Strategy: A History

by Lawrence Freedman

On this basis he has been cast as one of the founders of realism, a temperament to which strategic theorists have been presumed to be susceptible because of their relentless focus on power and their presumption that self-interest best explains behavior.

Law and morality were fragile restraints, as the powerful could make laws and define morality to suit their purposes.

“What made the war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.”

Thucydides may have stressed it for the sake of the reputation of his hero Pericles, the ruler of Athens for some thirty years from 460 BCE.

A coalition was an obvious benefit for a weaker power wishing to get stronger, but an alliance for a power that was already strong could be a mixed blessing because it could raise expectations and generate obligations while adding little in return.

As the Persian threat declined, the resentment increased and Athens became tougher, demanding

that their allies become more Athenian, including more democratic. The Spartans, by contrast, showed little interest in the internal affairs of their allies.

Donald Kagan notes the curiosity in Thucydides’s presentation of the issue to his fellow Athenians. He was probably present at these debates, yet he abandoned his normal practice of providing full reports of speeches presenting alternative points of view.19 Kagan concludes that he did so because further elaboration would have made it clear that the decisions on war were not so much inevitable but the result of Pericles’s persuasive powers.

Indeed the “war party” in Sparta was somewhat dismissive of Athenian power. King Archidamus was much warier, and more anxious to keep the peace, but his advice was ignored and in August 432 BCE, the Spartan assembly voted for war. Yet even after voting for war, Sparta still sent diplomatic missions to Athens, and these almost resulted in a compromise. In the end it came down to the Megarian Decree.

He used an argument still often heard when warning of a larger ambition behind an opponent’s apparently modest and reasonable demand. This was not a “trifle,”

“If you yield to them you will immediately be required to make another concession which will be greater, since you will have made the first concession out of fear.”

As Richard Ned Lebow has argued, far from being inevitable, war was “the result of an improbable series of remarkably bad judgments made by the leaders of the several powers involved.”

Athens and Sparta had managed to make the Thirty Years’ Peace work because there were leaders on both sides who were prepared to moderate any urges to action and aggrandizement in order to keep the peace, but each side also had hawkish factions that disliked moderation and made the case for war.

Pericles did not see the possibility of inflicting a decisive blow against Sparta, so instead he sought a stalemate. His calculation was that Athens had the reserves to outlast Sparta even if the war dragged on for a number of years. In the language of later centuries, he sought victory through enemy exhaustion rather than annihilation.

His efforts to find a course between excessive aggression and appeasement had led him to seek a combination of firmness and restraint. In the end, this increased rather than eased the risks to Athens.

Athenian democracy required that all the city’s key decisions follow intense public deliberations. Strategy could not stay implicit but had to be articulated.

Pericles enjoyed the company of the intellectuals, including Protagoras. He dismissed the idea that there was distinction to be made between men of action and those of words: “We are lovers of wisdom without sacrificing manly courage.”

Pericles then needed to ensure that events conformed to this vision. He therefore had to be much more than a persuasive orator. His speeches were strategic scripts, offering a satisfactory way forward that reflected his grasp of what might be possible in the light of the forces at work in the world.

The deeper meaning of Thucydides’s account was tragic, because it revealed the limits of strategic reasoning in the face of a contrary world: But actuality in the end proves unmanageable. It breaks in upon men’s conceptions, changes them, and finally destroys them. Even where men’s conceptions are sound and reasonable, where by their own creative power and their discernment of actuality they correspond to things, actuality in its capacity as Luck, will behave in an unreasonable way, as Pericles says, and overturn conceptions of the greatest nobility and intelligence.

Another character, Diodotus, provided a critique. When the oligarchs of Mytilene revolted unsuccessfully against Athens, Diodotus persuaded his fellow citizens not to impose a harsh punishment as demanded by the demagogue Cleon.

He then illustrated his point by making his case for leniency on the basis of Athenian interests rather than justice and by drawing attention to the limited deterrent effect of harsh punishments.

An even more striking example of Thucydides’s concern with the corruption of language was found in his description of the uprising in Corcyra, which resulted in a bloody civil war between the democrats and the oligarchs. As he described the breakdown of social order, he also described the corruption of language. Recklessness became courage, prudence became cowardice, moderation became unmanly, an ability to see all sides of a question became an incapacity to act, while violence became manly and plotting self-defense.

The most relevant for our purposes concerned the political role of philosophy, including damning those that had gone before for the very qualities that had made their intellects strategic. It was Plato who labeled this prior philosophy as sophism, for which he developed a formidable charge sheet.

Based largely on his own testimony, Plato bequeathed an enduring and demeaning image of the sophists as the “spin-doctors” of their day, rhetorical strategists, relativist in their morality, disinterested in truth, suggesting that all that really mattered was power.

For Plato, virtues were universal and timeless, and it was only through philosophy that they could be described and defined.

This charge sheet has now been discredited: the sophists were not a coherent group, and their views were complex and varied. It was not a collective name they chose for themselves, and it only acquired a pejorative connotation because of Plato.

