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Book Reviews
a

F. G. Hoffman , John Bew , David French , Nicolas

d

Lewkowicz , Thomas Rid , Paul Staniland , Tim

g

Stevens & Peter J. P. Krause

a

Fairfax Station , VA

King's College London

Brentwood , Essex

University of Bristol

The Shalem Center , Jerusalem, Israel

University of Chicago

King's College London

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Published online: 21 Oct 2010.

To cite this article: F. G. Hoffman , John Bew , David French , Nicolas Lewkowicz ,
Thomas Rid , Paul Staniland , Tim Stevens & Peter J. P. Krause (2010) Book Reviews,
Journal of Strategic Studies, 33:5, 777-795, DOI: 10.1080/01402390.2010.513199
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The Journal of Strategic Studies

Vol. 33, No. 5, 777795, October 2010

BOOK REVIEWS

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Donald Kagan, Thucydides: The Reinvention of History. New York:

Viking, 2009. Pp. 257. $26.95, PB. ISBN 9-780-14311-829-9.
No one can fault Thucydides for lack of ambition. It will be enough for
me, he wrote nearly 25 centuries ago, if these words of mine are
judged useful by those who want to understand clearly the events which
happened in the past and which (human nature being what it is)
will . . . be repeated in the future. In a massive narrative covering
notable examples of Greek hubris, the Athenian author sought to
produce a possession for all time. While Thucydides might be accused
of arrogance, he did achieve his goal. Human nature being what it is,
the interplay of fear, honor and interest in human conflict has been
continuously repeated. His History of the Peloponnesian War remains
a classic text and has rightly earned him accolades as the father of
political history. Thucydides called war a savage schoolmaster, and he
effectively addressed the role of strategic assessment, the importance of
domestic politics in conflict, the complexities of alliances and
diplomacy, and the interplay of land and sea warfare.
For this reason, Thucydides sits on a pedestal among historians, and
his work is considered de rigueur today for anyone serious about
military history and international relations. His insights have proven
invaluable to serious students attempting to understand the past and
apply it to the present and future. Much of this reputation is based on
Thucydides purportedly dispassionate style, attention to detail, and
perceived objectivity. Comparing him to Herodotus, the author Robert
Kaplan observes, Thucydides is more trustworthy. He is also more
limited. Thucydides gives us a distilled rendition of the facts. Likewise,
Princetons James McPherson prefers Thucydides precisely because he
is a more careful, precise, and trustworthy historian who does not try to
go beyond the evidence.
Yet, as the distinguished Yale classicist Donald Kagan shows in
Thucydides: The Reinvention of History, our Athenian narrator is not
quite the detached historian we were led to think. After he was exiled as
a disgraced Athenian admiral for the embarrassing loss of Amphipolis
in 424 BC, Thucydides had much time to ponder the war. However, he
was also biased by his association with critical players like Pericles and
his preference for the propertied class. Like any historian, Thucydides
ISSN 0140-2390 Print/ISSN 1743-937X Online/10/050777-19
DOI: 10.1080/01402390.2010.513199

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had to create a framework for the war and had to select facts and weigh
sources and arrange a narrative. His History is very much a personal
history with honor and reputation at stake. Contrary to what we might
have thought, Thucydides is more subtle than trustworthy. Like
Winston Churchill, he carefully crafted a story he wanted the audience
to accept. As Kagan reveals in his wonderfully handled account,
Thucydides was human after all and his account should be treated with
some skepticism. The author of his own highly regarded four-volume
history of the ancient Greeks own Long War, Kagan meticulously
weighs the evidence from other sources of that time as well as
Thucydides own account.
Thus, while Thucydides paints Pericles and his grand strategy for the
war as completely reasonable, Kagan finds this to be a revisionist
interpretation. Blame for the protracted and plague-ridden strife of
Athens was laid at the feet of the fickle nature of democratic rule by the
Athenian historian. No mention is made of Pericles failure to ensure
that the Athenian treasury was robust enough to make the strategy
viable or whether his defensive strategy fitted Greek culture.
Likewise, Thucydides would have his readers believe that the
infamous Sicilian expedition in 415 (and the next years surge) should
not be blamed on the aristocratic Nicias. Again no mention is made of
Nicias own failures to ensure that his expedition was equipped with
the cavalry required to take Syracuse, or his poor tactical dispositions
and weak leadership. Kagan convincingly demonstrates that Thucydides shades his arguments, largely by omission, to craft his own
interpretation of events against the contemporary accounts of his time.
While generous with praise for the Athenians research, Professor
Kagan finds that For all his unprecedented efforts to seek and test the
evidence, and for all his originality and wisdom, he was not infallible.
While not the perfect picture of detachment his admirers thought
him to be, Kagan has no problem arguing that the study of Thucydides
text still merits our time. As he concludes: His History raises for the
first time countless questions about the development of human societies
that remain very relevant today. He looks deeply into the causes of war,
drawing a distinction between those openly alleged and those more
fundamental but less obvious. Kagan continuously demonstrates a
mastery of his subject matter and the broader context of the age.
Anyone who wants to understand Thucydides in breadth, depth and
context should read Kagans discerning deconstruction of the underlying evidence. The author dissects the arguments embedded in the
History of the Peloponnesian War with exquisite detail and scholarship. The end product is a masterful work of history that will assuredly
be judged as an indispensable commentary, highly recommended for all
graduate-level courses in history and international security studies or

