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e8516b9 Self-interest would become comfort and then affinity. Transparency, for this reason, was vital: "We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude foreigners from any opportunity of learning or observing." Athenians found "the fruits of other countries" to be "as familiar a luxury as those of [their] own." The walls made their citizenship global." John Lewis Gaddis
58c1b8f The prudent leader "dreads and reflects on everything that can happen to him but is bold when he is in the thick of action." Xerxes listens patiently, but objects that "if you were to take account of everything . . . , you would never do anything. It is better to have a brave heart and endure one half of the terrors we dread than to [calculate] all of the terrors and suffer nothing at all. . . . Big things are won by big dangers." John Lewis Gaddis
14300f7 It was, as Berlin remembered it: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." 2 The passage survives only as a fragment, so its context has long been lost. But the Renaissance scholar Erasmus played around with it, 3 and Berlin couldn't help doing the same. Might it become a scheme for classifying great writers? If so, Plato, Dante, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Proust would all have been hedgehogs. Aristotle, Shakespeare.. John Lewis Gaddis
d0ad390 Joint-stock companies could be similarly flexible. "The absence of close control by the British crown in the early stages of colonization," Elliott points out, left considerable latitude for the evolution of those forms of government that seemed most appropriate to the people actively involved in the process of overseas enterprise and settlement--the financial backers of the enterprise and the colonists themselves--as long as they operated .. John Lewis Gaddis
bbf0edd Jefferson was a genius, the historian Joseph Ellis has noted, at concealing contradictions within abstractions. The Virginian who insisted "that all men are created equal" arrived in Philadelphia attended by opulently attired slaves. 36 His declaration coupled universal principles with an implausibly long list of offenses--twenty-seven in all--committed personally by George III: that's why the complete document can't be quoted today without.. John Lewis Gaddis
601d6a7 But what if Clausewitz and Tolstoy were wrestling with contradictions--perhaps even relishing the contest--rather than agonizing over them? 13 Both see determinism as laws to which there can be no exceptions: "If even one man out of millions in a thousand-year period of time has had the possibility of acting freely," Tolstoy writes, "then it is obvious that one free act of this man, contrary to the laws, destroys the possibility of the exis.. John Lewis Gaddis
9eda038 The outcome defied categories. 46 Was it a victory for principle or expediency? For the rights of man or the rules of statecraft? For lightness of being or heaviness of hand? For a republic or, as Washington himself put it, an "empire"? To say "all of the above" dodges the question, but usefully. For if Burke was right that governments should balance dissatisfactions, if Elizabeth was right to set precedents rather than be bound by them, if.. John Lewis Gaddis
ae29e4b Whatever their contradictions, Americans were consistent, before and after their first revolution, in deeply distrusting government. Having been left on their own for so long, the colonists saw as sinister any British action affecting them: "[ T] he most minor incidents," the historian Gordon Wood has shown, "erupted into major constitutional questions involving the basic liberties of the people." 49 Allergies that extreme don't easily disa.. John Lewis Gaddis
0e7165b The United States and the Soviet Union are different. . . . America's new president, Richard Nixon, is a longtime rightist, a leader of the anti-communists there. I like to deal with rightists. They say what they really think--not like the leftists, who say one thing and mean another.72 John Lewis Gaddis
df72ec4 It followed that anyone who could strengthen a fortification, repair a boat, power an oar, pay others to do these things, or even bring up a child who might someday do them, would be serving the state. John Lewis Gaddis
d23f99d It's no stretch to say, then, that Thucydides coaches all who read him. For as his greatest modern interpreter (himself a sometime coach) has gently reminded us, the Greeks, despite their antiquity, "may have believed things we have either forgotten or never known; and we must keep open the possibility that in some respects, at least, they were wiser than we." John Lewis Gaddis
f6e1855 Secretary of State Acheson had even announced publicly that the American "defensive perimeter" did not extend to South Korea." John Lewis Gaddis
caab33d We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude foreigners from any opportunity of learning or observing." Athenians found "the fruits of other countries" to be "as familiar a luxury as those of [their] own." The walls made their citizenship global." John Lewis Gaddis
