School of War - Ep 71: John Gaddis on Strategy (New Makers of Modern Strategy #1)

Episode Date: May 2, 2023

John Gaddis, Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military & Naval History at Yale University and a contributor to New Makers of Modern Strategy, joins the show to talk about the foundations of strategic thought. ▪️ Times  • 02:01 Introduction  • 02:42 Makers of Modern Strategy  • 05:21 Democracy and strategy  • 07:42 Do authoritarians do strategy better? • 10:32 A guide for future action • 14:19 Grammar and logic • 17:42 Ecological sensitivity • 21:00 Maintain credibility  • 23:25 NSC-68 • 28:04 Reactions   • 32:18 Self-correction • 37:12 Tolerating contradictions  • 41:29 Robert Kagan • 42:43 Intellectual humility Follow along on Instagram

In 1943, a collection of scholarship on strategy was published under the name, makers of modern strategy, military thought from Machiavelli to Hitler. It was edited by a man named Edward Mead Earl of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, and it took on as its project the education of American democracy in a subject that seemed at that moment to be a struggle for democracies around the world, the successful conduct of war, as explored through essays on the classic theoreticians of military struggle, and to a more limited extent, its practitioners. A second, almost entirely new edition, came out in the 1980s, updating the project for the Cold War and the nuclear age.

And now, today, in fact, a third edition has appeared, edited by a friend of this podcast, John's Hopkins, Hal Brands, which promises to advance the same goal, beginning with Machiavelli and reasoning through to the digital age. Throughout this spring and summer, we are going to do a series of episodes here on School of War, going deep with different contributors to the volume on their chapters. And today is the first installment. We welcome the great John Gattis, George Kennan's biographer, author of Strategies of Containment and other important Cold War histories, and a longtime leader of Yale's famous program in Grand Strategy, to discuss strategy itself and the institution that makers of modern strategy has become. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infinite. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a statement. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean.

Thanks for joining School of War. I'm delighted today to be joined by John Gattis. He is the Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale University. And he is a contributor to the new makers of, Modern Strategy. John, thank you so much for joining the show. Thank you, Aaron. It's good to be here. Today is the publication date for Newmakers of Modern Strategy. And this is going to be the first

actually of a number of episodes we are going to spin off talking to different contributors to the volume. You contributed the sort of closing essay, a survey of the contents of the volume, some of your thoughts on strategy more broadly, sort of a reflection on the institution of this book, which is the third, third of its name, if you will. And I thought maybe we could start there. What is this book? What does it seek to achieve and talk a bit about the first film is published during the Second World War, right?

The second edition during the Cold War and now this. So if you don't mind, just kind of walk us through what we're talking about here. Well, the first edition, which was 1943, I think, was a joint enterprise of Princeton and some other universities. It gathered together, I think, only about 13 or 15. Dean professors to talk about how the war had come and what the results of the war were likely to be. But it was notable for its grand strategic perspectives. So it respected classical texts and what classics had to do with current events from the very beginning.

So that drift, that angle in makers of modern strategy has always been there. So that was a hugely influential book at the time, both in the war itself and in the early post-war period. It was influential when I came on the scene in the 1970s to begin working on Cold War history. The second volume came out at the end of the Cold War in 1987. It was twice the size of the first volume, and it really was an effort to try to summarize what the Cold War had meant up to that point, but without knowing that it was about to end. The third volume, by far the biggest and the heaviest of all of these with some 44 contributors is certainly a product of the end of the post-Cold War era. If you think about it, this last period that we have gone through in

world history, beginning with the end of the Cold War and ending with the invasion of Ukraine, which I think is a huge turning point last year. That's a 31-year period. We still call it the post-Cold War era. I think we need a better name for it. And I'm hoping that, at this volume with all of its distinguished contributors will provide that kind of vision so that we can begin to back off and see it as a whole. But without losing track of the historical perspective, going all the way back to the ancients, that is so valuable in studying Grand Strategy. So that's what this is all about. How Brands was heroic in putting this together. It was a huge job. And it was a privilege to write the concluding chapter.