Pericles saw intellectual cultivation as something to which all Athenians aspired; Plato saw philosophy as an exclusive vocation with pure objectives.34 Plato believed that true philosophers would be so special that they should be rulers.

Plato was no enthusiast for intellectual pluralism or the complex interaction of ideas and action that characterized a vibrant political system. The rulers must have supreme power to decide what was wise and just. This vision has had an occasional appeal to would-be philosopher-kings and has been identified as a source of totalitarianism.

The advocate was Socrates: “We want one single, grand lie which will be believed by everybody—including the rulers ideally, but failing that the rest of the city.”

Just as children might be tricked into taking medicines or soldiers encouraged into battle, so communities had to be educated into a belief in social harmony and a conviction that the existing order was natural.

Under the Romans the pendulum swung away from mētis and toward biē. Homer’s Odysseus morphed into Virgil’s Ulysses and became part of a story of deceitful and treacherous Greeks.

In Strategemata, composed by the Roman Senator Frontinus between 84 and 88, the traditions of Roman warfare were passed on. The book was widely disseminated and retained a long influence, including Machiavelli

Lisa Raphals, picking up on Detienne and Vernant’s discussion of mētis, made the comparison with the Chinese term zhi. This had a wide variety of meanings from wisdom, knowledge, and intelligence to skill, craft, cleverness, or cunning. The individual who demonstrated zhi appeared as a sage general, whose mastery of the art of deception allowed him to prevail over an opponent of stronger physical force, just like those with mētis.

A dangerous commander, according to Sun Tzu, would be reckless, cowardly, quick-tempered, too concerned with reputation, and too compassionate.

For East Asian generals, Sun Tzu became a standard text. He was an evident influence in the writings of the Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong. Napoleon was said to have studied a French Jesuit’s translation of The Art of War.

François Jullien developed an intriguing line of thought by demonstrating the similarities between the Chinese approach to war, as exemplified by Sun Tzu, and the Chinese use of language. He argued that the disinclination to engage in high-risk, potentially destructive direct confrontations in war was also followed in rhetorical conflicts, which were similarly indirect and implicit. Circuitous, subtle forms of expression, both allusive and elusive, could be the equivalents of armies dodging and harrying.

Jullien offered a contrast with the Athenians. They saw the advantages in decisive action that brought both war and argument to a quick close, thereby avoiding the expense and frustrations of prolonged confrontation.

In the same way, the Athenians were straightforward in argument. Whether in the theater, the tribunal, or the assembly, orators would make their cases directly and transparently, with points open to refutation, within a limited time period.

The suggestion, however, of a strong Greek preference for “decisive” battle came from Victor David Hanson’s controversial argument that the terms for a continuing Western way of war were set in classical times.8 Critics have challenged this theory on the basis of the analysis of Greek warfare and the subsequent history.9 Beatrice Heuser has demonstrated emphatically that at least one strong strand in Western military thought up to the Napoleonic wars was to avoid pitched battles: “Few believed either in the inevitability or the unconditional desirability of battle.”

Vegetus expressed, in terms similar to Sun Tzu, a preference for starving enemies into submission rather than fighting them (“famine is more terrible than the sword”), and spoke of how it “is better to beat the enemy through want, surprises, and care for difficult places (i.e., through maneuver) than by a battle in the open field.”

The Byzantine emperor Maurice’s Strategikon had a similar take at the start of the seventh century: “[I]t is well to hurt the enemy by deceit, by raids or by hunger, and never be enticed to a pitched battle, which is a demonstration more of luck than of bravery.”

Using armies for occasional raiding, assaulting the economic life of the enemy, and threatening and demoralizing the enemy’s population provided an alternative form of coercion to battle.

Behind all of this, argued Honig, was the “metaphysical mystique” surrounding battle, for it reflected a view of war as litigation with God as the judge and battle as decisive as a divine judgment. It came when all other forms of dispute settlement had been exhausted.

Machiavelli’s method was empirical, which is why he is considered the father of political science.

Anticipating the “minimax” outcome in twentieth-century game theory, he observed that: “In the nature of things you can never try to escape one danger without encountering another; but prudence consists in knowing how to recognize the nature of the different dangers and in accepting the least bad as good.”

“[F]ortune governs one half of our actions, but even so she leaves the half more or less in our power to control.”

He understood that battle might be a place where Fortuna had a large hand and for that reason was wary of leaving her too much of a role.

The most interesting aspects of his work, however, were less about dealing with an external enemy and more about sustaining loyalty and commitment internally.

“To persuade or dissuade a few of a thing is very easy. For if words are not enough, you can use authority or force.” Convincing the multitude was more difficult: they had to be persuaded en masse. Because of this, “excellent captains need to be orators.”

In The Prince, Machiavelli offered notoriously cynical advice on how to gain and hold on to power, by being ready to indulge in all manner of private dealings while appearing publicly beyond reproach.