Nothing Less than Victory: Decisive Wars and the Lessons of History »

John David Lewis is visiting associate professor of philosophy, politics, and economics at Duke University, and senior research scholar in history and classics at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center at Bowling Green State University. He is the author of "Solon the Thinker: Political Thought in Archaic Athens and Early Greek Lawgivers".

"John David Lewis offers a superb appraisal of how ancient and modern wars start and finish. This chronicle of some 2,500 years of Western history is replete with a philosophical analysis of why nations fight, win--and lose. His insights and conclusions are original and fearless--as well as timely and welcome in the confused war-making of the present age."--Victor Davis Hanson, author of Carnage and Culture

"This book's argument is powerful and provocative, and Lewis is a good storyteller and scholar. Ambitious, stimulating, and thoughtful, this book makes a strong case for the value of the strategic offensive, and engages with the kind of problems that everyone should be thinking about today."--Barry Strauss, author of The Spartacus War

Publishers Weekly

Thanks to its recent experience of quagmires that drain into simmering truces, America has forgotten that triumph is the proper way to end a war, argues this brash study of military blowouts. Surveying six conflicts, from the Persian invasion of ancient Greece to WWII, historian Lewis (Early Greek Lawgivers) contends that lasting peace requires a shattering victory, “a display of overwhelming force” that “expose[s] the physical and ideological bankruptcy” of the losers and precipitates “an immediate collapse in [their] will to fight.” Lewis's analysis of war as a psychological struggle and “clash of moral purposes” is lucid and forceful; it's especially telling in his incisive account of Sherman's march through Georgia, and especially provocative in his defense of the atomic bombings of Japan. (“To break the Japanese leaders out of their ideological blinders... American leaders needed to kill a lot of Japanese in a visibly shocking way.”) He's less cogent when he tries to distill profound moral purposes from the murk of the Second Punic War or Roman emperor Aurelian's squabble with Queen Zenobia of Palmyra. Lewis's tight yoking of military success with moral superiority sometimes veers close to the notion that might makes right. (Mar.)

List of Maps and Illustrations vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Victory and the Moral Will to Fight 1
Chapter 1: "To Look without Flinching": The Greco-Persian Wars, 547-446 BC 11
Chapter 2: "Only One Omen Is Best": The Theban Wars, 382-362 BC 36
Chapter 3: "I Will Have My Opponent": The Second Punic War, 218-201 BC 68
Chapter 4: "A Prince Necessary Rather Than Good": The Campaigns of Aurelian, AD 270-275 109
Chapter 5: "The Hard Hand of War": Sherman's March through the American South, AD 1864-1865 141
Chapter 6: "The Balm for a Guilty Conscience": British Appeasement and the Prelude to World War II, AD 1919-1939 184
Chapter 7: "Gifts from Heaven": The American Victory over Japan, AD 1945 237
Conclusion: The Lessons of the Victories 286
Notes 295
Bibliography 323
Index 345