If you think about 1943 with totalitarians running amok across Eurasia, democracy very much in a defensive crouch, sort of you can draw not perfect, but some parallels to today, is there something about this project, again, speaking to makers of modern strategy as a kind of cohesive entity that's to do with teaching strategy to a democracy? And is there something odd or difficult about that enterprise if so? I think there is. Back in 1943, of course, the audios for this book was very limited. It was primarily decision makers in the war itself.

It was not widely circulated. But the sense was that even in the middle of a great war, it was important to have a sense of what other great wars had involved, what failures and successes had been there, because as early as 1943, many people, were seriously thinking about the post-war period, how to build that post-war world order. And makers of modern strategy was hugely influential in that regard. The audience has widened since then, and so this one is intended, as was the previous one. For a mass audience, it's intended for

university use. It's intended for students in war colleges and elsewhere. It's intended for anybody with the fortitude to wade through the whole thing, which is like 1,200 pages. You have to be a weightlifter to pick this up and hold it, but nonetheless, it's an impressive product. And the fact that it's gotten bigger over the years, I think, is a sign in itself, a kind of democratization of the discussion on grand strategy. So it's no longer confined just to elite groups, just to white males, just to distinguished elite professors at prestigious universities. but it's a much wider dialogue that's taking place intended for a wider audience for sure. Just sticking with this theme for a second, I've heard the argument made, Henry Kissinger kind of points at this argument in his most recent book on leadership,

that there does seem to be something of a strategy deficit in the present day on the part of the free world, if you'll allow the expression, and that they're, you know, granted, this is a point that have made prior to the invasion of Ukraine, which does seem to have been a strategic blunder on Putin's part. But if we go back to the day before that invasion, you could see making a very straightforward argument that there's something about Putin's Russia and Xi's China. They're just better, they're somehow better at geopolitics and strategy and whatever you want, whatever word you want to use. And there's something about democracies that are just reactive and they're catching up. Is that, is that necessarily the case? Is there something about strategy that's hard for democracies

and easier for authoritarian? Or help us understand that? Well, with all due respect for Professor Kissinger, and so dear friend, I think there's always been a strategic deficit. I can see a strategic deficit back when the Persians invaded Greece in 480 BC and wound up getting creamed in the Battle of Salamis. I can see a strategic deficit in Thucydides

and the great failures that he wrote about. It seems to me there have always been shortcomings. There have always been makers of war. who did not understand fully the circumstances of war or the accidents of war. And so that deficit, I think, is nothing new. It's always been there. I certainly would have been one who years ago would have started from the premise that authoritarian's do strategy better than democracies do.

But the evidence has persuaded me otherwise. I really don't think that's true, particularly in the light of the experience of the Cold War itself. One of the things I stress in this article is the unexpectedness of the persistence of the idea of containment, the strategy of containment, for some four and a half decades in unruly democracies, where if you look at the Soviet Union, as Sergei Rajenko does in his article, he sees no consistent pattern. He sees a great deal of experimentation, fumbling, and inconsistency. Certainly we see a lot of that in China as well during the cold. war. And I think the fundamental difference, Aaron, is simply this. Authoritarians don't have feedback mechanisms, don't have the same feedback mechanisms that democracies do. Authoritarian is authoritarian is authoritarianes are prone to being told what they want to hear because that's what their subordinates will do, either because they want to rise or because they want to survive. Democracy has feedback mechanisms all over the place. And sometimes that sounds like chaos.

Sometimes it invites disorder for sure. Sometimes it's corrupt. Sometimes it can be creative. But in another sense, it seems to me in the long run, it's profoundly healthy. So I would count on democracies with all of their messiness over the long term to have superior strategic approaches to authoritarian. I want to get into what you write in your chapter more directly and you make an observation that I found to be extraordinarily thought-provoking. about the tension between what you call timefulness versus timelessness when you're talking about the links between history and historical research on the one hand and strategy on the other.