Book Reviews 779

for anyone wanting to understand why the past will be repeated in the
future.
F. G. HOFFMAN 2010
Fairfax Station, VA

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Jeremy Black, The Battle of Waterloo: A New History. London: Icon

Books, 2010. Pp. 220. 14.99, PB. ISBN 9-781-84831-155-8.
Both experts and amateur enthusiasts will be interested in the latest
offering from one of Britains foremost and most prolific military
historians, though this book is more clearly geared to the latter.
Professor Jeremy Black offers a fresh perspective on the Battle of
Waterloo of 1815, by emphasising the importance of the long-term
military, political, geopolitical and strategic context in which it took
place. In doing so, he provides a counterpoint to those historians who
see the impact of Napoleon and his vast conscript army as a military
revolution to go alongside the political revolution which began in Paris
in 1789. Instead, Black believes that Waterloo in common with much
of the history of the so-called revolutionary period testifies to the
resilience of ancien regime ideas, structures, societies, and solutions,
including military means. If anything, he argues, the potential for
change was best represented not by Napoleon, whose Caesarism made
him essentially a destructive force, but by the capability of the
impersonal state in the shape of Britain, headed (though not led) by the
elderly, deaf, blind and mentally unstable George III.
The book is, in essence, a synthesis of the most recent secondary
literature on Waterloo, so readers expecting to find fresh archival
research will be disappointed. Much of the ground which is covered
will also be familiar to professional historians of this period. For
example, Black spends a significant amount of time explaining
Napoleons preference for concentrating his resources and attentions
on a single front at one time and his avoidance of lengthy, sapping
campaigns in favour of decisive set-piece battles. The same might be
said of the observation that Britain and Russia were the biggest winners
from the post-war settlement, or the section which deals with Frances
return to the international system after 1815.
Nonetheless, the obvious and admirable attempt to address a wider
audience does not distract from the underlying quality of analysis.
Black navigates the work of other historians with eloquence and brio,
and a refreshing lightness of touch. At most junctures, he emphasises
the existence of continuity over change and the accidental (or
circumstantial) ahead of individual genius. This is not simply a case

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of the revenge of the particular on the general so much as an attempt to
restore complexity where simplistic narratives have taken over.
While steering clear of mystical readings of his strengths, his
chapter on Napoleons generalship is accessible, balanced and
judicious. Likewise, his account of the Peninsular War more
particularly the lessons that Wellington learned from it and applied
at Waterloo is also impressive and useful to scholars of any level.
When it comes to Waterloo itself, we are left with a vivid picture of the
chaotic as much as the heroic reality of the battle: the uncommon level
of hand-to-hand combat; the poor visibility because of the huge
clouds of gunfire smoke which filled the air; the poor communication
between officers due to mounted couriers regularly falling off their
horses, often to their deaths; and the high rate of casualties from
backfiring cannons.
It is in the last few chapters where Black opens himself to consider
the wider impact of Waterloo on domestic politics, geopolitics and
diplomacy that he makes some of his most interesting and original
observations, but also veers slightly off script. There are one or two
instances in which the tone becomes unnecessarily polemical: such as
his complaint about what he sees as an attempt to de-militarise
military history in academia or more tangentially a condemnation
of New Labours attitude to history in contrast with Margaret
Thatchers robust historicized nationalism. Similarly, while the overall
emphasis on continuity is convincing, it is not quite accurate to say that
the European great-power system did not change substantially for
several decades; the Treaty of Vienna was a watershed in international
relations and, of course, most of its provisions were agreed before
Napoleon escaped from Elba.
Waterloo is often accredited with creating the assumption that one
great set-piece battle could settle a war something which subsequent
wars, from the Crimean to World War II, spectacularly disproved.
Towards the end of the essay, Black makes the point that the
Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars the lessons of which shaped
military strategy through much of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries are also seen as less worthy of study in a modern era of
insurrectionary and counter-insurrectionary warfare. In fact, as he
points out, such tactics were a crucial facet of the great power warfare
from 1792 to 1815, particularly the guerrilla warfare which occurred
on the Spanish Peninsula. Unfortunately, the author does not expand
on the insight any further, but contemporary military strategists could
do worse than turn their attention to this period.
JOHN BEW 2010
Kings College London

