Teaching Common Sense. Henry Kissinger
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say was scientific,” but who’d never been asked to look at the whole picture or grapple with moral decision making.5
After he resigned from the Foreign Service in 1989, Hill had spent three years at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. In 1992 his wife, Norma Thompson, accepted a faculty position teaching humanities at Yale, and he received a call to work as the special policy assistant to UN secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali. Donald Kagan, a preeminent Yale professor of classics and scholar of the Peloponnesian War, asked Kennedy to find an intellectual home for Hill.6 Kennedy named him a diplomat in residence at ISS, a made-up title that came with an office, a box of business cards, and an invitation to teach a seminar on the United Nations for international studies majors. The gig also brought “friction from other faculty members”7 over what they saw as Hill’s “right-wing” bent, Kennedy said.8 This grumbling didn’t bother Hill, who commuted from New Haven to Manhattan on weekdays, returning early on Monday afternoons in time for class. But he was shocked to find how little his International Ideas and Institutions students—all seniors—knew. “They didn’t have any idea what the United Nations did,” he said. “They knew nothing about its history. They didn’t know what had happened to create the need for international law, or what international law was.”9 At Stanford he’d designed a continuing education course called Statecraft, basing the syllabus on current events, “but not in the way people think of current events.” Instead, he approached it from a foundational perspective: “Where did the Arab-Israeli conflict come from? What are the intellectual origins of it? What are the great minds that bear upon it? What is the source of Zionism? I could get people to see that underneath any current problem there are reasons why it’s the way it is. Those reasons are, in most cases, connected to ideas and they go way, way back. Sometimes they’re bad ideas. But if you don’t know where the ideas come from, you don’t know why certain things are done.”10
At Yale, Hill revisited some of the same questions with his seniors, revamping the class to be more like Statecraft. Kennedy was so pleased with the results that he asked him to expand the seminar into a yearlong lecture course required for all sophomores majoring in international studies.11 By 1998 Hill had not only been teaching the seminar for several years but had become a regular instructor in the Directed Studies program for freshmen, teaching Historical and Political Thought, and Literature.
Kennedy, too, liked Gaddis’s suggestion of giving ISS a broader portfolio. Because it was self-funded through foundation grants and reported only to the provost, ISS was agile enough to take on what he called “outside, fifth-wheel ventures” that the political science and history departments, with their more rigid structures, couldn’t accommodate. Kennedy had underwritten the research of a PhD student who had gotten access to the Red Army secret archives of the Stalin period. He’d agreed to host a group of scholars from United Nations Studies, which moved to a different university every three years (this happened before Hill came to Yale and was unrelated to his work). From 1993 to 1996 the Ford Foundation, coincidentally, gave Kennedy and Yale a $1 million, three-year grant to study America’s new role in the United Nations after the Cold War, a project to which Hill offered informal, but invaluable, advice. To Kennedy a course on grand strategy would be consistent with ISS’s self-styled mission as “an incubator” for any undertaking related to international and security issues, “usually historical, broadly defined, nonideological, and not too big or too dodgy.”12
The intellectual void the professors recognized was comparatively new. As Hill often asserts, people used to know what grand strategy meant “in their bones.”13 According to Lawrence Freedman in his book Strategy: A History, the ability to strategize is so fundamental it predates humankind. “Deception,” coalition building, and “the use of violence”— all rudiments of strategy—can be traced to chimpanzees. The Hebrew Bible is filled with stories in which the protagonists put elements of strategy to use: David, for instance, relied on surprise and sureness to slay Goliath.14 “We assume that a kind of grand strategic logic has existed for as long as people have had to match up unlimited aspirations with limited capabilities,” Gaddis added. “Sun Tzu and Thucydides are the earliest records of this logic that have survived, but they certainly didn’t invent it.”15
While strategizing predates history, the term “grand strategy” didn’t catch hold until the early nineteenth century—the result of the large-scale expansion of warfare during the Napoleonic era. After touring military schools in France, two leading West Pointers, Captain Sylvanus Thayer, who became superintendent, and Dennis Hart Mahan, a professor of military engineering, introduced the theories on war and strategy espoused by Antoine-Henri-Jomini and Carl von Clausewitz into the US Military Academy curriculum.
Mahan’s teaching and writing, which integrated “French theory with emphasis on American common sense,” influenced a number of Civil War generals, including George McClellan, Ulysses Grant, and William Tecumseh Sherman.16 Reflecting on his wartime experience in an 1887 article in the Century, then the nation’s best-read magazine, Sherman popularized the notion that grand strategy encompasses all aspects of war. In the four decades after the Civil War, a time of explosive growth in America, grand strategy became such an everyday concept that people regularly evoked it, even when they talked about nonmilitary topics, including agriculture, industry, and the country’s burgeoning railroads.17
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