Teaching Common Sense. Henry Kissinger

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СКАЧАТЬ and international relations as they play out over the extremely long term and at the highest levels.”¹⁸

      But many graduates of the program see grand strategy as a more nimble philosophy that can guide a wide range of personal and professional decisions. “It’s a way of looking on the world from an elevated position with a grounding in lessons from millennia of history behind you,” one student said, adding, “It gives you the courage to take steps forward not knowing where they will lead but with the confidence that you can stake out your own course and are capable of correcting for any mistakes.”¹⁹

      “In practice, it means incorporating a sense of flexibility and appreciation for the unpredictable into one’s approach to complex problems,” Wittenstein, who negotiated the acquisition of Kissinger’s papers for Yale, noted. Marcel Logan (GS ’13) who took GS while attending the School of Management, said: “I always tell people that GS doesn’t teach as much as it reveals what is already there. Some people intuitively ‘get’ that.”²⁰

      Another student maintained that while “grand strategy is a perspective that allows for greater comprehension of any situation,” it is for her most “closely connected to theology and the life of faith.” As such, it includes “virtues such as humility and hope.” She later explained that “these virtues are not merely ‘nice things’ or morals to practice; they are actually the strategy to right living. They are in accordance with the longer-term reality of the vision of God, which is also fundamentally the shorter-term reality as well.”²¹

      But, from a more secular perspective, Max Nova (GS ’11) said: “It gave me the confidence to strike out and try something new and crazy, secure in the knowledge that Philip II [of Spain] didn’t really have much of a clue either.”²²

      As Gaddis told the Ethiopians, people have faced “the gap between what they hope for and what they can hope to get” for a long time. Empires have risen and fallen because of this gap. Wars have been fought and won and lost over this disparity between aspirations and capabilities. Once human beings acquired the ability to pass ideas from one generation to another then a body of experience began to develop with respect to how to bridge that gap.”²³

      It’s this broad sweep that GS draws on, introducing students to the field’s greatest thinkers and practitioners over two and a half millennia. Starting with Sun Tzu’s precepts on war, it moves briskly through Thucydides’s account of the Peloponnesian War, the life of Roman emperor Augustus; Niccolo Machiavelli’s recognition in The Prince of different kinds of morality; the contrasting leadership styles of Elizabeth I and Philip II; Carl von Clausewitz’s foundational text on grand strategy; eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant’s idea of peace through international order; the American founding fathers and Abraham Lincoln; European power balancers Klemens von Metternich and Otto von Bismarck; and in the twentieth century Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Winston Churchill, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong, Kennan, Kissinger, and Ronald Reagan. “The common thread is a search for timeless, transferrable principles,” Gaddis told the Ethiopians. These seminars “are not so much telling us what to do, but creating a checklist of things to think about.”²⁴ Or, as Wong, the engineering student who took GS as an undergraduate in 2011, summed it up: “It’s like having a library of minds to apply to different situations. You can grab Clausewitz off the shelf and have him advising you.”²⁵

      Rather than focusing on specific knowledge, the course asks students to consider how knowledge is gained, pushing them to develop an agile, adaptable intellect. Each January Hill welcomes the new class by quoting F. Scott Fitzgerald: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”²⁶ GS’s dominant metaphor, “the opposable mind,”²⁷ as Brooks calls it, reaches back to nineteenth-century poet John Keats’s concept of “negative capability”: the idea that “Men of Achievement,” as Keats wrote to his brothers in 1817, have the ability to tolerate life’s mysteries.²⁸

      Two hundred years later the iPhone age celebrates the opposite sensibility: the idea that we have the answer to every question in our back pockets, or what Kennedy called “an explosion of data.”²⁹ But one of GS’s underpinnings is that research alone can’t help us deal with pressing, complex questions: the president can’t ask Siri whether or not it’s in our country’s best interests to send military advisers to Ukraine. Decision making isn’t about looking up answers; it’s about balancing a large objective and at the same time being attentive to your surroundings. In GS terminology, you have to be both a hedgehog, a person who knows only one thing, and a fox, a person who knows many.³⁰ Woven into the course is advice on the importance of taking first-rate notes (selectively and in longhand), of listening to hear the murmur beneath the main conversation; of seeing what others don’t. One mid-September class on distinguishing “noise” from “signals”—something FDR failed to do before the bombing of Pearl Harbor—began with Kennedy saying, “If you were walking to the library on Saturday morning and happened to look up instead of down you’d have seen a thousand broad wing hawks heading to the Carolinas.”³¹

      It seemed like a benign opener; a random scrap of information—almost like a dust speck floating by. But it was enough to tee up Hill: “I looked out my office window about a year ago and there on a low limb in front of the provost’s house was perched a red-tailed hawk. Yale students were walking back and forth underneath this hawk, and no one knew it was there. They were looking at their texts and talking on the phone.” Hill continued, “This is not trivial. Consciousness is a modern thing. It’s the consciousness of what is around you. What you see is a version of the signals and noise of Pearl Harbor only [more] general. What do you perceive around you? How do you read it? And what is the range of your consciousness?”³² In a similar vein, Gaddis likened this awareness to squirrels. As he put it, “students need to be vigilant squirrels. Sure, squirrels run around, bury things, dig things up, and play with each other—but the ones that survive are aware, at all times, of the three dimensional environment in which they do these things.”³³

      No matter what the animal analogy, the message is the same: pay attention. Consider everything. Context matters.

      What’s being taught is “effective forecasting,” Brooks said. “How do you ask questions of a situation? I think the course gives your mind more clarity. The big thing it does is scope. It takes [students] five feet off the ground and puts them at five hundred feet”³⁴—like hawks.

Part Two

       Three Views on One Problem

      The Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy, like many СКАЧАТЬ