9e04b3e The alternative Kennan described as the "particularized" approach. It was "skeptical of any scheme for compressing international affairs into legalist concepts. It holds that the content is more important than the form, and will force its way through any formal structure which is placed upon it. It considers that the thirst for power is still dominant among so many peoples that it cannot be assuaged or controlled by anything but counter-for.. John Lewis Gaddis
ce12191 an atmosphere of lies and distortions, in other words, of which the very essence is the unceasing effort to induce people to abandon the evidence of their senses and of all objective criteria and to accept as valid a version of reality artificially created, unconnected with objective fact, and calculated to reduce them to a state in which no reactions are operative but those of fear and respect for the mysteries of Soviet power. John Lewis Gaddis
6983c22 safety depends," Kennan told a National War College audience in December 1948, on our ability to establish a balance among the hostile or undependable forces of the world: To put them where necessary one against the other; to see that they spend in conflict with each other, if they must spend it at all, the intolerance and violence and fanaticism which might otherwise be directed against us, that they are thus compelled to cancel each other.. John Lewis Gaddis
e62c1b8 The danger for Americans lay less in another Pearl Harbor than in what they might do to themselves because they feared one. For confronting totalitarians required, in many respects, emulating them. The leader who would attempt this "must learn to regiment his people, to husband his resources, to guard against hostile agents in his midst, to maintain formidable armed forces in peacetime, to preserve secrecy about governmental decisions, to w.. John Lewis Gaddis
a832f31 I]n the interests of our common tasks, we must sometimes overlook their stupidities," one Soviet official explained in 1973." -- John Lewis Gaddis
ec9bc7a Stalin fell into the trap the Marshall Plan laid for him, which was to get him to build the wall that would divide Europe. John Lewis Gaddis
95e7fe8 Just what Khrushchev intended to do with his Cuban missiles is, even now, unclear: it was characteristic of him not to think things through. John Lewis Gaddis
f597d15 Soviet leaders had to treat the outside world as hostile because this provided the only excuse "for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule, for cruelties they did not dare not to inflict, for sacrifices they felt bound to demand." John Lewis Gaddis
e476526 But when Christopher mentioned that he and Talbott had been trying to package post-Cold War policy in a single phrase, Kennan said they shouldn't. "Containment" had been a misleading oversimplification; strategy could not be made to fit a "bumper sticker." The president laughed when Talbott told him what had happened: "that's why Kennan's a great diplomat and scholar but not a politician." John Lewis Gaddis
469c407 Thanks to an ingenious constitution, their geographical isolation from potential rivals, and a magnificent endowment of natural resources, the Americans managed to build an extraordinarily powerful state, a fact that became obvious during World War II. They accomplished this, however, by severely restricting their government's capacity to control everyday life, whether through the dissemination of ideas, the organization of the economy, or .. John Lewis Gaddis
a8b6ea2 The Bolshevik Revolution, which had happened only a quarter century earlier, had in contrast involved the embrace of concentrated authority as a means of overthrowing class enemies and consolidating a base from which a proletarian revolution would spread throughout the world. Karl Marx claimed, in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, that the industrialization capitalists had set in motion was simultaneously expanding and exploiting the working.. John Lewis Gaddis
dc7c592 THE COLD WAR changed all of that, with the result that Wilson is remembered today as a prophetic realist, while Lenin's statues molder in garbage dumps throughout the former communist world. John Lewis Gaddis
e264509 Several premises shaped the Marshall Plan: that the gravest threat to western interests in Europe was not the prospect of Soviet military intervention, but rather the risk that hunger, poverty, and despair might cause Europeans to vote their own communists into office, who would then obediently serve Moscow's wishes; that American economic assistance would produce immediate psychological benefits and later material ones that would reverse t.. John Lewis Gaddis
4f5a7ff Their very independence from Great Britain resulted, as Thomas Paine had predicted it would in 1776, from the implausibility that "a Continent [could] be perpetually governed by an island."12" John Lewis Gaddis