Book Reviews 781

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William Philpott, Bloody Victory: The Sacrifice of the Somme and the
Making of the Twentieth Century. London: Little Brown, 2009.
Pp.699. 25.00, HB. ISBN 978-1-4087-0108-9.
The Battle of the Somme in 1916 was the biggest and most expensive
battle ever fought by the British Army. Stupid and callous generals
mismanaged operations on a grand scale in the course of a pointless
battle that condemned a whole generation of young Britons to their
deaths. These are the accepted cliches that have left a scar on the British
national psyche that remains to this day. They are why most of the
Anglophone literature on the battle focuses entirely on the British
experience.
But Bill Philpotts starting point is that such a narrow reading of
the past cannot make sense of the battle because it fails to
comprehend the bigger picture. Basing his conclusions not merely
on British, but also on Canadian, Australian, French and German
archival sources, it is that bigger picture that he presents here. It takes
two sides to make a battle, and what is important about this book is
that it integrates the operations of both Britains major ally, the
French, and their common enemy, the Germans, into the story. In
doing so Bloody Victory goes a long way towards transforming the
time-honoured narrative.
Philpotts assessment of the British experience on the Somme reflects,
and builds upon, the modern scholarly consensus, albeit one that has
hardly penetrated the popular consciousness. This was a war between
industrial empires, and it inevitably degenerated into an attritional
struggle. Casualties were bound to be grievously high. The British
Armys losses on 1 July 1916 were excessive. The infantry were sent
over the top to achieve over-ambitious objectives with too little artillery
support. But thereafter the British Army began to learn valuable
lessons. By September, its professional skills had improved and its rate
of losses had dropped. But what is less well-understood, even by
scholars, is that the Somme was not a British, but an Anglo-French
offensive. The battle was just one part of a bigger Entente strategy. The
French committed about the same number of troops to the battle as
the British, but thanks to their greater professionalism from the start of
the battle they suffered significantly fewer casualties in their operations
south of the river.
If the book has a hero it is the French commander, Ferdinand Foch.
Recognising that a breakthrough was impossible, by September 1916
Foch had begun to develop a new operational art form, the bataille
generale. Combining high tempo operations, material superiority,
manoeuvre and an attritional strategy, he showed that by knocking the
Germans off-balance it was at least possible to push them backwards.

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When he practised it on a much grander scale as the Allied
generalissimo during the Hundred Days campaign in 1918, it was
this doctrine that was finally to shatter the cohesion of the German
Army.
But that cohesion had already suffered a grievous blow on the
Somme. If both the French and British lost heavily in the summer of
1916, the biggest losers in Philpotts estimation, were the Germans.
Coming on top of their casualties at Verdun, by the end of the battle the
Germans had lost about a million men on the Western Front in the
course of 1916. In the authors stark, but realistic, assessment,
industrial war in the early twentieth century was not about controlling
territory; it was concerned with deploying machines to kill men. By the
end of the battle the Germans soldiers determination to fight on to final
victory at whatever the cost was starting to crack.
The book also goes beyond the battlefield to examine how the battle
was interpreted and understood on the home fronts of the belligerents.
This enables Philpott to provide a compelling critique of the myth that
the battle was futile. It did not seem futile either to the men who fought
it or their families back home. The Somme pitted not just armies
against each other, but opposing political and cultural systems. It was a
struggle between parliamentary democracy, in its French and British
forms, versus authoritarian German kultur. It was just as much a
psychological and political struggle as it was a military battle of
attrition.
It does the memory of those who died during the battle a grave
disservice to suggest that they did not die for a good cause. The British
believed they were fighting to crush the evils of Prussian militarism. The
French were determined to liberate their occupied provinces from the
German yoke. The Germans were fighting to defend their beleaguered
empire. Everyone knew that they had right on their side. Today these
might not seem like ideas worth dying for. But our inability to grasp the
fact that they did seem like supremely good causes to soldiers and
civilians in 1916 shows how far removed we are from the world of our
grandfathers and great-grandfathers.
DAVID FRENCH 2010
Brentwood, Essex
Giles MacDonogh, 1938: Hitlers Gamble. London: Constable, 2009.
20.00, HB. ISBN 9-781-84529-845-6.
This book chronicles the eventful year of 1938, starting with a review
of Hitlers strategic plans, as revealed in the Hossbach minutes of the

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meeting summoned by Hitler in November 1937. The Hossbach
memorandum, which became an important piece of evidence at the
Nuremberg Trials, outlined Hitlers aims for the future of the
Reich. Hitlers blueprint called for the preservation and enlargement
of the German racial community, not overseas, but in Europe.
The Reichs territorial expansion would provide the German nation
with the required Lebensraum to achieve economic self-sufficiency.
This required the annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakia and
the extraction of their much needed manpower, foreign currency
and raw materials in order to entrench Germanys geostrategic
position.
MacDonogh points out that it seems unlikely . . . that Hitler had a
master plan for these changes or any grand strategy that was specific to
1938 (pp.xixxx). The author highlights that by 1938 the conservative
elements in the Hitlerite regime had become increasingly marginalised
after verbalising their disagreement at the revisionist drive which was
crippling the German economy. Hermann Goring had replaced
Hjalmar Schacht as the Nazi economics supremo and was put in
charge of making Germany self-sufficient while financing rearmament.
At the same time, the German foreign policy apparatus had suffered
irreversible changes with Foreign Minister Constantin von Neurath and
several key ambassadors having been replaced.
A chapter is devoted to each month of that momentous year, charting
the events which precipitated the war. MacDonogh cites the Blomberg
Fritsch crisis in January and the end of Cabinet government in
February, which solidified Hitlers position and isolated the moderate
elements in the regime. The Anschluss in March, the Austrian Plebiscite
in April that revealed overwhelming support for the Fuhrer (p.xv),
Hitlers trip to Rome in May, which consolidated the alliance with
Italy, and the Kendrick crisis in August which destroyed the British
intelligence network in Germany are also given extensive treatment.
The strategic situation would take a decisive turn with Neville
Chamberlains visit to Germany and the signing of the Munich
agreement in September, the occupation of the Sudetenland in October
and the persecution of the Jews in the latter part of the year.
Hitlers trip to Italy revealed the ambivalent position of Mussolini
and his entourage towards Nazi Germany. While Hitler proved willing
to relinquish any claims to the South Tyrol in return for freedom of
movement in Austria and Czechoslovakia (p. 131), Ribbentrop was
anxious to link Italy into a pact with Germany. Despite acquiescing to
the adoption of the racial laws against the Jews, the Fascist leadership
were apprehensive about joining such a treaty, as they intended to
honour the 1937 Anglo-Italian Agreement which gave validity to
Romes claims in the Mediterranean.

