Teaching Common Sense. Henry Kissinger

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       Foreword

      Contemporary foreign affairs are generally being studied as anything but “grand,” focusing on individual cases in a fragmented process that has challenged the capacities for comprehensive analysis.

      The program in Grand Strategy at Yale University seeks to overcome this problem by conveying to future leaders— today’s college, graduate, and professional students—both an intellectual understanding of and some operational experience in strategy and policy in a comprehensive structure for international relations. Regarding the importance of such analysis, I wrote long ago, “History is not a cookbook offering pretested recipes. It teaches by analogy, not by maxims. It can illuminate the consequence of actions in comparable situations, yet each generation must discover for itself what situations are in fact comparable. No academic discipline can take from our shoulders the burden of difficult choices.” In the past decade and a half, I have observed and engaged with the faculty and students in the Grand Strategy program at regular intervals and have seen the seminar not only achieve the objectives of its founders by instructing students in history, strategy, and decision making, but also emerge as a model for educational emulation and a symbol for intellectual innovation elsewhere.

      Today, in pursuit of “objectivity,” the study of history is shying away from policy recommendations, while schools of “policy studies,” in pursuit of theoretical “rigor,” are avoiding historical cases. This gap is what the Grand Strategy program knows it must learn to close. The program’s challenge is to expand each generation’s fund of experience without becoming overwhelmed. Thus, it begins with “the classics,” distillations of experiences presented to be applicable to futures beyond imagination—an inherently evolving canon of works that from Sun Tzu to Thucydides to our own time has provided intellectual inspiration and shaped political institutions and practices. The greatest challenges to strategy and statecraft lie in the realm of unavoidable uncertainty, where decisions must be made before it is possible to know all the facts or to assess their ramifications. An education in the classics offers a leader a body of knowledge which can help prepare him or her for the necessity of taking action in moments of daunting uncertainty, including on matters critical to world order. In this sense, the Grand Strategy program has revived and reemployed a humanistic culture of learning and decision making that was once understood to be fundamental, yet in more recent times has largely been neglected.

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