John Lewis Gaddis

“The best education in grand strategy available in a single volume . . . a book that should be read by every American leader or would-be leader.”—The Wall Street Journal A master class in strategic thinking, distilled from the legendary program the author has co-taught at Yale for decades John Lewis Gaddis, the distinguished historian of the Cold War, has for almost two decades co-taught grand strategy at Yale University with his colleagues Charles Hill and Paul Kennedy. Now, in On Grand Strategy, Gaddis reflects on what he has learned. In chapters extending from the ancient world through World War II, Gaddis assesses grand strategic theory and practice in Herodotus, Thucydides, Sun Tzu, Octavian/Augustus, St. Augustine, Machiavelli, Elizabeth I, Philip II, the American Founding Fathers, Clausewitz, Tolstoy, Lincoln, Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Isaiah Berlin. On Grand Strategy applies the sharp insights and wit readers have come to expect from Gaddis to times, places, and people he’s never written about before. For anyone interested in the art of leadership, On Grand Strategy is, in every way, a master class.

On Grand Strategy

Evaluates the second half of the twentieth century in light of its first fifty years, chronicling how the world transformed from a dark era of international communism and nuclear weapons to a time of political and economic freedom. Reprint. 75,000 first printing.

A New History

The Cold War

What is history and why should we study it? Is there such a thing as historical truth? Is history a science? One of the most accomplished historians at work today, John Lewis Gaddis, answers these and other questions in this short, witty, and humane book. The Landscape of History provides a searching look at the historian's craft, as well as a strong argument for why a historical consciousness should matter to us today. Gaddis points out that while the historical method is more sophisticated than most historians realize, it doesn't require unintelligible prose to explain. Like cartographers mapping landscapes, historians represent what they can never replicate. In doing so, they combine the techniques of artists, geologists, paleontologists, and evolutionary biologists. Their approaches parallel, in intriguing ways, the new sciences of chaos, complexity, and criticality. They don't much resemble what happens in the social sciences, where the pursuit of independent variables functioning with static systems seems increasingly divorced from the world as we know it. So who's really being scientific and who isn't? This question too is one Gaddis explores, in ways that are certain to spark interdisciplinary controversy. Written in the tradition of Marc Bloch and E.H. Carr, The Landscape of History is at once an engaging introduction to the historical method for beginners, a powerful reaffirmation of it for practitioners, a startling challenge to social scientists, and an effective skewering of post-modernist claims that we can't know anything at all about the past. It will be essential reading for anyone who reads, writes, teaches, or cares about history.

How Historians Map the Past

The Landscape of History

The full scope of George Kennan's long life and vast influence is revealed by one of today's most important Cold War scholars. Yale historian Gaddis began this magisterial history almost 30 years ago; the result is a remarkably revealing view of how this greatest of Cold War strategists came to doubt his strategy and always doubted himself.

An American Life

George F. Kennan

Attempts to provide an answer to the question of how successful the Bush administration's grand strategy, set in nineteenth-century foundations, will be in the face of twenty-first-century national security challenges.

Surprise, Security, and the American Experience

Inquiries Into the History of the Cold War

The Long Peace

David C. Krakauer

Kenneth Pomeranz

History, Big History, & Metahistory

Rethinking Cold War History (A Council on Foreign Relations Book)

We Now Know

المشهد التاريخي

A study of American foreign policy and practices in the forties that focuses on the economic and political developments which forged the way for the Cold War

The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947

Winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Biography Widely and enthusiastically acclaimed, this is the authorized, definitive biography of one of the most fascinating but troubled figures of the twentieth century by the nation's leading Cold War historian. In the late 1940s, George F. Kennan—then a bright but, relatively obscure American diplomat—wrote the "long telegram" and the "X" article. These two documents laid out United States' strategy for "containing" the Soviet Union—a strategy which Kennan himself questioned in later years. Based on exclusive access to Kennan and his archives, this landmark history illuminates a life that both mirrored and shaped the century it spanned.

