Reddit reviews On the Origins of War: And the Preservation of Peace

I have a lot of reading assignments to give you, but I'm not certain how much time you are going to budget for research. At the very least I hope this will help you refine your Google fu and wiki consumption.

Step one : read Sun Tzu's Art of War. It's a short read, and you'll have a firm grasp of how military leadership is based on proven principles. You'll get a crash course on the essentials of intelligence, logistics, strategy, and tactics. If you want to write about warfare, you can't begin without knowing how it is conducted.

Next, I would approach classical warfare. I highly recommend the works of Donald Kagan, a Yale professor who's works on the Peloponnesian War are essentially the gold standard on the subject. He wrote a book called On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace. His thesis statement is that "A persistent and repeated error through the ages has been the failure to understand that the preservation of peace requires active effort, planning, the expenditure of resources, and sacrifice, just as war does." What this means is that peace is not the default condition between two states. The natural tendency in foreign relations is entropy and warfare, and thus peace is only maintained through exhaustive effort. Kagan should inspire a certain level of pessimism/realism that could help you make your "empires" seem less cartoonish, and more like states that made hard pragmatic decisions to ensure the survival of their respective populations.

Skim the works of Nicollo Machiavelli. You need to read two of his books : The Prince, and The Art of War. He was an Italian statesmen during what we consider to be Renaissance Italy. It was a time when the country was broken up into warring city-states that shifted alliances constantly. He wrote The Prince to earn the favor of one of these rulers, and with this book he essentially destroyed every illusion about power being a natural extension of god's grace. He showed the world how "the sausage is made" in politics. It was so utterly cynical and dark that some considered him to be the devil himself, and a few historians can't even believe he took his own position seriously. His thesis : of course a prince should be both loved and feared, but if you must choose one, it is "better to be feared than loved". You'll understand every character from Darth Vader to Tony Soprano better.

Next, I would send you to Max Boot. Specifically, pick up War Made New. His narrative begins with the beginning of the Modern Era (roughly 1490), when gunpowder began to change the rules of warfare, and ends with the modern War on Terror in the early 21st century. He shows you how each technological leap from gunpowder and replaceable parts, through the industrial revolutions, to the internet era each shaped warfare. In turn, he shows you how successes on the battlefield shaped the global landscape.

Thats all I have time for at the moment. Please check back if you have more questions.

I mean, we've basically always been at war.

And I very much subscribe to Donald Kagan's views on the issue of war from On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace, wherein he posits that peace is not the "default state" for countries and that the modern perception is very much not congruent with the pre-WWII understanding of war.

The only disagreement I have with the article is "Danger #2".

The offensive preparations (especially the Schleiffen Plan) of the great powers certainly had a profound effect on the escalation of the conflict, but I think the situation is, at the risk of being reductive, a sound illustration of the prisoners' dilemma.

Some would posit that the great powers assumed the lessons of Snyder's "Danger #2" following World War I, so much so that it informed the Allies' grand strategy in the interwar years, especially France's investment in the Maginot Line. The efficacy of that strategy and the fate of France is well known.

I'm willing to admit though that the accuracy of the concept, when applied to the Pacific, might be totally different.

I'd tend to concur with dstz.

While I think there is a great value in many if not most of what Hegel, Rousseau , Hume and Locke have to say. I find I do not take alot of weight with some of the more modern examples.

Particularly, Fukuyama and Friedman both take a fairly rosy view of the world - which is pretty seriously at odds with reality. For two men who never have to work a days' labor in their lives again, this is awfully convenient.

But such a trite dismissal of the various real hardships faced in order to get to some idealized future, it underpins my feeling that most neoconservative writers of the last 20+ years are pretty intellectually bankrupted by their breezy predictions on the shape of things to come, without ever considering the negatives or consequences of wars,propaganda or bad policies etc.

Which leads to another observation, it is by no means a given that liberal democracies are "the wave of the future".

A fact too often overlooked is that fascism - in the early 20th century did not fail as an economic model , but failed because of rampant militarization on the part of the principal participants.

Certainly given the corporate takeover of US and to a lesser extent European markets by corporatist interests, one does not have to examine the various trillion dollar financial fiasco's to see trouble ahead, (and with the recent LIBOR fiasco it's possible that we live during the planet's "first" quadrillion dollar financial problem).

So to the contrary liberal democracies have a number of critical flaws which are likely fatal in the longer term.

1. An inability to contain and confront militarism
   
2. An inability to properly regulate entrenched industrial/financial interests from setting policy/national priorities.
   
3. A long term inability to maintain fiscal stability for more than say - 25 years at a clip.
   
   In this respect, one need only consider the successes by other non-democratic or "less" democratic systems of governance to see that while they may not offer quite the same things to their citizens/subjects/people, they can still execute on notions of empire.
   
   I think most westerners tend to carefully overlook China's rise to prominence , not as a liberal democracy but as a totalitarian command economy and a heavily corrupt, hyper-active state controlled capitalist system.
   
   More over, when one looks at the real scholarship of writers like Paul Kennedy's "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers", or Niall Fergeson's "The Ascent of Money" I would even recommend - with some qualifications, Jarred Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel", Another book, by Donald Kagan has a very interesting read "On the Origins of War : And the Preservation of Peace, an easy read that's well worth it. Dr. Kagan's expertise lie in two areas, the Peloponesian War and the precursor history to World War 1, and it shows. While his summaries of Hitler and the Cold War are complete, it's clear his real heart is in the first two areas of inquiry.
   
   In particular these books detail in short order, how capricious history and the collapse of particular power systems can be.
   
   

• Both The Ascent of Money and
  
• Guns, Germs and Steel have been made into documentaries.
  
  I strongly recommend the book / e-reader versions though.
  
  I became rather concerned, a few years back regarding oil policy and the notions of "Peak Oil" , which is an extraordinarily important concern. This will DEFINITELY cut into the "prime" of many a great nation, when oil starts to become uncomfortably expensive.
  
  Another troubling read is The Long Emergency an analogous documentary is "The End of Suburbia", it poses the hard question of what does a world where oil / energy is 2, 3 or 5 times as expensive - and while Mr. Kuntsler I think is a little bit of an alarmist, he's not grossly wrong, like England, or Spain or France, the United States too, will have to rapidly come to terms with the practical limits of our ambition in - more or less our generation.
  
  Here again, I'm not suggesting that someone won't invent a "Mr. Fusion" and save the day, or that the US consumer base, won't transition to hyper-efficient cars over the next 10-15 years, but it's the other 7 billion people that need to also transition if we are going to have anything like a "happy" future.