Nothing Less than Victory: Decisive Wars and the Lessons of History Book

The thesis is sound and relevant to our times. There are certainly cases where the constant "management" of crises has been bad. There are a few where "peace" has resulted in genocide where one side couldn't shoot back.

A few quibbles. The thesis of the chapter on the Versailles Treaty is muddled. On the one hand, the author is very critical of British policy in the interwar years and sympathetic to the French position of wanting to punish Germany. (Recent scholarship has conclusively proved that Germany provoked World War I fearing that it wouldn't be able to maintain its edge much past 1914.) But then it turns into a history of the appeasement policy. So was the problem that the Versailles Treaty was inadequate? that the Entente should have occupied Germany? or that the League of Nations should have enforced it?

It would seem to fit better with the thesis of the book that the Entente should have pressed for a stronger victory in 1918. There's some reason to think this might have been possible. The German feelers for an armistice were fueled by a French breakthrough on their southeastern flank and their inability to hold it off and the western front at the same time.

But here's the thing, and I think this reveals the flaw in the thesis of the book: the Entente's refusal to push forward and occupy Germany was no more a betrayal than the German government looking for the armistice. The Entente countries were exhausted and often on the brink of their own collapses. Indeed, Russia had collapsed. The UK and France had seen changes of government in the middle of the war. How do we know that the Entente had the ability to completely defeat Germany in 1918 or 1919?

The countries that were democracies'and this includes France and the UK'might have not been able to sustain a policy of occupation of Germany at the time. Their publics had no appetite for more war. Even the United States who suffered comparatively little in World War II tried very hard to stay out of the next war.

Policy makers are often constrained by what their publics can tolerate. This is part of the price of democracy. The problem with the alternative is that there's no constraint on launching wars, and they do in fact usually come from less than democratic regimes. Men like Lloyd George, Neville Chamberlain, or even Kissinger, have to play with the hand their dealt.

Lewis makes a point of this in the Versailles chapter, showing that the German public (and Hitler) had conviction in their cause of rearmament and national unification. But didn't the Allies have a conviction as well that another disastrous war should be avoided? Why should it have been taken for granted that the British should fight for Austria? Lewis thinks an intervention at that point would have caused Hitler's downfall and avoided the entire larger war.

This is so much Monday-morning quarterbacking. It very well could have gone differently. Britain was far behind in rearmament also'if they suffered a defeat then what?

In the end, when the public accepted that Hitler had to be defeated, he was defeated. They had to be convinced.

To me this means that while we need to understand the value of real victory, we can't just tell the public "you need total victory" and expect them to endure long conflicts. They need to understand both the cause for the need to fight at the beginning and the reasons to persist.