Grand Strategies
Literature, Statecraft,
and World Order by Charles Hill
Yale, 384 pp., $27.50
"Statecraft cannot be practiced in the absence of literary insight,” writes Charles Hill. “Literature lives in the realm grand strategy requires, beyond rational calculation, in acts of the imagination.” Imagination is what Winston Churchill had in 1938, when he warned of Hitler’s mounting menace. Imagination is what Neville Chamberlain lacked when ahe chose the course of appeasement.
Chamberlain failed to comprehend the nature and extent of Hitler’s ambitions; and if we are to believe Hill, it may have been Churchill’s famous passion for great books that made the difference between the two men.
Literature, Hill contends, makes sense of fragments our reason cannot reconcile on its own. Of all the arts and sciences, only literature is
methodologically unbounded.
Literature’s freedom to explore endless or exquisite details, portray the thoughts of imaginary characters, and dramatize large themes through intricate plots brings it closest to the reality of “how the world really works.”
Ever since the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), sovereign states have formed the basis for international affairs. But today, nonstate actors are on the rise, world order is on the decline, transnational corporations reign over economic life. Our enemies huddle in a cave in Afghanistan one day and are seated next to us on an airplane the following day. Technology is making them ever more lethal. Culture is increasingly borderless. Ideologies such as communism and Islamofascism threaten to destroy civilized states from within. World affairs are suitably unpredictable. Statecraft requires us to deal with uncertainty—with “known unknowns,” as Donald Rumsfeld famously put it—and the intentions of foreign leaders, the course of world events, are unpredictable. A diplomat must be prepared to make decisions even when facts are unclear.
In Grand Strategies, Hill argues for “the restoration of literature as a tutor for statecraft,” describing the evolution of world order across history, from ancient empires to the modern state. Along the way he surveys the political insights of more than 70 poets and novelists, from Homer to Salman Rushdie. But Grand Strategies is also part memoir. Prior to his current incarnation as teacher and scholar, Hill enjoyed a long, distinguished tenure in the Foreign Service, and his diplomatic career included service as an aide to Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, and later as an adviser to Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the Egyptian secretary-general of the United Nations.
From Saigon to Camp David, the drama of Hill’s diplomatic career energizes this study. A lengthy meditation on Thucydides sets the stage for a midnight flight to Moscow, where the American envoy will engage Mikhail Gorbachev in a round of negotiations. For brief moments, it reads like a political thriller. “The Foreign Service of the United States,” writes Hill, “trained me to be a close reader of communist texts, as one of the best ways available to fathom what was going on in the minds of those at the top of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China.” Without literary knowledge, statesmen, no matter how well-intentioned, are doomed to fail: “The works considered in this book address the conundrums of statecraft in ways which may be used for good or ill by people in power,” and Hill warns of the dangers we face if we discount literary knowledge. The Founders “joined the literary-historical conversation of great texts about strategy, statecraft, and power across centuries.” In The Federalist, “Publius reveals the Constitution as meant to avoid the flaws of democracy revealed in classic texts.” But Rousseau rejected all prior regimes and governments as illegitimate. Rather than seeking to understand human nature, he sought to remake it. The bloodbath of the French Revolution ensued, followed closely by Napoleon’s tyranny.
Literature is, above all, “a supreme way of knowing,” and blindness to literary insight is the Achilles’ heel of pure political science. Fiction is the key to comprehending the real. Religion, and Christianity in particular, looms large here, and reason can never fully comprehend religious faith. Yet, as we were reminded on 9/11, religion remains at the forefront of international affairs. Whitman predicted that “there will soon be no more priests” and Nietzsche wrote God’s epitaph. Yet here we are, more than a century later, and God is proving himself to be a die-hard.
One shortcoming is that Hill fails to engage the text of the Bible in a serious way. It seems odd, for example, to say so little about how biblical narratives relate to the history of, say, the Holy Roman Empire. Likewise, in a lengthy chapter on the United States, the Bible’s influence on colonial and early republican history is only hinted at.
Nevertheless, religion is at the core of Hill’s prescription for a more stable world order. Religion entails ceremony, and protocol—the proper conduct of ceremony—“is the first literary genre.” Religion also authenticates the state. Legitimacy is the key to stability, and the key to legitimacy, claims Hill, is acknowledgment that world affairs are subject to a divine order: “A sacral nature must infuse world order if it is to
be legitimate.”
Indeed, diplomats, whether they realize it or not, are engaged in a religious system. And the literary realm, Hill argues, is essential for understanding the nature of man, as well as the religious/ceremonial nature of high diplomacy, for in literature, “the greatest issues of the human condition are played out.”
Nathan Harden blogs about higher education for National Review Online.