Paradoxes of War

This book adresses two fundamental questions about the nature of war: why reasonable people sometimes lead their nations into self-made traps of destructive proportions and why nations finding themselves in a deep mess of their own doing tend to deepen their troubles and make it harder for themselves to escape those traps. The study is organized in three parts around the various stages of war. The first focuses on the causes of war; the second on the processes of war management; and the third examines those short and long term implications of war which turn on its head the notion of war as an instrument of policy.