212e1fb WHAT IF Stalin himself was the problem, though, and communism might be salvaged with different leadership? The men who sought to succeed him all believed the diagnosis to be accurate and the prescription to be appropriate. Each of them set out to liberate Marxism-Leninism from the legacy of Stalinism. They found, though, that the two were inextricably intertwined: that to try to separate one from another risked killing both. John Lewis Gaddis
7de6c3b Despite having built his own movement with little help from Moscow, the new Chinese leader was a dedicated Marxist-Leninist who was more than ready to defer to Stalin as the head of the international communist movement. The new China, he announced in June, 1949, must ally "with the Soviet Union, . . . and with the proletariat and broad masses of the people in all other countries, and form an international united front. . . . We must lean to.. John Lewis Gaddis
e564ac0 I can't take communism nor can you, but to cross this bridge I would hold hands with the Devil. John Lewis Gaddis
4075657 He insisted on flying to Washington in a new and untested airplane so that its size would intimidate his hosts. John Lewis Gaddis
ada4781 The overall population of the German Democratic Republic had declined, since 1949, from 19 million to 17 million.51 John Lewis Gaddis
52e340f Without ever having read Clausewitz--at least as far as we know--the president revived that strategist's great principle that war must be the instrument of politics, rather than the other way around. John Lewis Gaddis
a2696b1 It's not a very nice solution," Kennedy acknowledged, "but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war."54 The president could not resist observing, though, when he himself visited the Berlin Wall in June, 1963, that "we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in, to prevent them from leaving us." The ugly structure Khrushchev had erected was "the most obvious and vivid demonstration of the failures of the Communist system, for a.. John Lewis Gaddis
824cb41 This is where the capitalists got it right: they were better than the communists at learning from history, because they never bought into any single, sacrosanct, and therefore unchallengeable theory of history. John Lewis Gaddis
f39277e The Cold War could have produced a hot war that might have ended human life on the planet. But because the fear of such a war turned out to be greater than all of the differences that separated the United States, the Soviet Union, and their respective allies, there was now reason for hope that it would never take place. John Lewis Gaddis
49b22f7 Whatever God thought about it, the old dictator's ghost was not so easily exorcized after all. John Lewis Gaddis
8c3fcd9 Complexity fully rendered would take too long and contain too much, thereby entangling judgment. Complexity as what you want or expect would only confirm what you think you know. You need something in between. John Lewis Gaddis
c519862 Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia, and Africa, have long expelled her. Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind. John Lewis Gaddis
a315f6b With the precedents of Soviet unilateralism in Europe all too clearly in mind, there was no desire within the new Truman administration to see something similar repeated in Northeast Asia. Here, then, the Americans embraced Stalin's own equation of blood with influence. They had done most of the fighting in the Pacific War. They alone, therefore, would occupy the nation that had started it. John Lewis Gaddis
5fb0de1 that American economic assistance would produce immediate psychological benefits and later material ones that would reverse this trend; that the Soviet Union would not itself accept such aid or allow its satellites to, thereby straining its relationship with them; and that the United States could then seize both the geopolitical and the moral initiative in the emerging Cold War. John Lewis Gaddis
59d6efd Its most memorable scene takes place in the piazza at Cesena early one morning in 1502, where the local governor, Remirro de Orco, is found in two pieces, with a bloody knife and a block of wood between them. "The ferocity of the spectacle," Machiavelli recalls, "left the people at once satisfied and stupefied." Cesare Borgia had made Remirro the governor of Romagna with instructions to pacify the rebellious province. This he did, but so br.. John Lewis Gaddis
5fd6e6c From 1957 through 1961, Khrushchev openly, repeatedly, and bloodcurdlingly threatened the West with nuclear annihilation. Soviet missile capabilities were so far superior to those of the United States, he insisted, that he could wipe out any American or European city. He would even specify how many missiles and warheads each target might require. John Lewis Gaddis
e22c5ed The ugly structure Khrushchev had erected was "the most obvious and vivid demonstration of the failures of the Communist system, for all the world to see." John Lewis Gaddis
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