This historian is also leaning, somewhat more controversially, in the direction of acknowledging that George W. Bush is likely to be remembered as the first great grand strategist of the 21st century. He is, however, somewhat ahead of most of his faculty colleagues and many — though by no means all —of his students in this respect

Let me suggest, though, that this would not be the first time professors and their students have been surprised to see grand strategies from unlikely sources.

Consider this comment from Henry Kissinger on one of Bush's predecessors: "Reagan's was an astonishing performance and, to academic observers, nearly incomprehensible. . . . When all was said and done, a president with the shallowest academic background was to develop a foreign policy of extraordinary consistency and relevance."

But how could this be? How could the shallowness of academic training be an advantage in the conduct of grand strategy? This is a really disturbing idea, but I think we'd better begin pondering it because to paraphrase another great grand strategist, it's beginning to look like deja vu all over again.

So let me try to answer this question — why the academy finds leaders like Reagan and Bush so difficult to understand — somewhat in the spirit of Larry Summers, by tossing out a few provocations.

First, that grand strategy is, by its nature, an ecological enterprise. It requires taking information from a lot of different fields, evaluating it intuitively rather than systematically, and then acting. It is, in this sense, different from most academic training, which as it advances pushes students toward specialization, and then toward professionalization, by which I mean the ever deeper mastery of a diminishing number of things. To remain broad you've got to retain a certain shallowness — but beyond the level of undergraduate education and sometimes not even there, the academy is not particularly comfortable with that idea.

Second, grand strategy requires setting an objective and sticking to it. The academy does not take easily to that idea either. It asks us constantly to question our assumptions and reformulate our objectives. That's fine to the extent that that sharpens our intellectual skills, and therefore prepares us for leadership. But it's not the same thing as leadership: for that, you've got to say "here's where we ought to be by such and such a time, and here's how we're going to get there." Taking the position that, "on the one hand this, and on the other hand that," as you might around a seminar table, won't get you there. Nor will saying that you voted for the $87 billion appropriation before you voted against it.

Third, grand strategy requires the ability to respond rapidly to the unexpected. It acknowledges that trends can reverse themselves suddenly, that "tipping points" can occur, and that leaders must know how to exploit them. The academy loves this sort of thing when it happens on the basketball court or the hockey rink. In the classroom, though, it resists the idea: instead the emphasis is too often on theory, which promises predictability, and therefore no surprises. That's why the academy tends to be so surprised when events like the end of the Cold War and 9/11 take place. Leaders, like athletes, have to be more agile.

Fourth, grand strategy requires the making of moral judgments, because that's how leadership takes place: in that sense, it's a faith-based initiative. You have to convince people that your aspirations correspond with their own, and that you're serious about advancing them. You don't lead by trying to persuade people that distinctions between good and evil are social constructions, that there are no universal standards for making them, that we should always try to understand the viewpoint of others, even when they are trying to kill us.

Finally, grand strategy requires great language. As the best leaders from Pericles through Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan have always known, words are themselves instruments of power. Their careful choice and courageous use can shake the stability of states, as when Reagan said, before anybody else, that the Soviet Union was an "evil empire" headed for the "ash-heap of history." They can also undermine walls, as when Reagan famously demanded, against the advice of his own speech-writers, that Gorbachev tear one down.

But where, within the academy is the use of great language taught? Where would you go to learn how to make a great speech? Certainly not to political science, language, and literature departments at Yale, where as students advance they are spurred on toward ever higher levels of jargon-laden incomprehensibility. I think not even to my beloved History Department, where my colleagues seem more interested in the ways words reflect structures of power than in ways words challenge or even overthrow structures of power.

The art of rhetoric, within the academy, is largely a lost art — which probably helps to explain why the academy is as often as surprised as it is to discover that words really do still have meanings — and that consequences come from using them.

The Bush administration, however — like Reagan's, Roosevelt's, Wilson's Lincoln's — understands that words carry weight. It is choosing them carefully. It is applying them strategically. And to the surprise of its critics, is getting results. It would be a mistake, then, not to listen.