Just tell us, tell us what I take you to mean is something along the lines of when you look at history, there's just so much that happens and so much of it seems kind of random. How could you possibly develop a guide for future action out of that? And yet here we are attempting to do that. Help us understand the tension and how this all works. Well, as Mark Twain was supposed to have said, but probably did not. History may not repeat itself, but it rhymes. And I think that's accurate, whether Mark said it or not.

And Thucydides said something very much like it in his great history, the Peloponnesian War. He said that the future will not reflect the past. It will not be a precise replication of the past, but it will resemble the past in several ways. And it seems to me that's true. have to be very careful about understanding what we mean or what we should mean by resemblance. So if what you mean by that is that you can construct some kind of a predictive machine-like theory of history that's going to tell you what the future of history is going to be, something that great authoritarian, or at least some of them tried to do, I don't think it works

that way. I don't think history is predictive in the same sense that a clock or something, a mechanism is predictive. But if what you mean is, does history widen your own experience by giving you that vicariously giving you access to the experience of others? Yes, it's immensely valuable in that sense. So the very fact that you can go back and study the mistakes of the past is hugely important, it seems to me. So that's my approach. That's how we teach strategy here at Yale. We don't try to build theories, but we do say that if you have had exposure to the great successes and to the great failures of the last 2,500 years, you have a database. You have a range of experience extending well beyond your own, which distills, if it's

done effectively, lessons from the past that you can keep in mind or should keep in mind. So who is to say that someone who has no experience at all is going to be more proficient than someone who's been well trained? Think of athletics. Is a basketball player who's had no training going to prevail over somebody who's at a really good coach over the use? Of course not. But can the coach come out on the court and tell the basketball player how to make every move? No way. That has to be left through the player, it has to be left to the unpredictable of the game. And so, timelessness, it seems to me, is like the rules in athletics. It's like coaching and all that.

It's what you need to know to be proficient in it. Timefulness is just another way of saying accidents will happen. There are unpredictabilities out there. There are things that you will never be able to predict, and you have to be capable of responding to those. but you'll respond better if you know the timeless principles. I'm sorry, that's a time-burdened answer. No, no.

That's right. It's fascinating. It makes me think of Aristotle who I think it's in the poetics. Aristotle makes the observation that poetry is more philosophic in history because everything that happens in poetry needs to happen, whereas in history, I'm obviously paraphrasing here, things just happen. And so in a way, you're asserting that strategy is. is somehow the what it's like the identification of the poetry and history or something like that?

Yeah, that would not be a bad description. Yeah. So speaking of oppositions, we've got timefulness and timelessness. There's another opposition that you identify and you pull from Klaus Fitz and discuss in your essay. And it lends its name, it lends itself to the title of the essay, the grammar and logic of strategy. Talk to us about what this opposition is. What is the grammar of strategy and what is its logic and how does that help us understand how the world works? Well, it relates to this whole issue of theory and practice or principles and adjustments.

Basically, the grammar is the training. The grammar is the rules of whatever it is that you're trying to do. So it may be what the coach is trying to teach you on the athletic playing field. It may be what your drill sergeant is trying to teach you in boot camp and the army or in the Marines. It may be what Goldman is trying to tell you if you go to work for Goldman. what are the rules, what are the expectations of the job, what is the path to success? The only problem is that in each of those things, whether it's finance or athletics, or combat, there are so many uncertainties that sooner or later you would be called upon to make your own judgment about this.

And that's the first is grammar, the second is logic in Klausowitz's terminology. Klausowitz presents a beautiful demonstration of this when he talks about. about a young man going onto a battlefield for the first time. The young man has been trained in all the things that he is supposed to know. And so he's very confident as he goes into the battle. But then guns start firing and a bullet whizzes by and smoke starts rising and somebody next to him gets wounded and whatnot. And the grammar that he has been taught, which is military discipline,

it does not seem quite so logical to them under those circumstances of pressure. And that's where logic comes in. Logic for Klausowitz is simply common sense. So how do you take training on the one hand, which is abstract, time-allowed, all of that? How do you link it to common sense, which is what's happening around you right now, the surprises, the uncertainty, all of that, the risks of it? How do you take these things and balance them? And Klauswitz himself said, this is the essence of strategy. It's that linkage between grammar and logic, between principles or training on the one hand and common sense on the other hand, that create the need for grand strategy. It resides in that interface. Those are his terms. And I think when they're explained, it's just another way of stating this principle of learning from the past. But at the same being situationally aware of what you're confronting at the moment.

