The Art of Victory
attempts to extract from the gamut of human
experience the lessons of how mankind has
come to dominate much of nature, and survive
in relative harmony with it. And how we can
and must keep doing it. No small
task, but one made more focused by the sole,
underlying tenet of the book: that we all
seek to survive and to perpetuate our
bloodlines, and ensure that, in the process,
our lives have meaning. Meaning � however we
each interpret this nebulous word � may be
one of the greatest drivers of human
accomplishment, and therefore human progress
and survival.
We are now in the vortex of
one of the most dynamic ages of change in
human history, and it�s time to take stock,
and to plot a course into our future. What
is the future of the human species? Can our
particular society survive and sustain
itself in control of its own destiny
(because we know that the life expectancy of
societies is precarious)? How will we
survive, and how well will we
survive? Who and what are our competitors?
How do we prevail?
So let me start with the
words which commence The Art of Victory:
turn and take one last look
around at the life
you have known,
at the life we humans have built over the
past few thousand years. It is already gone.
The granite columns of antiquity remain,
�though they crumble. Humanity, more vast in
its numbers, remembers little of its past.
This great upheaval we see today is how the
epochs change.
Our ego tells us
that this era of change is different from
all other past human experience; that the
future is unchartable and unmanageable. But
that is not so. We can shape the future as
we have always done, now more than ever
before. There are golden times again for us
to make.
And yet we
are in the eye of the hurricane, an Age
of Global Transformation, a pivotal time for
humanity. The pace of change is
accelerating, not just in science and
technology: human numbers are surging, and
flooding into urban, mostly coastal, cities
and towns, creating a cauldron of friction
and potentially revolutionary heat.
Climates, too, are changing, and yet we
remain fixated on the status quo, and
on the promises and fears of the future.
Forgotten is the fact that in our past
mankind was more aware of the tools of
survival with which nature equipped us.
� So that begins to answer �
in those opening words of The Art of
Victory � the question as to why anyone
in the 21st Century would write a
book on the subject of victory. That word �
victory � is, to many, antithetical to the
political correctness which pervades today�s
culture of self-indulgence. In any event,
what does it mean? [By the way, I do not
mean to sneer at political correctness: it
is a natural human mechanism of survival for
segments of all populations; it is a
mechanism which automatically self-regulates
society, just as militancy is a natural
reaction to certain situations.]
Clearly, we first need to
define the concept of victory before
we can determine what its goals should be at
a personal or societal level, let alone
consider how we achieve those goals. Here we
are, tens of millennia into human social
organization, and we have not yet adequately
defined one of the most important words in
our language.
My work, specifically for the
past 35 years, has been largely to analyze
events through the prism of grand strategy,
which sounds very grand, although all it
means is that, as a discipline, things are
viewed through an entirely contextual
framework, embracing as many factors as
possible of current, past, and future life
and reality. As my old master, Dr Stefan
Possony, would say, it means seeing the big
picture, but without neglecting a
brushstroke of detail; to be a �specialist
generalist�. Understanding strategy, and
particularly grand strategy, demands an
holistic perspective of the total warp and
weft of global history: seeing the long,
historical strands � the warp � and the
broad geopolitical contextual weave � the
weft � of current affairs, economic trends,
power and social factors, and so on. As you
can imagine, then, with that task, there is
no such thing as a perfect grand strategist.
In total, I have spent more
than four decades studying global issues,
often in conflict zones and troubled areas,
watching societies rise and fall. In the
process, it seemed less than clear that
anyone actually remembered what historical
occurrences set them on the their path. In
essence, mankind seemed to have forgotten
where it came from and where it wished to
go. In modern, successful societies it had
become seemingly unnecessary to ask the
basic questions of: who are we and who am I?
From whence did I come? And whither do I and
my society wish to go? What is necessary for
me to survive tomorrow? Not today,
but tomorrow.
