student is an embarrassment to most universities, because he seems to be saying, ‘I am a whole human being. Help me to form myself in my wholeness and let me develop my real potential,’ and he is the one to whom they have nothing to say.”4
Compartmentalization also has broader ramifications. “The [US] president, or whomever, can’t be bound by disciplines,” Hill added. “He can’t say to himself, ‘I’m only going to think about the economics of this, or I’m only going to think about the demographics or the domestic politics of this.’ You’ve got to think about it without any fences. Everything comes at you at once . . . So you have to be multidisciplinary.”5
Gaddis, Kennedy, and Hill try to avoid “fences” at every level, beginning with what, exactly, they mean by the term “grand strategy.” “The reason why no one can tell you what it is is because it’s more than one thing,” Hill said. “No two of us are alike in the way we see things.”6 While the professors share the conviction that “having a grand strategy is a good thing,”7 the course determinedly offers no formal definition, forcing students to reconcile it themselves.
The way Kennedy defines it is: “The crux of grand strategy lies . . . in policy, that is, in the capacity of the nation’s leaders to bring together all of the elements, both military and nonmilitary, for the preservation and enhancement of the nation’s long-term (that is, in wartime and peacetime) best interests.”8
Hill hopes students “will come away having learned to become foundationalists”—people who believe that some ideas have been proved true over time and must be assumed before other truths can be known—“but I don’t think that my teaching colleagues necessarily share that,” he said. “I don’t think that’s something they think about much. That’s something I bring up. To me that’s what grand strategy is. My definition of grand strategy is multidirectional, multidefinitional. You need to know what is going on here, which is extremely difficult to get people to deal with.”9
But speaking before a group of Ethiopian government officials at Yale in 2014, Gaddis joked that his definition—“the calculated relationship of means to large ends”—is “the briefest, the most eloquent, and the most correct . . . You can wish for the stars, but your ability to get to the stars is always going to be limited.”10 He elaborated in an earlier address at Duke University in 2009: “Our knowledge of [grand strategy] derives chiefly from the realm of war and statecraft because the fighting of wars and the management of states have demanded the calculation of relationships between means and ends for a longer stretch of time than any other documented area of collective human activity.”11 Grand strategy “applies to all fields of human endeavor,” Gaddis told the Ethiopian contingent. “We all have things we need and have to figure out how to get them, and that is strategy. The ‘grand’ has to do with significance.”12
“Gaddis’s definition is miniscule, and it’s circular,” Hill said. “Essentially it means don’t do stupid things. If you can’t reach the grapes, get a ladder. That encourages students to do what they want to do, which is to stay away from grand strategy.”13 The opposite reflex—going toward grand strategy—would be a tolerance for ambiguity. “Students have been instructed since kindergarten, ‘If you do something this way, this will be the outcome,’” he elaborated. When a situation is uncertain, “they’re at sea. They say, ‘Quick, get me back to land as quickly as possible.’”14 Similarly Hill believes that most people are so conditioned to think issue by issue, it’s tough for them to step back to see the whole picture. “Whenever they’re asked, they get jumpy and beads of sweat develop.”15
After critiquing a fall semester Marshall Brief in which the students got stuck discussing the minutiae of the Ebola virus rather than the overall relationship of the United States with Africa, the assigned topic, Hill emailed Gaddis. “Maybe we should have some kind of joint session between now and the end of the term to go over this with them. They really don’t get what GS is, even allowing for the faculty’s various angles on it. We know that it’s not because they lack intellectual capability; it has to be a very deep cultural-educational conditioning that puts them in a ‘paradigm’ . . . that they can’t imagine themselves beyond.”16
Separately, Hill said, “The area where we’re successful is not this year’s class or last year’s. When they graduate, they don’t ‘get it’”—a Hill refrain. “Five years out, if they’ve had real experiences, then they begin to get it.”17
When asked to define Grand Strategy, the vast majority of alumni, regardless of when they took GS, did seem to get it. They tended to cite Gaddis’s definition, expounding on it to present a grasp of grand strategy as a compelling model for leadership. Some viewed the concept primarily through the lens of political power: the state’s strategic assessment of economic and military priorities. As Benjamin Klay (GS ’02) remarked, grand strategy is “a nation’s means of achieving its clearly articulated objectives through progress that is measurable.” Similarly, a GS ’06 student maintained that it signals “the level of planning that focuses on domestic 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