Yeah. And thinking about how you're going to get through it. Yeah. No, it's a common criticism of a sort of military type, right, or military stereotype, somebody who is adherent to procedures to a fault. They've got excellent grammar in your scheme of things or claustrismic scheme of things, but no appreciation for logic. Right.

Yeah. You proceed through your chapter and you list a series of elements that are important to the conduct of strategy. and I'd like to go through a few of them with you. And as you go through them, you've sort of very generously make reference to the other scholars contributing to the volume in their own essays. It's actually a wonderful sort of summary of, if you like, the spirit of the book. I couldn't refer to all 44 of them. I wondered if you were keeping track as you went and trying to run up the score.

No, it's actually, it's a wonderful survey. And let me just start with the first one you name, which is ecological sensitivity. Yes. What does that mean to be ecologically sensitive as a strategist? Ecological sensitivity means knowing the playing field, knowing what's going around you. Situational awareness, as the military would refer to it, you can make the environment in which you act an ally, or you can make it your enemy. So it's extraordinarily important to do the first, to make it your ally and to use it to your advantage. San Zhu, the Chinese grand strategist, has this wonderful principle, which at the first time you read it, it sounds like a platitude.

It says something like water runs downhill. And you think, what's profound about that? But then he says, and armies should do the same thing, meaning armies should enlist the forces of gravity as allies and therefore magnify their own power in this regard. And that, I think, is a very, very fundamental principle. Know the environment that you're going into and get it on your side. So maybe that will involve literally implementing the plan that you have. More often, it will involve modifying the plan that you have to take into account the unexpected things you run into.

So just to go back to Xerxes, invading Greece, you know, he built his great bridge of boats across the hell of spot. He moved his great armies in, but he did not adapt to the particular circumstances he faced as he marched through and down the end of the pelop. among which were lions coming out of the mountains eating his camels, which were bearing the food that the troops needed, among which were the size of the army, which was so big that it was drinking rivers dry, if you didn't take into account that, among which was the absence of good harbors around that coastline so that he could not be supplied. We should not have taken a rocket scientist, if there were any in ancient Greece, to come up with those principles.

but Cirque's was so convinced of his own power that he was unable to do that. The Greeks got the environment, the ecology, on their side, and that accounts for their victory, it seems to me. And there are any number of other situations that you can name in which the same thing happened. The Americans in the American Revolution, just pulling the British in, but having infinite room in which to retreat. The Russians doing the same thing when Napoleon invaded Russia in AT. 12 and so on. So that ecological sensitivity, it seems to me, is number one. You have to know the

playing field and you have to get it on your side. I call it really the geostrategic equivalent of a home court advantage. Yeah. So it's hard to imagine, though plenty of people have screwed it up, it's hard to imagine anyone who's given the matter any thought disagreeing with your observation or saying that obviously it would be preferable to, you know, not pay attention to one's environment or surroundings. Your second principle, though, which is that it's important to maintain credibility, seems to me to inspire more controversy, and you point to the controversy in your discussion, that on the one hand, we need to maintain credibility. On the other hand, we have to avoid something that you call credibility creep, as opposed to mission creep. What's going on here? Why do we

need to maintain credibility? Because you're trying to magnify your power in the first place. So you may be trying to throw a defensive umbrella around some country that you pledged to defend. You may be trying to defend your own country. You will probably not be able to cover all of the places for an attack will come, but you have to appear to have done that in order to project your credibility. The United States, through the Cold War and still today, has defensive commitments with some 40 countries around the world. Does that mean we're capable of defending 40 countries around the world all it wants? Of course not.