Most of us in the West � the
modern, industrialized states essentially
led by secular governments � had, for a
half-century or more, the luxury of
believing that tomorrow was a linear
extrapolation of yesterday. The Cold War
period was a comforting respite from the
century or more of upheaval and growth which
had occurred immediately before it. During
the Cold War, we came to believe in growth
in all good things, shrugging off minor
setbacks. The end of the Cold War saw a
return to chaos, or apparent chaos, in many
things. The globalization which we saw
emerge seemed unlike anything which had been
seen in recent history. But it was not
unprecedented in its strategic
characteristics.
In the book I talk of the
reality that Genghis Khan�s iteration of
globalization in the early 13th
Century has direct parallels to today.
Genghis Khan�s approach was to seize
territory and decapitate conquered
societies, killing their leaders and
destroying their hierarchies. This left
societies without local leaders, and robbed
of much of their sense of identity. His
process � incorporating globalization of
communications and command and control,
globalization of ideas, and capital �
ensured that new concepts, and new
technologies exploded throughout the
Eurasian landmass. So, too, did other
things, such as pandemic disease. Because of
Genghis Khan�s new world, and only a century
after his death, the plague swept with
lightning speed from China�s Pacific coast �
where it killed more than 50 percent of the
population � to Europe�s Atlantic and
Mediterranean shores where it ravaged
populations. That was the last time, until
our present period, when the population of
Western Europe declined.
The black death brought some
interesting consequences. Historically
speaking, the black plague was not entirely
black. In Europe, it meant that survivors of
the plague became richer, because they
inherited from a lot of dead relatives, and
so capital formation � and therefore
economic growth and social transformation �
became easier. Today, the decapitation of
hierarchies, however, has been performed by
the mass media, but we are often left,
nonetheless, leaderless, confused, and riven
with angst.
But let me return to the
central theme: victory itself.
Victory is not about winning
a battle or a war. It is far more complex,
and far more elevated than that. It is not
just about today, or even the next few
tomorrows. This is how I described it in
The Art of Victory:
Victory � is infinitely more
important than war and peace. Without
victory � victory over nature, victory over
adversaries, victory over self, victory over
ignorance � a society fades to extinction.
Mankind can tolerate the uncertainties and
costs of conflict, but without victory there
is no lasting peace, or any real peace at
all: no prosperity, no control over destiny,
no guarantee of survival. Victory at its
essence is the survival of the species.
Victory is the goal of life
and therefore ultimately of the whole range
of human emotions and skills; it is a
genetic writ within the essence of each
individual human being: to survive,
dominate, perpetuate, grow.�
And I went on to say:
Victory is not just
�winning.� Winning � when viewed down the
silent, windswept plains of history � is
tactical, a phenomenon which is, by
definition, explosive, transitory, and
ephemeral. Victory is slow-burning,
overarching and transcendent. Victory
requires, however, that goals be won or
achieved on an ongoing basis. It is neither
a permanent nor secure phenomenon. Society
too often mistakes the process of conquest
for victory itself, which is the sustained
delivery of a complex pattern of successes.
To be victorious, then, implies the command
of an epoch and the fundamental alteration
of history, personal or societal. While a
single success or defeat may affect history,
victory � whether eventually undone or not �
marks the path of a society or of mankind.
In other words, victory
sounds pretty much like what we see � or
rather, what we have seen � all
around us in the West. We had conquered and
dominated geography over the centuries; we
have secured and built our economic wealth,
our science, our languages, our literature
and beliefs. We became, then, masters of all
we surveyed. The question now � in this age
when upheaval means that all things are
again up for grabs � is whether we in the
West wish this path to continue.
Not that this book was
written just for a Western audience. Indeed,
the large bulk of humanity has been denied a
true grasp of victory for centuries, and
many now sense intuitively that they have,
in the post-Cold War world � the Age of
Uncertainty � the opportunity to seize it.
