ABSTRACT
Miraculous Peace Everlasting embodies everything good: every religion has promised it to its followers, as has virtually every quasi-religious ideology. Wages are equally important in war and peace. Health, happiness, and peace—what ordinary people ardently seek for themselves and their families—provide fine greeting-card material; they make for dull reading. Long-term planning, moreover, implies constant recalibration of circumstances and assessment of relative balance of power, both military and nonmilitary—which implies recognizing that strategy is no less indispensable in war than in peace. True enough, in war the strategic becomes entwined with the tactical—hence the two can easily be conflated. They are nevertheless quite distinct: a tactical victory that represents a strategic setback is known as a pyrrhic victory, thus semantically immortalizing King Pyrrhus's short-lived defeat of the Romans at Aesculum, in 279 BC, that would soon be followed by his own.
