Writing in the eighteenth century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that the life of a king was made up of two objects: to extend his rule beyond the frontiers; and to make it more absolute within them. Reading those lines, I couldn’t help but think of Vladimir Putin, whose primary political goals seem to mirror those of absolutist monarchs. Rousseau was implying that war was an instrument wielded by capricious princes to serve their own interests. Not long after Rousseau, Antoine-Henri Jomini was the first military strategist to unpack the idea that war is the continuation of politics by other means. Many politicians and military strategists throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century agreed, whether democrats, fascists, or communists. General Ludendorff, Marshal Shaposhnikov, and Mao Zedong all came to the same conclusion: war and politics – one and the same thing.
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