Stretching from Antiquity to the Second World War, a major new work of history that examines how battles have been fought - and reveals how wars have actually been won.
History has tended to measure war's winners and losers in terms of its major engagements, battles in which the result was so clear-cut that they could be considered decisive. Cannae, Konigsberg, ...Austerlitz, Midway, Agincourt-all resonate in the literature of war and in our imaginations as tide-turning. But these legendary battles may or may not have determined the final outcome of the wars in which they were fought. Nor has the genius of the so-called Great Captains - from Alexander the Great to Frederick the Great and Napoleon - play a major role. Wars are decided in other ways. Cathal J. Nolan's The Allure of Battle systematically and engrossingly examines the great battles, tracing what he calls short-war thinking, the hope that victory might be swift and wars brief. As he proves persuasively, however, such has almost never been the case. Even the major engagements have mainly contributed to victory or defeat by accelerating the erosion of the other side's defences. Massive conflicts, the so-called people's wars, beginning with Napoleon and continuing until 1945, have consisted of and been determined by prolonged stalemate and attrition, industrial wars in which the determining factor has been not military but mat?riel. Nolan's masterful book places battles squarely and mercilessly within the context of the wider conflict in which they took place. In the process it help corrects a distorted view of battle's role in war, replacing popular images of the battles of annihilation with somber appreciation of the commitments and human sacrifices made throughout centuries of war particularly among the Great Powers. Accessible, provocative, exhaustive, and illuminating, The Allure of Battle will spark fresh debate about the history and conduct of warfare.
This book spans more than 200 years of U.S. diplomatic history. Its geographical scope widens along with the expanding interests of America itself, from initial exclusive concern with the empires of ...Europe, to the emerging nations of Latin America, to the commercial opportunities and geopolitical concerns of Asia and Africa. The ambassadors chosen for inclusion reflect these historical changes in American foreign relations. Organized alphabetically, the biographies present an implicit account of the evolution of the U.S. diplomatic service, from its founding and early principles through the 20th century evolution of its habits and culture.
The implosion of the Soviet idea over the course of 1989 to 1991, culminating in the collapse of the Soviet Union itself, promises to reshape the region along lines of historic ethnic, and even ...religious division. That development requires those interested in American-Russian relations to take a more historical approach to analysis than might have been the case hitherto. The past is, of course, not necessarily a guide to events in the present or future. None the less, current debates about how deeply the United States should be involved in Russian affairs should benefit from better familiarity with the historical record, in particular of that period before the relationship between the two countries suffered from mutual ideological and geopolitical animus. It is sometimes forgotten, or else too briefly remembered, that relations between the United States and Russia extend back to the dawn of an independent American diplomacy. Similarly, it is not always recalled that for much of the nineteenth century, especially prior to the Civil War, those relations were relatively amicable, although also distant and detached. An overview of the period may therefore be useful today, for the degree to which the United States can afford o t detach itself from Russia is again of main concern. A related area of interest and debate is the role of public opinion in possibly forcing confrontation on issues where national elites might prefer to maintain cordial relations. This essay seeks to cast light on these areas of current interest, by focusing on the interplay between public enthusiasms in the United States for diplomatic intervention in Russia, and official political calculations in American diplomacy prior to 1865. It argues that the resulting policy had mostly to do with a detachment from Russian despotism, born of the physical isolation of the United States, its lack of truly significant contacts with Russia, but also its own deeply flawed republicanism.
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