One characteristic of a good book is that it reminds you of other good books. Victor Davis Hanson’s The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation reminds me of several.
In the beginning of his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides considers what conclusions would be drawn by observers wandering amidst the wreckage of Athens and Sparta should they suffer a disaster that would extinguish them. He imaginatively stands in the ruins of his own age. This is one expression of the melancholy sadness that characterizes Thucydides’ view of human existence. Nothing lasts forever.
The Gathering Storm, the first volume of Churchill’s WWII memoir, relates how his own imagination and observation caused him to call out a warning. Powers were rising that could plunge the whole world into darkness. Mankind was rushing toward a conflict Britain, Western and civilization itself, might not survive.
In the Parallel Lives, Plutarch placed biographies of great men side by side in comparison. But there are many levels of comparison in Plutarch beyond the individual. Greece and Rome, Athens and Sparta, as well as other cities and regimes rise and fall, succeed and fail, conquer or are conquered.
The End of Everything strikes many similar chords. The book covers four historical case studies (Thebes, Carthage, Constantinople, and Tenochtitlán) of abrupt wartime destruction that marked the end of cultures and civilizations. It begins and ends with a warning to the modern world and the U.S. that we are not immune from repeating these tragedies.
In Hanson’s vividly drawn chapters, many themes recur: collective naiveté, incorrect assumptions, unaddressed vulnerabilities, unrealistic assessment of current threats, and delusions of institutional invulnerability.
Some readers may applaud Hanson’s gripping historical descriptions but doubt the applicability of his examples to the modern world. After all, his last case study occurred more than 400 years before the invention of the atomic bomb. How, then, can historical analogies from very different eras have anything important to say in our own time? The modern age has difficulty finding relevance in the distant past. The possibilities of repetition seem distant.
Hanson concedes that there is no modern instance of political and cultural annihilation closely corresponding to his historical examples, but that does not indicate irrelevance. It does not take that much effort to imagine that contemporary conflicts could descend into wars of annihilation. He points to conflicts involving Israel, Russia, Ukraine, North Korea, China, Turkey, and Pakistan, for example, which display both annihilatory rhetoric and nuclear saber-rattling. Do the differences of modern technology and politics render comparison useless? We might consider Plutarch once more, for whom “parallel” does not mean “the same.” Plutarch searches not for exacting equivalence, but for similarities that can promote meaningful reflections.
The real concern for American readers is the book’s applicability to the United States. We might well contend that the modern United States bears little resemblance to Thebes or Carthage or Tenochtitlán, but it is worth remembering that all of the destroyed peoples discussed voiced, explicitly or implicitly, some version of the sentiment, “It can’t happen here—it can’t happen to us.”
The United States is or would be involved in all the modern conflicts mentioned to some degree, and we have our own unaddressed vulnerabilities similar in many ways to the fallen cities of Hanson’s examples. Are we not capable of being overly confident and complacent, of looking to the past rather than realistically assessing present danger, of vainly trusting to legal codes of restraint, and of underestimating the strength, inventiveness, and determination of our enemies?
The issue of internal weaknesses setting the stage for possible destruction deserves particular attention. Hanson points out that, in each case he examines, the instances of civilizational destruction he describes were were not sudden, one-off events but rather the explosive finale to a long process of internal decline and decay. While the book by itself does not fully illustrate such internal weakness regarding the United States, Hanson has done so in many other places in his writings and commentary. We have unsustainable debt, a shrinking military, crumbling domestic law enforcement, and an increasingly fractured, tribalistic population. The energy and order of the U.S. is flagging, leading to greater peril on the world stage.
Given these realities, we could do worse than to follow Churchill’s admonition, as Hanson does,
“Study history. Study history. In history lie all the secrets of statecraft.”