Hard Truths, Soft Power

“Can then force, broadly considered, be regarded as an inevitable factor in international adjustments and in the maintenance of the general international balances … May it not be that by confounding force with war we are simply ignoring a fact of not only general but universal existence?” Alfred T. Mahan, the first great American military strategist, wrote that in 1912, two years before the First World War. Perhaps that protracted and gruesome struggle would have dimmed Mahan's enthusiasm for war, but one doubts that even the brutal face of war would have changed his belief in the necessity of force, especially to avoid war.