Teaching Common Sense. Henry Kissinger
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Название: Teaching Common Sense
Автор: Henry Kissinger
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Социальная психология
isbn: 9781632260697
isbn:
The idea of grand strategy recrossed the Atlantic in the early years of the twentieth century in its original military context, gaining favor among professors at Oxford and Cambridge. Calling their group the “Round Table,” its members sought to glean lessons on leadership found in ancient Greece, promoting their thoughts in articles and monographs. Although the Round Table died with the decline of the British Empire, B. H. Liddell Hart, a distinguished twentieth-century military theorist, refined the concept of grand strategy (Kennedy was his research assistant from 1966 until Hart’s death in 1970). And with Kennan’s idea of “containment,” the United States continued to be guided by an overarching strategy through the end of the Cold War.
But by the cusp of the twenty-first century, both the phrase and the consistency it promoted had been relegated to the archives. In the political realm grand strategy had been replaced by what Hill likes to call “tiny strategy”—a series of one-off initiatives with no connective tissue, such as Bill Clinton’s call for school uniforms and V-chips for TVs in his 1996 State of the Union address. And university classes that dealt even obliquely with anything grand strategic—the uses of power or the history of empires—had all but been abandoned, a casualty, the professors said, of 1960s’ social tumult. Hill, who graduated from Brown in 1957, received a broad, classical education that enabled him to expound comfortably on the differences between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment on his Foreign Service exam. Ten years later the exam no longer tested applicants’ grasp of intellectual history but of current culture, such as name the director of The Graduate. According to Hill, “That was what people in America knew.”
In the 1960s, he continued, “Wherever you looked the overwhelming demand and assumption were that whatever existed had to be torn down. Question Authority! The curriculum was an authority, so tear it down. American Literature had a canon! Get rid of it! Skull and Bones—tear it down! In fact, tear down Yale! You were supposed to deal with issues that were immediately in front of you. No longer were you supposed to teach the high realms of international politics. No one knew any history. My joke was that [students] could tell which came first—the First World War or the Second [World War]—by studying the titles of things.”18
Kennedy, likewise, blamed the wide neglect of international security on the “memory of and hostility to the Vietnam War. Anything that had to do with power and imperialism and empires and foreign policy had got us into trouble,” he said. So when the old guard retired, scholars who specialized in more topical areas, such as gender or environmental history, replaced them.19
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Peter Berkowitz takes a similar view, attributing the disappearance of military affairs courses from elite institutions partly to “the same post- Vietnam hostility to all things military that impelled faculties and administrations to banish ROTC from campus[es].”20
When the article was published suggesting that that the ideal military affairs course would start with Sun Tzu and Thucydides, Gaddis was exultant. “That’s not a military history course,” he said, correcting Berkowitz. “That’s a Grand Strategy course. [Berkowitz’s] rationale and justification for it could have been written by us . . . I was accusing Charlie Hill of ghostwriting it.”21
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