ABSTRACT
We make war that we may live in peace,” the Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote in Nicomachean Ethics nearly 2,500 years ago. Although that simple statement has been elaborated upon and expanded in the years since, it remains a central tenet that underlies using force in the contemporary world. In the period between the twentieth century’s world wars, the British strategist Sir Basil Liddell Hart put the same sentiment a slightly different way: the purpose of war, he said, was “a better state of the peace.”