The book has 30 chapters, 28 of which are
headed by a maxim, explained in the text
which follows, and all are equally important
to the attainment and the retention of the
victory of a society, or of an individual
within society. Where possible, I have set
the stage for each maxim with an example
from current life.
So the book deals heavily
with the formulation and components of grand
strategy and how they relate to the success
or failure of both societies and
individuals. It gets into how belief systems
are formed, and the r�le of religion; and it
gets into one of the main areas of my work
for which there has never been a textbook:
psychological strategy.
The original paper on which
the book is based was intended to follow,
and to broaden the context of Sun-tzu�s
2,500-year-old Art of War; Niccol�
Machiavelli�s The Prince and
Discourses; Carl von Clausewitz�s 1832
classic, On War; and Sir Basil
Liddell-Hart�s Strategy. These texts
remain essential, of course, but missing
were textbooks, or blueprints covering the
broader context.
Science has now given us the
ability to better understand the impact of
climate�s inevitable and immutable process
of change, and the impact of geospatial
strategic change brought about by mankind�s
unprecedented ability to move globally and
into space. And, of course, we need to
understand the ramifications of changes in
scale and pace which the compounding
development of human tools has allowed.
The first maxim sets the
stage, and says: Victory is the principal
goal of a society and the first
responsibility of the state, because only in
victory is survival possible. And I
begin that chapter with an example of how
Daimler and Chrysler each began their search
for survival, a process which led to their
1998 merger, and how Daimler emerged as the
dominant party and the ultimate victor in a
corporate sense, and Chrysler, in order to
survive, sacrificed a great degree of
control over is own destiny: its language,
culture, and so on. It was a prosaic version
of the fictional space invaders who want to
take over earth because their own planet had
become untenable. Daimler, like a number of
other European (and particularly German)
companies such as Deutsche Post and now,
increasingly, Airbus Industrie, have
literally attempted to almost covertly
export their financial center of gravity to
the US because the US provided a more
habitable climate.
Taking the longer view of the
millennia of the construction of the West�s
dominance over the globe, it may be that the
moves of corporations from, say, Germany to
the US amount to nothing more than moving
the deck chairs on the Titanic after
the iceberg had been struck. Unless � Unless
the West, or modern society, decides
consciously that it wishes to perpetuate its
hard-earned victory, instead of allowing it
to be eroded, or broken up; a process which
is now possible; and now indeed possible on
a rapid scale.
The parallels between the
West of today and the decline and fall of
the Roman Empire are evident.
In the book, I also note that
societies tend to bifurcate � or trifurcate,
or even more � when they approach their
zenith as was the case with Rome. In Chapter
20, The Never-Ending Challenge, Maxim
20 reads: Victory can never be total, and
this is its beauty. Victory is always
relative and will ultimately fail if it
attempts to be absolute. To provide a
current context, I highlighted the reality
that, despite the fears of some Western
Europeans � and some in disenfranchised
societies who rightly feared for the
survival of their own cultures and
bloodlines � the US at the end of the Cold
War was never going to be the sole
global power, just as Rome could never have
prevailed over the entire planet, neither
could the Mongols under Genghis Khan, nor
Hitler, nor the so-called �monolithic
communism� of which Lenin fantasized.
To illustrate the fact that
absolute power absolutely generates
competition, I hope I made the book more
appealing by citing the parable of financier
Sir James Goldsmith, who said: �When you
marry your mistress, you automatically
create a job vacancy.� The reality is that,
like watching the constant splitting of
cells under a microscope, we can see masses
build, and then, ultimately split and begin
new lives as separate entities.
Indeed, maxim 21 notes:
The enemy of �identity� is �mass�. Where
identity is sacrificed to mass, victory
suffers. And in that chapter, under that
maxim, I say: �Welcome to an Interregnum of
Cratocide and Cratogenesis�. Here, I�m
pleased to say that, working with a
colleague in Athens, