In a closing chapter, Hanson reviews the ‘lessons’ of the Peloponnesian war. Though most of these are merely realistic — that money is more important than raw courage, that technology is critical — first among these lessons is that ‘rules of war are to be broken’. Not just strategic rules of thumb, either, but ethical rules, which he dismisses as ‘nostalgia’; truly effective war-making was only made possible ‘by the liberation from traditional moral restraint’. Hanson ruminates on moral quandaries like Curtis LeMay’s fire-bombing of Japanese cities in the second world war: was he a war criminal, he wonders aloud, or ‘did he shorten the war and punish those in Tokyo’s household factories whose labour produced the planes, shells, and guns’ used by the Japanese military? The use of the word ‘punish’ in that sentence is a clear hint as to what Hanson himself probably thinks the right answer is.
Hanson ends by praising Thucydides’ history ‘as a timeless guide to the tragic nature of war itself, inasmuch as human character is unchanging and thus its conduct in calamitous times is always predictable’. Consider those final two words. In his view of the potential barbarity of war Hanson may well be wiser, or at least more realistic, than many of his pro-war contemporaries. But he has allowed this grim view to limit his understanding of what humans can achieve, and indeed have already achieved, in making war less common, and in making it less barbaric when it does occur. To accept the worst because one thinks it is inevitable is pessimism of a dangerous kind; to justify the worst in the service of achieving permanent peace is cruel folly.
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