Conclusion
The literature on strategic history is thin. There is an abundance of military history, as
there is also of political, diplomatic, economic and social history; yet, strangely, strategic
history is largely missing. Perhaps it is not so strange, though, because both scholarly
and popular understanding of strategy and its vital function are in short supply (Strachan,
2005b). Strategy is difficult to comprehend, and even more difficult to do well. It is the
somewhat mysterious bridge between the military instrument and political objectives, the
meaning of both of which is simple to grasp. It is unfortunate that so few scholars grapple
seriously with the challenges and dilemmas of strategy, because it can provide by far the
sharpest tool for analysing the course of modern history. Our modern world has been
made, unmade and remade pre-eminently by the threat and use of organized force.
Although strategic history cannot possibly capture the whole story of modern times, it
does offer a superior guide to what happened, and why, in international relations. The
binding thesis of this text holds that strategic history provides the best navigation aids to
explain and understand the relations among polities.
To put flesh on the bare bones of a general commitment to the strategic perspective,
six themes which permeate this analysis have been identified. These are: the relationship
between stability and change, or continuity and discontinuity; the crucial nexus between
war and the politics which alone renders belligerency purposeful and meaningful; the
ill-understood distinction between war and its conduct in warfare; the frequently tension-
fraught relations between politicians and soldiers; the connections between war and the
societies that wage it; and, finally, the oddly underexplored, yet surely critical, agencies
and agents that connect war with peace and peace with war.
Strategic history always is nested in, and is shaped and driven by, multiple contexts.
The contexts specified here were: first and foremost, the political; the socio-cultural; the
economic; the technological; the military–strategic; the geographical; and the historical,
or chronological. To understand the contexts of war is to grasp a great deal. It is not,
however, to understand everything. This book does not offer a structural interpretation
of events, a story bereft of the inconvenient variability of human performance. The
history of war and peace in international relations is a big story that shows the engage-
ment of mighty forces and powerful contexts. Nevertheless, strategic history has to be
done by individual human agents. This, emphatically, is not a history without individuals
of importance.
There is an essential unity to the strategic history of modern times, regardless of the
cumulatively radical changes in contexts. The next chapter makes explicit that which was
largely left implicit here. It presents the theory of war and strategy, predominantly with
reference to the writings of the most influential of all strategic theorists, Prussian major
general Carl Philipp Gottlieb von Clausewitz.
Themes and contexts of strategic history 13Key points
- Major themes run through strategic history: continuity and discontinuity; the
relationship between politics and war; the relationship between war and
continued