The resignation of Beverly Gage, professor of history at Yale and director of the Brady-Johnson Grand Strategy Program, is the great brouhaha of the last weekend.
I am not a graduate of the grand strategy course, but have followed its development over the last decade and a half.
Othello and Desdemona in Venice by Théodore Chassériau (1819–1856) Earlier this week I suggested that major authors of world literature could be divided into three categories. Each of the categories is an attitude towards fictional and dramatic narrative. I labeled the three approaches as that of the artificer, the reporter, and the fabulist. In that […]
Harold Bloom is dead. His death has prompted one final, staggered brawl between the exhausted ranks who have spent away their strength with three decades of culture warring. My personal assessment of Bloom is that he was an excellent salesman and a stupendous reader, but an uninspired critic. With the concept of a ‘canon’ or […]
A man who added phrases to the language George Orwell was a fantastic essayist. One of my favorite of his small essays is his response to an essay by T.S. Eliot that assessed the life and work of Rudyard Kipling. I am not sure what it was about Rudyard Kipling that brought out the best […]
Hannah Arendt(image source) Yesterday Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin asked the following question on twitter: Name your top three public figures you wish were still alive right now to comment on what’s happening in our country. I’ll go first (in no particular order): John McCain, Christopher Hitchens, Hunter S. Thompson. [1] A lot of people were […]
Vasily Perov, Portrait of Dostoevsky, 1872. The function of the Negro college, then, is clear: it must maintain the standards of popular education, it must seek the social regeneration of the Negro, and it must help in the solution of problems of race contact and co-operation. And finally, beyond all this, it must develop men. […]
Last week’s posting (“Everything is Worse in China”) caught the attention of Rod Dreher, who reblogged it with comments over at the American Conservative. I sent him an e-mail in response introducing a few Chinese thinkers who might be relevant to the traditionalist cause, especially in its Benedict Option version. As he has published the […]
There was once a time when the first thing I would do in the morning was rush to the computer so that I might check the comment threads of the five to ten blogs I followed on national security and strategic theory. It was the golden era of the old Strategy Sphere: a time when […]
ISIS fighters near Mosul, in the 2014 advance against the city. Image source: “ISIS in Mosul, thousands of Refugees Flee,” Rodaw.com (9 July 2014). Last week Strategy Bridge published an interesting piece by Sebastian Bae. In it Bae analyzes the United States’ strategy to defeat ISIS through the lens of the Sunzi and its precepts. […]
Mao Zedong writing On Protracted Warfare (Yan’an, 1938) Source: Wikimedia. INTRODUCTION Last fall I wrote a popular series of posts outlining the history of the eight decade war waged between the Chinese Han Dynasty and the Xiongnu (old style: Hsiung-nu) nomadic empire. My posts were a response to a prominent American strategic theorist who misunderstood […]
