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The Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy, like many great endeavors, began over lunch. This one took place on a winter Sunday in 1998 at Kennedy’s house on Humphrey Street in New Haven. Then, as now, he was head of Yale’s International Security Studies Program. His guests were Gaddis, whom he’d recruited to Yale from Ohio University eighteen months earlier to fill the prestigious Lovett Chair of Military and Naval History vacated by historian Geoffrey Parker, and Hill, who’d become a full-time practitioner professor. On the conversational menu: “the state of the world.”¹

As distinct as their personal politics are, the three men found common ground that day, agreeing that Bill Clinton, then midway through his second term, seemed to lack a foreign policy vision and that their students were missing a historical context of the world.

One Clinton initiative struck the three professors as particularly wrongheaded: the push to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to incorporate Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. The wars in the Balkans, which had erupted at the end of George H. W. Bush’s presidency, raged on, and Russia’s transition to a democracy was not as automatic as US statesmen had predicted. Along with George Kennan, whose biography Gaddis was researching, the professors felt that expanding what had begun, in 1949, as a Cold War alliance would further hinder Russia’s progress.² Only later did it become evident that there had been debate within the White House about the administration’s grand strategy—and even whether or not it needed one. According to former deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbott, President Clinton argued that Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman had been given credit for having grand strategies to combat Hitler and Stalin, but in reality they’d “just made it up as they went along.”³

After hashing over world affairs, the professors’ lunch conversation turned to a new, but related, topic: where ISS was headed. Kennedy presented two options: to continue the status quo, or to rethink what they were doing and become more active. Besides his concern over Clinton’s strategy gap, Gaddis was eager to find a new outlet for his scholarship. The Cold War, which he’d been studying and writing about for thirty years, was over. “I took the opportunity to suggest . . . the need to take ‘crude looks at the whole,’ a focus, even a program on ‘grand strategy’ as a way of pulling together . . . what ISS does.”⁴

Kennedy and Hill liked the idea. Even before the lunch, the three men, neighbors as well as colleagues, often chatted informally about the challenges they encountered in their classrooms. “It had become clear that we had three different angles on a common problem,” Hill later said. “Students who’d only been expected to work on corners of problems, gather the data, and then solve that one problem in a way that a scientist would 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 studying the titles of things.”¹⁸

Kennedy, likewise, blamed the wide neglect of international security on the “memory of and hostility to the Vietnam War. Anything that had to do with power and imperialism and empires and foreign policy had got us into trouble,” he said. So when the old guard retired, scholars who specialized in more topical areas, such as gender or environmental history, replaced them.¹⁹

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Peter Berkowitz takes a similar view, attributing the disappearance of military affairs courses from elite institutions partly to “the same post- Vietnam hostility to all things military that impelled faculties and administrations to banish ROTC from campus[es].”²⁰

When the article was published suggesting that that the ideal military affairs course would start with Sun Tzu and Thucydides, Gaddis was exultant. “That’s not a military history course,” he said, correcting Berkowitz. “That’s a Grand Strategy course. [Berkowitz’s] rationale and justification for it could have been written by us . . . I was accusing Charlie Hill of ghostwriting it.”²¹