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MacDonogh mentions that the signing of the Munich Agreement in
September obliterated any chances to remove Hitler from power
because of opposition in the army and the Wilhelmstrasse and the
reaction against Canaris and Kleist-Schmenzin and all those who had
implied that Britain would fight (p.228). The Munich Agreement
entailed the weakening of the internal opposition to Hitler. Consequently, there would be no further major attempts to undermine the
Fuhrers authority until the failed coup of 20 July 1944.
The book pays particular attention to the plight which befell the
Jewish population in Austria after the Anschluss, something which
became the first statement of intent in Hitlers desire for a Judenrein
Europe. The author points out that the annexation of Austria provided
Hitler with the opportunity to implement the eradication of Jewish life
by means of emigration, the plundering of Jewish businesses and,
remarkably, through an end to assimilation (p.116).
The author works on the premise that until 1938, Hitler could be
dismissed as a ruthless but efficient dictator, a problem to Germany
alone; after 1938 he was clearly a threat to the entire world.
MacDonogh succeeds in mapping the most relevant indicators of
Hitlers strategy and the events that were to plague the continent of
Europe a year later. Although somewhat broadly tackled, it constitutes
a revealing account of Hitlers opening moves to war.
NICOLAS LEWKOWICZ 2010
University of Bristol
Patrick Porter, Military Orientalism: Eastern War Through Western
Eyes. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Pp.256. $25.00,
HB. ISBN 978-0-231-15414-7.
The orient is a diffuse idea. Oriental was what lurked beyond the
boundaries of civilised Europe, unknown and fascinating. It stood for
the East, sometimes for the South, always for the unknown other. Ideas
of the oriental other have not just influenced, and sometimes
dominated, Western perspectives toward the East. As Patrick Porters
fine new book shows, orientalism has also affected Western views of its
battles and wars.
On the face of it, the scene is predictable: Western armies are made
for industrial battles, decisive plots of organised force, and orchestrated
manoeuvres. They are rational, orderly, calculated bureaucracies with a
sophisticated division of labour, high-tech weapons systems and clear
lines of authority from civilian politicians. They develop plans in
institutionalised general staffs, and their strategic and operational

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Book Reviews 785

thinking guided by post-Enlightenment intellectual craftsmen like
Antoine de Jomini or Carl von Clausewitz.
Easterners, so the popular stereotype goes, fight altogether differently
as martyrs and kamikazes. They are deceitful, cunning, irrational,
emotional, chaotic, and spiritual, their raw violence seemingly triggered
by primordial ethnic or tribal hatred, vendettas, and blood feuds. Some
of these juxtapositions are very much alive today. Patrick Porter sees
the orientalist world view come to the fore in popular culture, for
instance in films like 300, Black Hawk Down, Rambo II and III, and
The Last Samurai. But such an argument would be trite. Military
Orientalism is shrewder.
Porters critical thrust goes against the cultural turn, the revived
focus on culture among those who make and study strategy. The United
States land forces have turned their attention to understanding alien
cultures counter-insurgencys human terrain and away from the
high-tech hype of the 1990s. Europes armies, with the usual delay of a
few years, are chasing after what some critics see as an American fad. In
academia and strategic studies, likewise, anthropologists and counterinsurgency theory is in; Clausewitz is out. Yes, seeing the relevance of
culture is a step forward, Porter agrees. But seeing culture as rigid and
stable can be naive.
Instead, Military Orientalism analyses culture in motion. The
books objective is to marry better models of culture with the world of
military policy and analysis. The thesis is radical only at first glance: in
strategy, where all sides in a conflict apply almost all means at their
disposal to succeed, culture becomes more dynamic and more volatile.
When facing battle, actors change traditions, violate norms, and they
innovate in order to gain an advantage. At war, Porter writes, even
actors regarded as conservatives may use their culture strategically,
remaking their worlds to fit their needs. Culture does not just shape
ways of war; war shapes culture.
Four chapter-length case studies furnish the argument.
The first deals with British military observers of the Russo-Japanese
War of 190405, who linked Japans prowess to its social setup,
political values, and concept of citizenship. Yet British observers
claimed that the Japanese way of war and the Far Eastern warrior
values offered advice that could help improve the British Empires
mastery of battle, as Britains own fighting ethos was diluted by
urbanisation, modernisation, and liberalism.
The second case study explores Western perceptions of Mongol
warriors, who roamed Central Asias endless steppe in the first half of
the thirteenth century. European and American observers came to see
Genghis Khans mounted warriors as roaming nomadic predators,
laying waste to civilisation on its path with chilling virtuosity. But the

