me and I think it builds well-rounded personalities I think it's like it's kind of an electoral conditioning which is like a physical condition and it's it's something that will be useful in ways that cannot be specified at this point but it will be just at your thought I know you talked about hedgehogs and foxes has been leaders developing but what are your thoughts and intentional bad actors we have Alex Jones who's trying to create fake information for people I'm sorry start oh I'm sorry I apologize hedgehogs and foxes as leaders developing structures work on grander strategy but nowadays we have a situation of intentional bad actors we have Scott Pruett and the CPAs not there to make it work well or you have people like Alex Jones intentionally giving false information to deceive Americans so I just want to get to the thoughts that I was not gonna come in on the trumpet I know but I mean ignore them Intel but there are bad actors and mutters they're always bad actors nothing new about that but the and working around these people and in some cases or some cases what appear to be bad actors actually turn out to be challenging things that need to be challenged so I think we do have to keep some open-mindedness as well I'm not making any claims about mr. Pruitt but I'm just saying that this is something we need to not jump to conclusions on that's what I think I would say on this but part of what I think is critically important to do right now is not to be so carried away with current events that this is all that you're doing this is all that young people are learning it breeds cynicism it breeds a sense of futility it I think simply I think it's unhealthy and this is again why it seems to me it is psychologically stabilizing to go back to earlier periods Machiavelli in the prince writes at the end of it about how he spent his day and he would spend his day supervising the chopping of wood on his woodlot and he would sell it he was an early capitalist for sure but at the end of the day he would take off his muddy clothes and he would put on fine robes and he would spend the evening communing with the great classical texts of the past and it's a wonderfully lyrical passage about how you combine these both things how you combine the demands of daily life with at the same time taking refuge as in some portion of the day in some other time and place and drawing solace and insight from that spirit it seems to me is very important for us to try to preserve or regain or teach those kids who have not yet mastered it for sure so these are the kinds of things we're trying to do hi yes I'm a student at Georgetown University getting my masters in arts and Liberal Studies I'm writing a very long paper right now my final called Iraq Vietnam 2.0 I was hoping you might have any insight on the similarities no sorry can I quote you on that yes the great development economist Albert Hirschman has a concept called the hiding hand as distinct from the all-knowing invisible hand and he developed this concept by studying large infrastructure projects that people undertake in developing countries or elsewhere and they encounter huge problems midway through that had they known about them in the beginning they would never have undertaken the project but encountering them midway through they figure out a solution and it strikes me that the Hedgehog is the visionary who conceives of the project and gets everybody else to go along with it like Xerxes and the Fox the Fox is more sensitive to what's there figures out I think it's critical and one of the things that I think is extremely important is the study of national cultures and in national cultures I think somehow in the wake of the end of the Cold War and the whole Fukuyama end of history movement in the globalization movement of like 20 years ago now the it became politically incorrect in universities to study national cultures or even to talk about national cultural differences and I think that's a great loss because there is no way that these ancient cultures whether they are Chinese or whether they are Russian or whatever they may be whether they're Persian are going to go away they themselves in some ways are classics because they have lasted for so long so it's unrealistic to expect that everybody is going to become like everybody else and I think greater sensitivity to national cultures is just the equivalent of what you're talking about a greater sensitivity to the terrain that you're building on before you begin to build you need to know the ground and I think where you're sadly deficient in that I hope we'll come back to it all right what else professor what if you comment on how you came to be a historian and I understand he started out as a library scientist or something that's correct where'd you learn that all right no I do not hold out my undergraduate career as a model for planning for young people because I was first all a victim of Sputnik in the sense coming from very small town in Texas a victim of Sputnik so my parents were convinced that I had to be you know science and engineering was the only thing you know I was shipped off to Rice University which was totally beyond me and in effect flunked out of it and then had to transfer to the University of Texas having tried several other things and they were adamant you're not going to stay in this little town you're not going to take up ranching you're not going to take over the drugstore all of that so that was precluded and so my mom did say at one point well maybe you could become a librarian she was the high school librarian you know and so thinking there was nothing better to do I started in on that track but fortunately at the University of Texas you could not major in that it was only a minor he had to pick a major in something so I picked history which I'd always liked and so I took some history courses and I was blessed with a professor who at my senior a year I think first semester my senior year called me into his office it would never have occurred to me otherwise to come in and work near his office we did not have a culture of visiting professors in their offices back then he called me into his office and said that this paper that you have just written for me could be published and I was totally flabbergasted and astonished it was on the Muscovy company in Elizabethan England it had nothing to do with what I later did but it had everything to do with causing me at the very last moment to jump the library science and just stay in the history program at Texas at that point it was too late to apply for anywhere else and besides being Texans we wouldn't have thought of applying to anyplace else so that's where I went through I'm perfectly happy with where I went to school I think I've benefited a lot in fact in the 60s from not being on the East Coast and the west coast less places were crazy in the 1960s scene and so we were a lot more calm and rational in Texas and those says Tony who's making faces at me back there so that turned out to be the that turned out to be the niche that turned out to be what I was good at but it took me a long time to figure that out and I tell my students to try to figure it out earlier than I did in that in that regard and I hope they do but I have no assurance that they that they will but it certainly is important to find something that you're good at but it's equally important to find something that you love doing and the two things go with each other you won't be good at things you don't love doing it seemed to me so these two things very much go together and I try to make this very clear to the students we have time for one more question if anybody has anything else all right well thank you very much everyone for coming out [Applause] you

Channel: Politics and Prose

Views: 14,264

Rating: 4.8441558 out of 5

Keywords: John Lewid Gaddis, On Grand Strategy, Foxes and Hedgehogs, Fox and Hedgehog, Fox and Hedgehog parable, Fox and hedgehog good to great, Yale, Isiah Berlin, Phillip E. Tetblock, Phillip Tetlock, John Gaddis, Xerxes, Leadership, strategy, common sense, Abraham Lincoln, Pulitzer prize, history, historian, Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy, Cold War, Politics and Prose, Washington DC, book, author, book talk, author talk, John Lewis Gaddis lecture, lecture

Id: -7MH8PEGtl0

Length: 52min 51sec (3171 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 26 2018