to the net objective, and abstract, advantage of offence relative to defence. Nevertheless,
a belief in the superiority of the offence can hardly help but offer support to arguments
that urge the taking of the military initiative.
‘Geography is destiny’ is an overstatement of an enduring truth that has pervasive
strategic meaning. All strategic history has a geographical context. We humans live in
geography, are attached to our home geography, and sometimes covet other people’s
geography. Especially in its political and strategic connections, geography plays a major
role in the story told and analysed here. The geopolitical context, which is to say the
political meaning of spatial relationships, could not help but provide a fairly stable
context for the strategic history of the past two centuries. The geographical location of
political units, the identity and characteristics of neighbours and neighbours-but-one, and
the political implications of the natural arrangement of land and sea have had far more
than a marginal influence on events. Consider the strategic consequences of Germany’s
position in the centre of Europe, or of America’s effectively insular location an ocean
removed from both Asia and Europe. Every strategic matter has, and must have, a
geopolitical context of some consequence.
Finally, it is important to recognize the salience of the historical context per se. In
other words, while many historians prefer to write and teach their history thematically,
there is no escaping the fact, even the tyranny, of chronology. Every event, episode,
process and trend discussed here occurred at a specific date and, necessarily, happened
in the stream of time. That stream and its implications play momentous roles in strategic
history. The human actors discussed in this book played out their roles on a stage that
was set in good part by great impersonal forces, or even by structures, but human agency
is always important. This book is about human behaviour – strategic behaviour admit-
tedly, but still human. The people in this strategic history were moulded by the times in
which they lived, the societies of which they were a part, and of course by the ideas that
were fashionable and sometimes authoritative. In other words, in order to understand how
and why people behaved strategically as they did, it is essential that we locate them
historically.
For example, it is necessary to remember that nearly all of the politicians and soldiers
of 1914 had no hands-on understanding of modern warfare. Arguable exceptions
included the British experience against the Boers in South Africa (1 8 99–1902), and the
Russians and the Japanese in their struggle for Manchuria and Korea (1904–5). In sharp
contrast with 1914, in 1939 the human players in all the countries entangled in the
European crisis had had almost too much personal experience of modern warfare. Most
of the politicians and all of the senior soldiers of 1939 were among the survivors of
World War I. Their attitudes were shaped by their experience of total war and its conse-
quences. As a general rule, policy-makers are too busy in office to add significantly to
the intellectual capital with which they began their duties. That capital is the product of
their period of education, which may have been brief, and especially of some defining
experience. For every individual and his or her contribution to strategic history, there is
a historical context keyed to a definite chronology.
These seven contexts must have a constant relevance to our analysis. Strategic history
is nested within them, and is shaped and driven by them. Their presence will be noticed
throughout this tale.
12 War, peace and international relations