Jim Sleeper: Grand Strategic Failure
[Jim Sleeper is a lecturer in political science at Yale University and the author of Closest of Enemies: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York.]
"When I asked [Charles Hill] why he had never written his own big book he only smiled," notes his former student Molly Worthen in her 2007 book about him, The Man on Whom Nothing Was Lost. "There was no better way to get people to pay attention to ... your take on history, he explained, than to write ... beneath the byline of Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, and Boutros Boutros-Ghali. After all, who had ever heard of Charlie Hill?" But Hill, a former diplomat and senior advisor to a string of powerful men, wasn't being quite truthful with Worthen, and not only because he would soon publish an ambitious take on history under his own name.
Worthen's title quotes Homer's characterization of the wily Odysseus, whom Hill now presents as a master of the "creative dissembling" that he believes diplomats must undertake beneath the protocols of their profession, sometimes violating the truth and their superiors' trust. Hill's stated aim in Grand Strategies is "the restoration of literature as a tutor for statecraft," and he ranges from Homer through Salman Rushdie to argue for literature as a "supreme way of knowing" the world of diplomacy. He alsocalls the book "a primer" for Yale's richly funded, foreign-policy-oriented "Studies in Grand Strategy" program, which counts him as a "distinguished fellow" and "diplomat in residence."
But these literary and pedagogical claims shade over some highly personal motivations. Reading his own experiences back into a tapestry he weaves from a selection of great books, Hill interprets great literature and historical episodes to show that statesmen such as Albrecht von Wallenstein, Cardinal Richelieu, Charles Talleyrand, Oliver Cromwell -- and their confidential note-takers and informal envoys, Hill's own predecessors, such as Richelieu's Père Joseph and Cromwell's John Milton -- "possess a certain mad, enigmatic quality" and are amoral by conventional standards because they think that they can keep order only by shuttling back and forth across bounds of convention. Hill's own history as one of the Reagan officials whose silence compromised the federal investigation of the Iran-Contra scandal makes his attempt at self-justification clear....
"Only literature, Hill claims, is "methodologically unbounded" enough to show "how the world really works." But Hill has stacked the deck by starting with a highly specific notion of "how the world works" and interpreting literature to suit his paradigm. A more serious literary survey might show how writers such as Reinhold Niebuhr or Jurgen Habermas and their counterparts in fiction address recent shifts in popular beliefs about power and legitimacy that have brought down armed regimes -- the British in India, Afrikaners in South Africa, segregationists in the American South, and the Soviets in Eastern Europe -- with very little carnage. Jonathan Schell's The Unconquerable World, published in 2004, shows how world literature and history can help explain such shifts.
Early in Grand Strategies, Hill offers a chilling metaphor for his vision. He writes that he was transfixed by the gaze of the ancient Greek priest and emissary Laocoon as he and his sons are strangled by serpents in sculpted marble, "the first artistic depiction of the anguished reaction of a body to painful defeat.... For me it is a look that can be seen across the ages,.... whether the face is contorted in pain or in calm contemplation, of one who can... see clearly into the [tragic] essence of things." The classical tragic hero's gaze into the abyss is, "rightly understood ... a matter of Grand Strategy."
But the man on whom nothing was lost has missed liberal education's responsibility -- and its unmatched capacity -- to inspire an ethic richer than grand-strategic amorality amid perpetual conflict and mistrust. Instead, he has written Grand Strategies and is teaching the classics at Yale to show young Americans how to wield power and risk destruction with Laocoon's pitiless, gnomic gaze.
Read entire article at Foreign Policy
"When I asked [Charles Hill] why he had never written his own big book he only smiled," notes his former student Molly Worthen in her 2007 book about him, The Man on Whom Nothing Was Lost. "There was no better way to get people to pay attention to ... your take on history, he explained, than to write ... beneath the byline of Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, and Boutros Boutros-Ghali. After all, who had ever heard of Charlie Hill?" But Hill, a former diplomat and senior advisor to a string of powerful men, wasn't being quite truthful with Worthen, and not only because he would soon publish an ambitious take on history under his own name.
Worthen's title quotes Homer's characterization of the wily Odysseus, whom Hill now presents as a master of the "creative dissembling" that he believes diplomats must undertake beneath the protocols of their profession, sometimes violating the truth and their superiors' trust. Hill's stated aim in Grand Strategies is "the restoration of literature as a tutor for statecraft," and he ranges from Homer through Salman Rushdie to argue for literature as a "supreme way of knowing" the world of diplomacy. He alsocalls the book "a primer" for Yale's richly funded, foreign-policy-oriented "Studies in Grand Strategy" program, which counts him as a "distinguished fellow" and "diplomat in residence."
But these literary and pedagogical claims shade over some highly personal motivations. Reading his own experiences back into a tapestry he weaves from a selection of great books, Hill interprets great literature and historical episodes to show that statesmen such as Albrecht von Wallenstein, Cardinal Richelieu, Charles Talleyrand, Oliver Cromwell -- and their confidential note-takers and informal envoys, Hill's own predecessors, such as Richelieu's Père Joseph and Cromwell's John Milton -- "possess a certain mad, enigmatic quality" and are amoral by conventional standards because they think that they can keep order only by shuttling back and forth across bounds of convention. Hill's own history as one of the Reagan officials whose silence compromised the federal investigation of the Iran-Contra scandal makes his attempt at self-justification clear....
"Only literature, Hill claims, is "methodologically unbounded" enough to show "how the world really works." But Hill has stacked the deck by starting with a highly specific notion of "how the world works" and interpreting literature to suit his paradigm. A more serious literary survey might show how writers such as Reinhold Niebuhr or Jurgen Habermas and their counterparts in fiction address recent shifts in popular beliefs about power and legitimacy that have brought down armed regimes -- the British in India, Afrikaners in South Africa, segregationists in the American South, and the Soviets in Eastern Europe -- with very little carnage. Jonathan Schell's The Unconquerable World, published in 2004, shows how world literature and history can help explain such shifts.
Early in Grand Strategies, Hill offers a chilling metaphor for his vision. He writes that he was transfixed by the gaze of the ancient Greek priest and emissary Laocoon as he and his sons are strangled by serpents in sculpted marble, "the first artistic depiction of the anguished reaction of a body to painful defeat.... For me it is a look that can be seen across the ages,.... whether the face is contorted in pain or in calm contemplation, of one who can... see clearly into the [tragic] essence of things." The classical tragic hero's gaze into the abyss is, "rightly understood ... a matter of Grand Strategy."
But the man on whom nothing was lost has missed liberal education's responsibility -- and its unmatched capacity -- to inspire an ethic richer than grand-strategic amorality amid perpetual conflict and mistrust. Instead, he has written Grand Strategies and is teaching the classics at Yale to show young Americans how to wield power and risk destruction with Laocoon's pitiless, gnomic gaze.