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Mongols mobility and aggressiveness, in turn, have long inspired
European, Russian, and lately American strategic thinkers.
Then Porter moves on to more recent examples, the Taliban and
Hizballah. Both enemies have in common that they are cultural
realists they may change long-established behaviour, their timehonoured traditions, and their accustomed cultural dispositions in
order to fit their strategic and operational needs, to guarantee survival
if not success on the twenty-first-century battlefield. The Taliban, he
argues, therefore exhibit a characteristic ambiguity between stasis and
change. At first glance, the Islamist purists appear as tribal warriors,
driven by extreme and extremely conservative values and
worldviews. Yet, at closer view, the Taliban are highly adaptive
enemies, with innovative methods in education, public outreach, and
modern tactics that embrace the latest high-tech innovations.
The book focuses on two issues simultaneously, Western views and
Eastern war on both counts Military Orientalism has some
shortcomings. It somewhat selectively uncovers orientalist attitudes
in scholarly articles and policy documents. As a result, the book
sometimes seems to overestimate the strategic relevance of perceptions,
including oriental perceptions. The Second Lebanon War (2006), for
instance, was highly damaging for Hizballah, no matter its short-term
public relations advantage in some quarters.
Second, the books criticism of cultural notions is right most of the
time, but not all the time. The remarkable increase in suicide bombings,
to give just one example, is hard to explain without reference to
spirituality and features that seem genuine to specific cultures.
Orientalist views, in short, may sometimes be wrong and irrelevant,
but sometimes they may be correct and relevant. But the author
recognises these problems and admits that his book may be tinged by
the very images and myths that it seeks to challenge.
Politicians view the armed forces as instruments of state power.
Armies often see themselves as surgeons, methodically administering a
certain treatment until an operation is accomplished successfully. Both
like to imagine the enemy as still, pliable, and visible. In Porters
potent analysis, reality is not as neatly cut and stable. The most
endurable element may be the Western views of its oriental enemies.
Here, Porters notion of cultural realism is designed to create better
strategic visibility: attention to cultural fluidity, to contradictions, and
to our own assumptions, he hopes, may help realise, for instance, how
the Taliban of today differ from the Taliban of 2001, or how
Hizballahs tactics have changed between 2000 and 2006.
War, Porter writes in Clausewitzian fashion, is a deadly
reactive dance, and culture is subject to its volatile nature. The
cultural landscape cannot be accurately mapped with the help of

Book Reviews 787

anthropologists, because that human terrain, unlike geography, is ever
shifting. Herein lies the danger of the cultural turn in strategic affairs: it
is not just that it may restate old bigotry in the language of political
correctness. It may ignore and deny something much older and much
more fundamental: the dynamic nature of war.

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THOMAS RID 2010

The Shalem Center, Jerusalem, Israel
Steven R. David, Catastrophic Consequences: Civil Wars and American
Interests. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. Pp.204.
$25.00, PB. ISBN 0-801-88989-8.
Steven David has written an important and serious book on how
internal wars can harm American strategic interests. Focusing on
China, Mexico, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia as the most dangerous
possible sites of civil war (p.153), David argues that state collapse and
internal rebellions can generate unintended but devastating spillover
effects that include loose nuclear weapons, massive refugee flows, and
global economic shocks. Catastrophic Consequences is valuable both
for its cogent, straightforward analysis and for bringing together a set
of important cases that are rarely compared to one another. The book
builds on Davids excellent previous research on the links between
internal and external security.
David argues that the United States is highly vulnerable to the effects
of foreign civil wars. He analyzes China, Mexico, Pakistan, and Saudi
Arabia in terms of the potential danger their collapse or disarray would
pose to the United States, the likelihood and causes of possible civil war
within each state, and the possible results of this instability. Escalating
unrest in Pakistan carries with it the most alarming risks, with the
possibility that a fractured or overwhelmed Pakistan Army loses
control of nuclear assets to Islamist radicals who could then attack the
US. He rightly notes that full-scale state collapse in Pakistan would
pose a uniquely horrific threat to American interests because it brings
together a witches brew of capability and instability (p.50).
In Saudi Arabia, rebellion against and conflict within the royal family
could lead to the destruction of crucial oil infrastructure that would
badly damage the American, and global, economy. David correctly
identifies the current obstacles to rapid US adaptation to a massive and
prolonged oil shock.
The dangers presented by violence and instability in Mexico are
found in flows of refugees to the US, shocks to the American economy,
and the safety of Americans in Mexico. This focus on Mexico is

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particularly prescient as that country descends further into drug-fueled
violence.
Finally, waves of unrest, rebellion, and economic collapse within
China could have devastating effects on the global economy and
security in Asia. He describes a China very much at odds with
optimistic predictions about its future, one in which a fragile banking
system, corrupt institutions, and various demographic imbalances
create severe risks to the countrys stability.
While David overstates the case that civil wars have been largely
ignored by scholars and policymakers (p.2), since a huge amount of
attention has been paid to failed states, ungoverned spaces, and
American interventions from Haiti to Kosovo, he is absolutely right to
highlight the importance of internal conflicts. Davids arguments are
lucid and provocative, and they need to be carefully considered by
scholars, analysts, and policymakers.
Yet Catastrophic Consequences leaves open several questions and
concerns. First, Davids approach lumps together a wide variety of
types of internal conflicts under a shared banner, from martial law
to political party polarization to state collapse to peripheral
insurgency. These forms of rebellion and contentious politics have
very distinct origins and consequences, but David tends to identify
them one after another without much differentiation, leading to a set
of laundry lists of disaster. There is much more room to parse out
how variation in the type and intensity of internal conflict in each
case would affect American interests. In China, there is a huge
difference between chaotic state collapse and increasing nationalist
militarization over the issue of Taiwan. Regional insurgencies against
the Pakistani state are far less serious than a direct fracturing of
the states coercive apparatus. The level of unrest in Saudi Arabia
could range from a minor blip to a massive supply crisis, and it
matters enormously which is most likely and under what circumstances.
Some of the possible scenarios David presents are not just different
but also diametrically opposed to another. For instance, the Chinese
state may split and collapse into factional feuding (p.143), or its
increasingly professionalized, capable, and organized military may
overthrow its civilian masters (p.142). It is hard to reconcile the statecollapse future with the praetorian-state future: they cannot be equally
likely or driven by the same causes.
Mexico is presented as a state with a political and security elite that is
thoroughly enervated and infiltrated by drug money and corruption
(pp.10610), yet David also argues that it is easy to foresee the
emergence of a Mexican leader who will not tolerate this growing state
within a state and undertake a serious effort to rid Mexico once and for

