My Take | What does it mean to win a war?

Perhaps as a former colonial subject in Hong Kong, I used to read a lot of British writers such as the military historian Liddell Hart. One of Hart’s pet peeves was Clausewitz. Subsequent wider reading makes me question his critical, almost angry judgments. Now, I think the Prussian general might have been more on the mark than the British captain.

Maybe if I had been a German colonial subject, I might have started with Clausewitz and ended with Hart. How Western imperialism messed with the minds of its subjects, long after its end! It did give some of us, sometimes, a decent education. In my reading experience, the French were clearly superior interpreters of German thought; just consider Raymond Aron’s magnum opus Penser la guerre, Clausewitz.

Some philosophers of war

If Hart, Aron and Clausewitz were alive today, what might they think about the war in Ukraine and the meaning of victory – and whether or not that should even be the aim? The problem is that most people’s image of a military victory is that over a prostrated enemy or an annihilated one, like those photos of destroyed Berlin, Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, or the formal surrender of the Japanese aboard the USS Missouri. Such victories are undeniable physical facts. Hart, more than any other influential military writer of the last century, attributes that kind of (image of) victory – the end result of total war and universal destruction – to Clausewitz.

But often, throughout military history, claims of victory were controversial or open to interpretation. However the war in Ukraine turns out, it will likely be inconclusive and open to disputes, with all sides claiming some kind of “victory” or at least fulfilment of war aims. When the guns fell silent, Clausewitz once wrote, contesting political claims began.

This is perhaps the real difference between Hart’s Clausewitz and Aron’s Clausewitz, or war as war and war as politics. For Clausewitz himself, war is, of course, both war AND politics, a dialectical whole. He was, like many educated Germans of his time, influenced by Hegel and thought dialectically, in terms of opposites and their reconciliation – defence and offence, ends and means, tactics and strategy. But Hart was a military man while Aron was a political philosopher (and a sociologist), who spent most of World War II editing a Free France newspaper in London. That might account for their contrasting interpretations.

Aron once described Alexis de Tocqueville as an aristocrat who learned to accept the inevitability of the coming democratic age. He might have said that Clausewitz – who preferred the more restrained “cabinet warfare”, or wars between princes, of the 17th and 18th centuries – came to terms with the inevitability – but not the desirability – of Napoleonic total war and partisan warfare, and their full destructiveness that came to define modernity. To visualise the destructiveness of partisan warfare, or what Clausewitz and Mao Zedong called “arming the people”, just think of Iraq and Syria. Some pundits in the West think the Ukrainians should wage a partisan war against the Russians; well, not if you want their country completely levelled.