The most important book I read as a student at West Point was a weighty tome titled “Makers of Modern Strategy.” It covered the evolution of strategic thinking from Machiavelli to the nuclear age, explaining the rise and fall of states as a result of choices made by statesmen and generals about how, where, when and why to employ military force to achieve political objectives. It was an edited text—no one person, it seems, was erudite enough to be an expert across such a broad range of history—and hence suffered from differences in writing style and inconsistencies in theme, but it was the best education in grand strategy available in a single volume.

Until now. Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2011 biography of George Kennan, has compiled a lifetime of thought about success or failure in statesmanship into “On Grand Strategy.” Like “Makers of Modern Strategy,” it explores the facets of wisdom, temperament and courage that create great leaders and enduring empires. Unlike its storied predecessor, Mr. Gaddis’s book has the advantage of being a long walk with a single, delightful mind, which makes it much easier for the reader to comprehend the lessons that cohere across continents and millennia.