So somehow you have to convey credibility that you will respond if attacked, even though what you're seeking to defend is much greater than what you can possibly do all at once. So that's why I make the analogy to banking, that banks lend much more money than they have on deposit, on the assumption that their depositors will not suddenly all come in at the same time and want their money back. But when that happens, bank fail. And when that happens to countries, countries fail, it seems to me. So the question is, how do you maintain credibility in that kind of a situation? How do you take advantage of the ability to project influence without dissipating power?

And that's a tough one. The broad discussion that we're having right now reminds me I once upon a time, well, still do, but once upon a time read and still do derive great profit from your book, Strategies of Containment. And I recall you were pretty critical in that book of NSC 68 in some ways for the reasons that we're discussing right now. And it seemed to me, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but you seem to me to be more sympathetic in your treatment to Kenan's vision of the early stages of the Cold War than to his successor in NSC 68, which actually said, sets the parameters for Truman, precisely because of this, that there's a failure to prioritize amongst commitments and a sort of a real chance of a run on the bank. And I just want to ask you if, in fact, that's the kind of thing we're talking about and then take the opportunity to ask you

since we have you. You know, the Cold War does end up overall a success. You know, did NSC 68 really get it all that wrong? Well, let's go back to Kennan and NSC 68. That's a good illustration. What Kenyon said in his first policy pronouncements, 1947, 48, he said, we have only five really important points to defend in the world. Or to put another way, he said there were five great power centers in the world, the United States, Britain, Japan, Germany, the Soviet Union, two of those, only one of them was in hostile hands when he wrote that in 1947. He said the objective of our strategy to be to make sure that none of the other four. get into hostile hands. That's all very precise. And it says that we should not be worrying too much

about powers, weak powers in Africa. For example, these are not important. Latin America is not going to be on the table in this regard. We shouldn't worry about that. And he went along with a strategy of not regarding Korea as important as well. So in principle, that was a great strategy because it limited our commitments to what our capabilities really were at that point. The problem with it was emotion. So if you think about that as the grammar of Kennan's strategy, and then think about emotion as the common sense, the logic in the strategy, when Korea was attacked unexpectedly in the summer of 1950,

Kenan was one of the first to say, good God, we have to defend this, you know, But that was in opposition to his grammar. His logic told him he had to do that, you see. Well, we can argue back and forth about who was right on that. But that's how commitments begin to expand, because grammar gets carried away by the logic. And from that notion that we have to respond wherever our interests are threatened, we have to respond wherever an attack takes place.

That's where Mission creep comes in. And so it got to the point within 10 years or so of the end of World War II that we were saying we were going to go to nuclear war if a couple of little offshore islands off the coast of China, Kimoi and Matsu were attacked. Whoever said that the world needed to risk its own existence in defense of two hunks of rock off the China coast. But that's what the logic of creep did. So somehow, in good strategies, you have to have to have. some protection against this. You have to say, okay, we have some things that it really is important to defend. We have other things that are much less important. We understand that emotions will come into this equation, but we need to deal with the emotions in a rational way. And one of the best

examples of this really comes from the 19th century, John Quincy Adams, the Secretary of State, saying, yes, we needed to dominate the North American continent in the sense of expanding all the way to the Pacific. But we did not need to take Canada. We did not need to take Mexico. Did not need to take Canada because it was a British position, and that would be valuable to us to have the British on our side. But did not need to take Mexico because it exacerbate the racial problems we already had in this country. So Adams established criteria for saying no and saying no creep in this regard. That's what got lost, it seems to me, in the Cold War. We confused vital interests with peripheral interests.

But we're by far not the only country that has ever done that. A lot of others have done the same thing. If you'll permit it, just to continue on this theme, because I think this is really interesting. So as you lay it out, Adams is able to prioritize and set limits, but he is, he's setting these limits by saying there are positive things that we don't need to do. You know, the ball is in our court and we don't need to do them. Whereas with, say, for example, the invasion of Korea in 1950, that is something we are reacting to. You know, communist activity in Vietnam, it's something we are reacting to.

