by another: the modern world has been unmadeseveral times by war. Each of the great
conflicts of 1792–1 8 15, 1914–1 8 , 1939–45 and 1947– 8 9 had transformative effects upon
international relations. One author, Geoffrey Perret, tells us that ‘Since 1775 no nation
on Earth has had as much experience of war as the United States: nine major wars in nine
generations’ (Perret, 1990: 55 8 ). He warns that states are both made and unmade by
strategic histories that record excessive defence preparation or war-making. At the time
of his writing in the late 19 8 0s, the theory of imperial overstretch was politically
fashionable (Kennedy, 19 8 7). Ironically, it was seized upon by those critical of American
policy, but it showed its potency as a theory in the precipitate decline and definitive fall
of the Soviet empire. The point most worthy of note is that it is hard to find countries that
have not been made by war. Inevitably, some of them have been unmade by the very same
agent. Nearly all countries were created through a process of greater or lesser violence.
There are a few exceptions, but they are so minor as to prove the authority of the general
rule. As late as the 1740s, England was still enforcing its union with Scotland against
Jacobite challenge by force of arms, while the Irish dimension to the United Kingdom
continues to occasion some violence. Peace may have broken out in Northern Ireland,
but it remains fragile.
Because war, and its conduct in warfare, is no more than an instrument of political
decisions, or policy, one might argue that strategic history can make no sense apart from
political history. That is true, which is why this narrative and analysis attach such high
importance to several of war’s most vital contexts, pre-eminent among which is the
political. Those contexts are identified and discussed in Chapter 1. But while granting
the sovereignty of the political, the past 200 years have revealed that warlike outcomes
are consistent with a bewildering array of specific causes, general conditions and
particular triggers. Politics and the other sources of contextual fuel for conflict yielded
an irregular, but always repeated, urge to fight during those two centuries. War was
ever available as a live policy option. On balance, it has been a relatively stable agent
of politics, while its political and other parents have served up a veritable feast of his-
torically particular motives. Just as the very concept of strategic history provides,
indeed reflects, a unified understanding of the course of events over 200 years, so
also does a fundamental view of why communities are prepared to fight. In that latter
regard, Thucydides wrote for all time when he identified ‘fear, honor, and interest’ as
the strongest and most enduring of motives (Strassler, 1996: 43). Particular wars may
be prevented, or tamed and rapidly concluded, by the settlement of specific political
differences. But war itself, war as a human social institution of great antiquity, will
never be eradicated until people discover definitive remedies for the maladies, even
pathologies, that are the anxieties conflated by Thucydides into his deadly triad of
motives.
Some historians warn against the grand narrative, the explanatory framework that
threatens to explain too much (Black, 2004: 1). Braving such perils, this book is con-
structed around the grand narrative that strategic history provides a valid and essential
way of understanding the course of events. Also, this theory holds that the strategic
history of the past 200 years serves well enough to enable one to make sense of the ebb
and flow of events. Most major developments in international relations from 1 8 00 to the
present can be accommodated, even in many cases explained, with reference to strategic
criteria. Of course there is far more to history than war and peace but, to repeat the thesis,
2 War, peace and international relations