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Conclusion/Consilium

E

veryone knows what a conclusion is—it summarizes the material one has
just covered and makes some kind of interpretation about it. Virtually
every book ends with a conclusion that reiterates the key points in the various
chapters, and then pulls them together to provide some kind of meaning to it
all. The Latin word consilium goes further. It generally translates as “advice,”
“suggestion,” “purpose,” “judgment,” or “wisdom.” Hopefully, this book has
done both, provide a conclusion and offer some judgment, or even wisdom,
about what we have covered here. Simply writing “history,” telling the stories
of the past, does have value—after all, we move forward based on what has
come before us. But simply knowing the “facts” of history does not give us
much of a foundation to go forward and learn from them, to understand why
people acted a certain way, why certain conditions emerged, why some won
and some lost, and so forth. So we need to offer a conclusion, but we must
provide consilium as well, to use history to plan for the future, to provide a
purpose to study the past and see what it can teach us, to give us wisdom.
Now, at the end of this examination of the U.S. from the Civil War onward,
we should have both a conclusion and consilium. Moving forward, we have the
advice of the past to guide us.
It is Indeed fitting that a book that covers U.S. history from the Civil War
to the present based on the concepts of power and its impact on the American
people, and detailing its growth not just at home but also abroad, would con-
clude with the U.S. at the crossroads of political power and economic strength
and struggling for answers to the dilemmas in which it finds itself. The wars
in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as a major intervention in Libya and a drone
war in Pakistan, saber-rattling against Russia, and non-U.S. combat involve-
ment in various spots like Syria and Palestine, along with significantly