And in a democracy in particular, you know, it's obviously all before my time, but, you know, reading accounts of how the American press was acting in the summer of 1950, it is hard to imagine And it's just hard. You can make all the resolutions you want beforehand. And interestingly enough, as you know, the Truman administration does not state actively and energetically that it won't defend Korea. It's sort of ambiguous. And so how do you, I mean, how do you then not react? And actually, sorry, a second double-barre question, should we have not reacted?

Is that your position that the Korean War actually would have better not to? In retrospect, I think we were wise to defend Korea, because if Korea was taken over completely, by the Chinese Japan, much more vital interest close by, would have had a much greater security problem than it did. So that makes, that made sense to me. It's just something we didn't think about. I think we made the right decision. But then fast forward to the decision to come to the defense of South Vietnam, whoever said that Vietnam, a divided country, was a vital security the interests of the United States. Whoever said that we needed to commit at one point something like 500,000 troops in the defense

of South Vietnam and take something like 58,000 killed to defend that country, to keep it from going communist. In fact, it did go communist. And what's the result of that? It is now one of the friendliest countries in Southeast Asia. It is just as worried about China as we are. it's offering naval bases to American ships again or going back in to the bases that they used half a century ago. Going communist is not the only thing it's on the mind of a country like that.

Who your neighbors are and how they behave would be there as well. The very logic of our opening to China in 1972 was that we could actually ally with a communist country if it had a common enemy with us, which in that case with the Soviet Union. We even said in 1941, we could ally with the Soviet Union if we had a common enemy, which we did, Nazi Germany. So the point is, if you think about these things one-dimensional, you will often do dumb things. If you think about them ecologically and think about, well, yes, ideology is important, but so too are economics, and so too is geography and so too is the question of who threatens whom and under what circumstances. If you think ecologically, then I think you're going to make fewer mistakes. That's my own answer to that.

Sure, sure. And look, I certainly, and I don't think there are many who I'm not going to make the case that our intervention in Vietnam was well designed and well executed. Though we are going to have Mark Moyer on the show to talk about his chapter at some point in coming months. So I'm curious to see his take on it. But I do want to ask you, if you'll permit it, What is your take on Li Kuan Yu's sort of semi-famous praise of the United States' intervention of Vietnam, that it bought time for the rest of the Pacific? And it slowed the pace of communist infiltration of any number of Pacific countries. Well, as with Dr. Kessinger, I had great respect for Likwine, for sure.

But you can always say when you know what the outcome was, you can say, we bought time. or we lost time or whatnot, you know, nobody can, nobody can prove an assertion like that. So, Lee Kuan Yew himself was fully aware of the changes that were taking place inside China. Was it China that was then going to take over Vietnam? Would that have been a bad thing? Was it Russia that was going to take over? And we went back and forth on this. Finally, we decided it was neither China nor Russia that were going to take over Vietnam,

but it was simply that we would be embarrassed. if North Vietnam took over South Vietnam. So we kept changing the danger, changing our perception of the danger in that part of the world. Yes, it may have bought time for South Vietnam. I think it lost time for the United States. If you think about how close this country

came to tearing itself apart in the 1960s, owing to the Vietnam War, that was not the only thing that was happening, but certainly it was profoundly disruptive in terms of our own domestic institutions and trust in government. Just continuing through the elements that you identify is essential to successful strategic thinking and action. The next one is self-correction.