Robert Lovett Professor of History John Lewis Gaddis

Examines the history of the Cold War, reflecting Soviet, East European, Chinese, American, and West European viewpoints, and offering new insights and solutions to long-standing puzzles

Rethinking Cold War History

a hidegháború történetének újraértékelése

Most már tudjuk

John Lewis Gaddis' acclaimed history of U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union during and immediately after World War II is now available with a new preface by the author. This book moves beyond the focus on economic considerations that was central to the work of New Left historians, examining the many other forces -- domestic politics, bureaucratic inertia, quirks of personality, and perceptions of Soviet intentions -- that influenced key decision makers in Washington, and in doing so seeks to analyze these determinants of policy in terms of their full diversity and relative significance.

Jonathan Rosenberg

Ernest R. May

Philip H. Gordon

Philip Gordon

Professor of History Ernest R May

This text uses biographical techniques to test the question: did the advent of the nuclear bomb prevent World War III? It examines the careers of ten Cold War statesmen, and asks whether they viewed war, and its acceptability, differently after the advent of the bomb.

Nuclear Diplomacy Since 1945

Cold War Statesmen Confront the Bomb

Esistono criteri strategici generali in grado di assicurare la vittoria nella guerra contro i nemici, oppure nella lotta contro un avversario politico? O che, semplicemente, possano garantire maggiori probabilità di successo quando si devono affrontare e risolvere situazioni critiche? John Lewis Gaddis, storico della guerra fredda e autorevole esperto di politica internazionale, risponde a questi interrogativi traendo spunto da un enigmatico frammento del poeta greco Archiloco: «La volpe sa molte cose, ma il riccio ne sa una grande». In un serrato confronto sia con i classici della storiografia (da Erodoto a Tucidide), del pensiero strategico (da Clausewitz a Sun Tzu) e del pensiero politico (da Machiavelli a Isaiah Berlin), sia con le opere di sant'Agostino e l'immortale Guerra e pace di Tolstoj, per citare solo alcune delle sue numerose fonti, Gaddis rivisita eventi e snodi epocali della storia dell'Occidente per mostrare gli esiti felici, o viceversa fallimentari, delle diverse scelte strategiche adottate dai protagonisti. Dal disastroso progetto d'invasione della Grecia del «re dei re» persiano Serse alle drammatiche contorsioni della guerra del Peloponneso, dalla sorprendente edificazione dell'impero romano a opera di Ottaviano Augusto alla sagacia con cui Elisabetta I seppe resistere all'Invincibile Armada facendo dell'Inghilterra la regina dei mari, dalla disfatta di Napoleone in Russia all'abilità dei più grandi presidenti americani (Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson e Franklin D. Roosevelt): la lezione che se ne può trarre è la ricorrente supremazia di chi ha saputo «combinare il senso di direzione tipico del riccio e la sensibilità per l'ambiente circostante tipica della volpe», ovvero la superiorità di una visione strategica attenta ai vari aspetti della congiuntura, alla peculiarità del terreno d'azione e al bilanciamento di mezzi e fini, e più incline alla flessibilità che alla dogmatica aderenza al piano originario e all'imperativo di realizzare, sempre e comunque, l'obiettivo prestabilito. Se, come ha scritto il «Wall Street Journal», Lezioni di strategia è «un libro che dovrebbe essere letto da qualsiasi leader o aspirante leader americano», tale invito può essere senz'altro esteso a tutti coloro che, anche al di fuori degli Stati Uniti e senza spiccate ambizioni di leadership, sono chiamati a compiere scelte problematiche o a misurarsi con sfide di particolare complessità.

Lezioni di strategia

John Lewis Gaddis wordt gezien als de meest vooraanstaande historicus van de Koude Oorlog en doceert over militaire- en politieke strategie aan Yale. Hij begint deze masterclass in de antieke wereld en eindigt bij de Tweede Wereldoorlog en beoordeelt de grootschalige strategische theorie van onder andere Herodotus, Sun Tzu, Machiavelli en Von Clausewitz.

Een masterclass over Herodotus, Sun Tzu, Von Clausewitz en andere grote strategen

Over strategisch denken

A discussion of United States foreign policy from World War II to the Carter administration is based on recently declassified government documents

John Lewis Gaddis

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