On Grand Strategy

John Lewis Gaddis is the Robert A. Lovett Professor of History at Yale University, and was the founding director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy. His previous books include The United States and the Origins of the Cold War; Strategies of Containment; The Long Peace; We Now Know; The Landscape of History; Surprise, Security, and the American Experience; and The Cold War: A New History. Professor Gaddis teaches courses on Cold War history, grand strategy, biography, and historical methodology. He has won two undergraduate teaching awards at Yale and was a 2005 recipient of the National Humanities Medal. His George F. Kennan: An American Life won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Biography.

[T]he best education in grand strategy available in a single volume . . . a long walk with a single, delightful mind . . . On Grand Strategy is a book that should be read by every American leader or would-be leader. John Nagl, Wall Street Journal
 
A remarkably erudite volume [that] renders nuanced verdicts on an eclectic cohort of thinkers, writers, monarchs and conquerors 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. Washington Post

Thought-provoking The approach is highly idiosyncratic and the structure loose; it has something of the feel of a personal manifesto or intellectual memoir. Weekly Standard

[An] eminently readable book by a master historian It is a brilliant book learned, seductively written, deep. The New Criterion
 
Lively Gaddis concludes with an invaluable warning that true morality embraces neither messianic interventionism nor the quest for utopianism Instead, ethical leadership pursues the art of the possible for the greater (not the greatest) good 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. The New York Times Book Review
 
  An extraordinary treatise on the need to teach the principles of sound strategy to today s leaders The book is a rich one. It makes sense of our world, but is also capable of beautifully crafted pithy historical judgments 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.