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all of the drug cartels (p.114). Given the detailed analysis underlying
the former claim, the latter assertion comes as a surprise.
Second, David spreads himself too thin in the empirical research,
trying to offer compelling and comprehensive treatments of four
incredibly complex countries. The author is to be commended for his
ambition and effort, but the errors and omissions in the case of Pakistan
illustrate some of the problems that come with this approach. He
makes some minor mistakes (the plural of madrassah should be
madaris for instance), but others are much more significant.
David never discusses the Muhajir insurgency and related ethnic
conflict in Karachi, Pakistans volatile economic hub and largest city,
which has contributed to endemic national instability. In addition, his
claim that the 2002 election results in the North West Frontier Province
(NWFP) showed that the Islamist and separatist movements became
one and the same (p.72) ignores the deep-seated rivalry between
Islamist parties and the Pashtun nationalist Awami National Party
(ANP), which won the NWFP in 2008. This leads to a serious
misreading of Pashtun separatism and its possible implications for the
Pakistani state. Regionalist sentiment in Sindh, Karachi, Baluchistan,
and the NWFP has in fact traditionally been opposed to radical Islamist
politics. For this reason among others, Davids argument that the
Baluch revolt is only less slightly dangerous (p. 68) than the Al-Qaeda
and Taliban presence in the NWFP is not very credible.
Davids concerns about the Pakistani nuclear arsenal are understandable and articulately framed, but he offers very little detail
about the command structure, organizational functioning, and
history of the Pakistani nuclear establishment, which is absolutely
essential to any balanced assessment of the risks of nuclear loss.
There are only a few brief paragraphs on this essential topic (pp.58
63). Similarly, there is no in-depth analysis of the political interests
of the pivotal military, which is portrayed both as the one
institution that holds the country together (p.64) and as extraordinarily inept (p.66). Most curiously, David writes that the major
question regarding Pakistan is not whether civil war will break out,
but why it has not done so already (p.76). As of the books
publication in 2008, an intense insurgency had been raging in the
NWFP and parts of Baluchistan for several years accompanied by
mass-casualty bombings and heavy military losses. Civil war had
already come to Pakistan.
Third, the approach of Catastrophic Consequences is forwardlooking and by its very nature speculative. This is useful for policy and
planning purposes, but the cost is a lack of structured historical analysis
on how civil wars have (and have not) influenced American interests in
the past. This would have both provided a valuable, lasting scholarly

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contribution and more clearly explained Davids expectations for
future contingencies in China, Mexico, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia.
There are also dangers to this speculative approach because core
assumptions can become rapidly obsolete. While Davids arguments
look to be increasingly supported in Mexico, the end of military rule
and resurgence of counterinsurgency efforts in Pakistan undermine
some of the arguments he presents. Similarly, the reduction of
militant violence in Saudi Arabia from its peak around 2004 may
downgrade our fears of large-scale political unrest in the country.
The shelf life of Catastrophic Consequences thus may be limited by
this approach.
Despite these concerns, Davids book is well worth reading and
pondering. It synthesizes a huge amount of information into a
compelling argument. Crucially, Catastrophic Consequences also
suggests a set of interesting research questions through which to
further explore the hugely important relationships between wars within
states and conflicts among them.
PAUL STANILAND 2010
University of Chicago
Joshua Cooper Ramo, The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New
World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us and What We Can Do About
It. New York: Little, Brown, 2009. Pp.280. $25.99, HB. ISBN 978-0316-11808-8.
Drawing an analogy from the early twentieth-century Einsteinian
revolution in physics, Ramos thesis is that a similar revolution in
politics, particularly foreign policy, is now required in order for us (for
which, read US) to thrive and survive in the modern global
environment of accelerating change and ever deeper complexity. Ramo
argues persuasively that the old laws of (inter)national power are
increasingly redundant in effecting positive change and irrelevant to the
reality of global systems.
This book is unlikely to appeal to political realists, for whom talk of
non-state power or state non-power is often an uncomfortable and
unresolved distraction. Realists, though, should remember that their
worldview is predicated on the notion that without states, there is
anarchy. In a world that increasingly seems anarchic, then perhaps we
should re-evaluate the Westphalian system in terms of success and
failure of the nation-state?
Democratic peace theory may hold true for democracies but it says
little about wars prosecuted by them against non-democratic nations.