What does it mean for a power to be able to self-correct? It just means for power to be able to recognize that it's made a mistake and adjust accordingly. And this is where it seems to me the Chinese experience is fascinating. if you look at it over a 5,000-year period or so. You can see all kinds of inconsistencies in their culture, in the borders of the country in terms of how they were governed, who they controlled all of this. But you can also notice that China,

the institutions of China, the culture of China today is very similar to what it would have been 5,000 years ago. It hasn't been that much change. So this country has survived somehow, through all of the trouble that it's gone through. And I think maybe part of the reason for that on a long-time historical time scale is a capacity for self-criticism and self-correction. We can't operate on that same long time table, but I think we can learn something from this. And it seems to me that the ability to reconsider what we have been doing, to reevaluate it periodically, is an immensely

useful thing to do. The institutions of democracy force that to a considerable extent. So our own election process, our free press, all of that forces a certain amount of self-criticism in that regard. And I think we shouldn't be afraid of it. I think we should admit that mistakes have been made and try to extract ourselves from these. One of the things that really has puzzled me over of the years was what the motivation was post-9-11 for what we were trying to do in the Middle East over a 20-year period. And I would keep asking people who would come to Yale, what are we trying to do in Syria? What are we trying to do in Iraq? Nobody could ever really explain it. We have to be there. And so we made heroic efforts to be there. We shifted the purpose and the justification

for this along the way. we wound up with what has come to be called a series of unending wars. Biden decided to end it in 2021, and it ended in a humiliating way with the Kabul airport disaster and people hanging onto the planes, just as they had done in the exit from Saigon. But is anybody saying we should go back now into Afghanistan or should go back in the same way that we did into Iraq at that point? Is anybody saying that the long-term interests of the United States have been harmed? by withdrawing from that enterprise, which we ourselves did not understand.

I don't know of anybody who's saying anything like that, you know. And this just gets back to something Kenan said years ago about Vietnam. He said there is more respect to be earned in the eyes of the world from the liquidation of unsound positions than there is from the pointless, unthinking, unlimited defense of them. And something like that, I think, is the self-correction that I've done. talking about. It was a dilemma, though, wasn't it? Just to stick with that observation of Kennings, right? And maybe your response, this will be it's just the manner of the withdrawal

rather than the fact of the withdrawal. But post-Afghanistan withdrawal in 2021, it is, to me it seems, I'm of course, curious to know your view, hard to argue that it improved the credibility of the Biden administration, but perhaps I'm not, I'm not seeing that correctly. Well, you can debate that, but if you look at what the Biden administration has been able to orchestrate in the response to the Ukrainian invasion, it's hard for me to see that our power has been weakened in the world overall by what happened in Kabul six months before. It seems to be quite extraordinary what the Biden administration in post-February 2022 was able to pull together by way of solidifying NATO, by way of getting arms to Ukraine, all of this,

by way of building a coalition in this regard. And if we had really lost that much faith and that much face in the way that we withdrew from Kabul six months earlier, it seems to me that should not have happened. Do you think that the withdrawal played a role in Putin's decision to go into Ukraine or not a factor? Well, I mean, for sure. It may have been one of several things that might have caused him to think that the U.S. would not respond. But in itself, I doubt it. Got it. So I want to be respectful, your time here. So I'm going to name the other elements on the list and we can we can go into them as you see fit, but you other other elements of successful strategy to expect the unexpected,

which seems to me to be important and also straightforward. Employ contradictions. That's a little harder, I think, to at least wrap your mind around the label of it. And then the last one, which seems at the same time both totally essential, but also if we're easy to, sort of obvious, but if it were easy to do, no one would ever fail, which is to know what is it all about. So of those three, what do you think is the most important? Should we spend some time on here? Probably the most important one is tolerating contradictions. And this gets back to what's known, at least to historians and to literary scholars as the F. Scott Fitzgerald principle. Fitzgerald once said that the sign of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold

contradictory ideas in the mind at the same time and retain the ability to function. Well, that's just another way of saying that's life, because life is full of contradictions. You can't resolve them all. You have to live with some. And certainly that's true of geopolitics. The question of what the right thing to do may be can be totally different from what the expedient thing to do may be. And what happens to morality, what happens to principle in between these things, you see. So that's an old story, and it's going to be a story that continues indefinitely into the future. It's the gap between aspirations and capabilities, which I think really is at the center of strategy. And I think what we have to do is to learn to live with this, to be comfortable with it, not to tear ourselves apart when we are forced to do it, sometimes understand that we have to postpone doing the right thing.

