Given the Western ability to produce deadly weapons, its propensity to create cheap, plentiful goods, and its tradition of seeing war in pragmatic rather than ritual terms as a mechanism to advance po...
General George S. Patton may have been uncouth, but he wasn’t wrong when he bellowed, Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser.
Few American commentators evaluated MacArthur’s strategic sense at various stages in his generalship in Korea; it was instead the perception of whether he was winning or losing that mattered most to t...
Human character is unchanging and thus its conduct in calamitous times is always predictable.
Who we are, how we think, and the manner in which we act, ipsis factis, are considered obnoxious, dangerous, and unpalatable to many fundamentalist Muslims around the globe, who endure manifestations...
We should note that almost every technological transformation of consequence has taken place under Western auspices—if not Western in the strict geographical sense, then Western in the notion of a cul...
To conclude wars decisively and achieve prewar aims, the victor must defeat, and often even humiliate militarily, an enemy and force the loser to abandon prewar behavior before offering a magnanimous...
To assert that military history suggested that wars broke out because bad men, in fear or in pride, sought material advantage or status, or because sometimes good but naive men had done too little to...
Out of spite, McCain had flipped on his earlier support of Obamacare just to cast the deciding vote that defeated Trump’s effort to repeal and replace it.
Osama bin Laden did not attack on September 11 because there was a dearth of American diplomats willing to talk with him in the Hindu Kush. He did not think America denied its Muslim citizens the righ...
Nicholas Monsarrat’s epic postwar novel of the Battle of the Atlantic, The Cruel Sea, is a quite different, nightmarish elemental story of men at sea amid
Mexica warriors were predicated on birth and status. In a cyclical pattern of cause and effect, such greater innate advantages gave aristocrats predominance on the battlefield in taking captives, whic...
Japan would live and die by the race card—defining (and demonizing) America as white and thus Japan as a kindred but clearly superior yellow people.
In Trump’s mind, the problem with federal agencies was not just that they overreached and were weaponized, but that their folds of bureaucracy led to incompetency.
Barack Obama, for at least the first two years after his departure, had all but destroyed the traditional role of Democrats as a federal, state, and local majority party—and in its place had paved the...
After fighting for four long years, we were completely surprised by the Soviets’ efforts to absorb Eastern Europe, and their rejection of almost all wartime assurances of elections to come.
It was the horror of the two world wars—Verdun, the Somme, Hiroshima—that led to our own era’s questioning of the tragic view of war. Such a reaction was certainly true and understandable in a Europe...
Close cooperation with Saudi Arabia against the Shiite Houthis in Yemen. Apparently, Trump figured that to demand cessations of these operations that others had started would call upon him the wrath o...
Agenda. These themes frame the formal plan of this book. The argument covers the three years since Trump announced his presidential bid in July 2015 to mid-2018, as he neared the end of the second yea...
When the successful military action against Saddam Hussein ended in April 2003, more than 70 percent of the American people backed the invasion of Iraq, with politicians and pundits alike elbowing eac...