tempting to explain the past in terms of its consequences. This phenomenon is especially
prevalent in the field of strategic history, since major wars all but demand to be inter-
preted as the necessary consequence of a host of preceding conditions, trends and events.
The idea that great wars are uniquely potent in their ability to shape international relations
for decades to come, a persuasive idea indeed, can march in step with the notion that, in
some inescapable sense, anticipation of those great wars dominated their antecedent
periods. This is an unsafe assumption. To illustrate the point, Chapter 1 of The Second
World Warby Spencer C. Tucker bears the title ‘The Road to War, 1931–1939’ (Tucker,
2004). With the benefit of hindsight, one can hardly object to such a description of the
1930s. But does it aid understanding to approach the international relations and strategic
history of that decade almost solely with reference to its explosive conclusion? Most of
the statesmen and soldiers of the 1930s, certainly prior to Germany’s illegal reoccupation
of the Rhineland on 7 March 1936, did not believe that they were on ‘the road to war’.
Indeed, approached historically, which is to say from prior to after, it is not entirely self-
evident that the 1930s were ‘the road to war’, at least up to a certain date. As earth-
shaking events, the great conflicts of the past two centuries easily can seem to have been
overdetermined. One needs to beware of the approach which reads backwards from the
facts of wars to the causes that are presumed to have been responsible for them. Similarly,
one has to be on guard against the complementary view that strategic history proceeds
purposively towards some preordained, if only temporary and partial, conclusion.
Themes
The first and most general theme is the rich interplay between strategic historical
continuity and discontinuity. What changes and what does not? Although these pages
tell a tale punctuated by many revolutions of several kinds, the continuities also are
impressive. Chapter 2 demonstrates that war, the subject which comprises the core of this
story, has a nature that is as unchanging as its character is highly variable. With some
exceptions granted, the atomic discovery for example, strategic history more often moves
by evolution than by revolution. Moreover, there are factors that always matter deeply,
even when discontinuity is unarguable, say as between the military styles, the tactical
‘ways of war’, of the German and British armies in 191 8 , as contrasted with 1914.
Morale is by far the most important component of fighting power, while discipline
and training are eternal necessities. Vociferous defenders of traditional values are apt
to receive rough treatment by the prophets for novelty, but the last 200 years have
registered many a claim for dramatic discontinuity in strategic and international political
affairs which seriously overreached the bounds of the possible. Time after time in the
twentieth century, the conclusion of a great war was expected, or at least hoped, to herald
a brave new world characterized by a pattern of international cooperation for which a
new institutional framework was optimistically provided. Later chapters will comment
critically upon both the League of Nations and its successor, the United Nations
Organization (UN), as vehicles for the continuities and anticipated discontinuities
in international relations. A most important question is why strategic history, for all its
obvious dynamism, has enduring features which on balance are destructive of inter-
national political stability. ‘Fear, honour and interest’ comprise a powerful compound
source of continuity.
Themes and contexts of strategic history 5