because first we have to do the expedient thing. First, we have to do the thing that gets us into the position later to do the right thing. These things don't always happen at once, you see. So that question of timing, what do you do when? What compromises do you make at any point along the way? It seems to me is exactly relevant to this. So I've written about this in several different ways, but I think the best example really is Franklin Roosevelt, who was an internationalist,

but he pursued isolationist policies in the 1930s because he assigned priority first to domestic economic recovery, and he knew that we could not do anything internationally until we have recovered domestically. Once he moves toward internationalism, he leaves the way open for cooperation with the Soviet Union because he sees Germany and Japan are the bigger enemies. And while we don't like communism, he understood that authoritarians are not going to be able to cooperate. And if we could somehow align ourselves with the Soviet Union, they could do most of the fighting for us. And indeed they did in the war against Germany to a very considerable extent. Was that an immoral thing to do in the short term? Yeah, we cooperated with the most repressive.

government anywhere to defeat another repressive government. But should we have not done it and then suffered 20 or 30 times the number of casualties that we in fact did suffer in that war? Would we have come out of the war as strong as we did if we had weakened ourselves by carrying that main burden of the war against Hitler and the Japanese? No, I don't think so. So all of these things are compromises that you have to make. All of them are contradictions. which you have to hold in mind and measure. And the measuring is timing, what do you do now, what you do, yeah, thinking through these things. And if you say that these compromises are, unfortunately, the answer is yes. If you say that they are immoral, I think the answer has to be hedged

in terms of what, in terms of the national interest, in terms of getting you into Evan, exactly what? Yeah. And so that's, That's what I mean by it. So I'm sort of fascinated by the Roosevelt conduct of foreign policy, especially in the 30s because it's, you know, unfortunately it seems relevant today to understand how that worked and how he did his work. I'd sort of like to ask you a self-indulgent question on that front, which is, you know, you are the author in strategies of containment, I think, of the sort of definitive one-stop shop analysis of how American strategy evolves during the Cold War through this study of these different key figures and documents. Who has written? Is there such a volume for the evolution of American strategy in the 30s? Or is like the premise wrong because it was just all Roosevelt. So you should read, you should read about Roosevelt. You should we read? You ought to be reading Robert Kagan and his new book, The Ghost at the Feast, which I think is.

It's the second volume in his trilogy. And this filing covers 1900 to 1941. But I've just finished it. And it seems to me that he has got it down perfectly well, ranging from Theater, Rose. through Woodrow Wilson, through the 1920s, and up to FDR, but not end of the war itself. And I think he's got it just right. He talks about what an astonishing thing it was, that the great power, the power that came out of World War I with the greatest influence and capability, simply ceased to use it, and that was us. We had won the war. We had come out of it richer than anybody else.

we had potentially the greatest military in the world at that point in 1919, 1921. We decided not to use it at all. And there's no question that the authoritarian's took note of that and then forced us to have to do the same, to reverse the damage of that. Bob talks about all of that in his book. And I think it's a triumph. Thanks for that. Thanks for that. Now, one last thought on your comment or observations on contradictions.

You know, it seems to me what you're saying is there's a requirement for intellectual humility or perhaps just humility broadly in the face of these problems. It puts one in mind of great history, you know, like Thucydides, for example. I mean, there's just so much stuff happening that the human mind might discern certain patterns and there might be a pattern that works in a certain set of circumstances and another pattern that works in different circumstances. But to embrace the contradiction, as you put it, means you know, you have to accept that your probably you, Aaron McLean, you, John Gattis, you're not going to develop the grand theory.

And the moment you think you have it, you're probably going to start making some very serious mistakes. Oh, Aaron, I think intellectual humility is always called for. I'm all in favor of it. John Gattis of Yale University, director and guiding light of the grand strategy program there, contributor to the new makers of modern strategy. This has been a great conversation. I really, really appreciate you making the time.

Thank you, Aaron. Enjoy. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.