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Nor has neo-Wilsonian democracy cured the world of war and want, as
famously suggested by Francis Fukuyama in The End of History and
the Last Man (1992). The US-led war on terror has succeeded only in
creating more terrorists, an empirical proof surely contrary to its stated
objectives. Self-balancing and largely self-regulating global capital
markets have proven to be incapable of balancing or regulating
effectively enough to stave off near-collapse and subsequent economic
misery to millions. Capitalism itself, and its Cold War foe, communism,
have in most cases achieved the very opposite of their aims of bringing
prosperity, health and happiness to all.
Ramos does not suggest that the world is anarchic, however. His
view is that the world is in a state of organised instability, a concept
drawn from the physical sciences, in particular chaos theory and
complexity science. In this system, we never know what event, object or
person may prove to be responsible for triggering unexpected and
occasionally catastrophic change. The scientific metaphor runs through
the book and also provides it with its conceptual basis. This is a
common and effective conceit but has its limitations. There is little need
to refer to the physics of politics, for example, when all one is
referring to is political economy, a term of sufficient currency and
utility to satisfy most authors.
Our current institutions are inherently incapable of grasping the idea
of organised instability and therefore formulate policy via outmoded
thought and practice. Essentially, they make bad policy because they do
not understand the environment in which they operate, and are too
lethargic and inflexible to adapt and respond. The old rulebooks of
cause and effect, deterrence and defence, are no longer applicable,
relying as they do on monolithic organising principles. Ramo is
encouraging policy-makers to take a good hard look at the world
around them and at themselves and then begin reconfiguring power
structures and decision-making processes in order to generate good and
appropriate policy that reflects the dynamism of a complex world.
Through a series of diverse case studies Ramo draws conclusions
about how some people and organisations are thriving in an unstable
world. At the heart of them all is a reliance on quick-wittedness,
innovation, pragmatism, and an eye for opportunity. This holds true as
much for Hizballah as it does for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. The bulk
of the book is taken up with describing how people are adapting
successfully across the world while traditional structures are falling
behind. Ramo writes in engaging fashion, is adept at linking across
times and subjects, and the reader is left in little doubt that he is
definitely on to something.
However, as a guide to how we can save ourselves (p.8) the
book inevitably falls short. Although Ramo does not claim to be

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prescriptive in his recommendations for how this can be achieved, he
does not offer anything likely to be of interest to those who should
perhaps be reading this book in the first place: policy-makers.
Although the author writes encouragingly of returning a sense of
agency and responsibility to weary citizens everywhere, if our
institutions really do need to change then how best should that be
achieved? Ramo offers no solutions in this department, other than a
refocusing from security to resilience, learning from Oriental
concepts of indirection rather than confrontation, and an appreciation of context. His suggestion that we view threats as systems,
rather than objects, is wise but already part of military planning, if
not political decision-making.
More revealing though is the discovery of sufficient typographic
errors and egregious mistakes the Rwandan genocide was in 1994,
not 1995 (p.82) coupled with frequent references to the still unfolding
economic crisis, to suggest that this volume may perhaps have been
rushed to publication. It feels unfinished and drops away alarmingly
towards the end without satisfactory conclusion. Ramo could quite
easily defend this on the basis that in his worldview nothing is ever
finished and, certainly, if his ideas are to be taken seriously then this is
all a work-in-progress anyway. He also leaves us in no doubt as to his
high-flying social environment, reflecting perhaps his hobby of
competitive aerobatics.
The book is accompanied by an eclectic bibliography, the constituents of which are, in the habit of popular volumes, annoyingly
unreferenced in the text. Although a useful reading list, there are
omissions. Given its likely readership one could reasonably expect to
find listed John Robbs Brave New War (2007), Nassim Nicholas
Talebs The Black Swan (2007), and General Sir Rupert Smiths The
Utility of Force (2005). Relying as it does in part on chaos theory, the
omission of James Gleicks groundbreaking access-level book, Chaos:
Making a New Science (1987), is curious.
Despite its limitations The Age of the Unthinkable deserves wide
readership which, judging by its media reception in the US, it is likely to
gain. Joshua Cooper Ramo is erudite and imaginative, a combination
that means that although he may not have all the answers he is entirely
competent to successfully communicate complexity with clarity. This is
no mean feat, and the book offers sufficient insight into the modern
world, its characteristics and its problems, that it commends itself to
the academy and to the wider public and, of course, to policy-makers
everywhere.
TIM STEVENS 2010
Kings College London

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Audrey Kurth Cronin, How Terrorism Ends: Understanding the

Decline and Demise of Terrorist Campaigns. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2009. Pp.330. $29.95, HB. ISBN 978-0-691-13948-7.
Audrey Kurth Cronin observes that despite variation in casualties,
objectives, and longevity, all previous terrorism campaigns have had
one key characteristic in common: they ended. Therefore, she argues
that the best way to develop counterterrorism policy is to thoroughly
analyze the final stages of previous terrorist organizations in the hope
that the resulting findings can provide improved guidance to those who
wish to better understand terrorism campaigns and bring them to a
close.
To accomplish this, Cronin analyzed 457 campaigns from the
Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT) Terrorism
Knowledge Base in addition to numerous short case studies, which
helped to illustrate the causal pathways of the demise of previous
campaigns. The six pathways Cronin identified serve as the foundation
for the book and are described as follows: (1) capture or killing the
groups leader (2) entry of the group into a legitimate political process
(3) achievement of the groups aims (4) implosion or loss of the groups
public support (5) defeat and elimination by brute force (6) transition
from terrorism into other forms of violence. (p.8)
Cronin presented these mechanisms as part of an analytical framework for academics and policymakers to better understand the
dynamics of terrorism and then used the framework herself to
evaluate the probable course of Al-Qaedas ultimate demise. She
claims that Al-Qaeda is unlikely to end due to decapitation of its
leadership (too late), achievement of its goals (impossible), or
elimination by brute force (counterproductive and improbable).
Instead, she argues that Al-Qaeda is likely to meet its demise due to
the loss of public support from targeting missteps or a transition to
other methods of violence like insurgency, nudged along by states
offers of negotiations and/or amnesty to Al-Qaedas peripheral
elements.
As Cronin points out, far more scholarship has been completed on
the causes of terrorism, but the end of a campaign cannot be
understood simply as the absence of its original causes. Her analysis
of dynamics that emerge after a campaigns initiation, therefore,
represents the first of two major contributions to the counterterrorism
literature. The second results from the structure of her analysis. Much
of the existing counterterrorism literature seeks to improve state policy,
and so it focuses on what states have done right and wrong in the past
and makes recommendations about what they can do better in the
future. This research design is not without merit, but its resulting policy

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recommendations can pose a problem when they are based on a statecentric concept of counterterrorism.
As Cronin effectively argues, many of the reasons why terrorism ends
from infighting to a loss of popular support have little to do with the
actions of states. Therefore, effective counterterrorism policy has as
much to do with the realization by state actors of how often they play
an inconsequential or even counterproductive role in the demise of
terrorist organizations as it does with attempts to actively thwart their
activities. Cronins broader analysis of all possible pathways to
terrorisms end reveals that studying the objective of most counterterrorism policies (the end of terrorism) may be more useful than
simply studying the items of interest (the policies themselves), and may
well represent the best way to get the latter right.
Unfortunately, a few key methodological choices Cronin makes, once
her focus on the demise of terrorist campaigns is set, weakens some of
her empirical claims. First, her study selects both independent and
dependent variables to a considerable degree. It is one thing to want to
understand the manner in which terrorist campaigns end; it is another
to draw conclusions almost exclusively by analyzing the presence of
those pathways and the termination of campaigns. Doing so may limit
the identification of key independent variables and related hypotheses,
make assessment of their relative explanatory power and scope
conditions problematic, and generally draw into question associated
causal claims. In the absence of a more thorough examination of
instances lacking her independent variables, or instances of endurance
alongside her studies of campaign demise, her findings are less robust
than they otherwise might be.
This leads to the second problem with Cronins methodology,
namely, the set-up of her case studies. The author repeatedly labels her
cases comparative, but it is often unclear exactly what she is
comparing or how the comparison is being structured to yield powerful
results. Most of her cases resemble brief attempts (often three pages or
less and at times even less than one page) at describing one of her six
causal pathways with some historical context. The vast majority are
thus largely illustrative and lack consideration of competing explanations for the end of campaigns or any attempt to hold key lurking
variables constant across cases.
That said, Cronin does offer a few promising exceptions, particularly
in the section on decapitation. Her analysis of The Shining Path, The
Kurdistan Workers Party, and the Real Irish Republican Army (RIRA)
included time series data on group attacks overlaid with the date of
capture of key leaders, which allows the reader to better assess this
explanatory variable in greater context. As Cronin notes, the data is
imperfect and challenges to assembling it in this manner abound, but

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these examples do provide a positive step in analyzing her claims
against the full life span of the groups, if not in comparison with
competing explanations. Ultimately, the number of cases Cronin
considers is impressive, and since her primary purpose is the
presentation and specification of mechanisms rather than the testing
of causal claims, these methodological critiques are not fatal to the
larger project, and they present opportunities for future research.
Cronin succeeds in the central goal of her study, which is to present a
template for understanding the demise of terrorist campaigns that
future scholars can learn from, debate, and revise. Unfortunately,
Cronins project fails to fully incorporate two recent similar studies, the
article Why Terrorism Does Not Work by Max Abrahms (International Security, 2006) and Why Terrorist Groups End: Lessons for
Countering Al-Qaeda (2008) by Seth Jones and Martin Libicki, thereby
missing an opportunity to launch that debate and further advance the
subfield.
Cronin could have examined best practices for analyzing terrorisms
end using large statistical samples, which has not been attempted by
many scholars. In particular, she could have analyzed methodological
difficulties shared by all three studies in isolating the effects of the use of
terrorism by a single group on achievement of a political objective.
Although Cronins awareness of this issue is clear from her discussion
of two case studies of group success the Irgun Zvai Leumi and the
African National Congress she does not suggest or utilize any
qualitative or quantitative methodology for better isolating terrorisms
impact. This presents a further avenue for future research.
The fact that Cronins book raises more questions than it answers
may ultimately be a positive, because she aims to provide a wideranging analysis of a subject in its early phases that can serve as a
springboard to future studies. How Terrorism Ends is, therefore, a
worthwhile book for both academics and policymakers. If a reader
agrees with some points and finds others lacking, but ultimately
considers how to grapple with terrorism from a new perspective,
Cronin will have succeeded in her aims.
PETER J. P. KRAUSE 2010
Massachusetts Institute of Technology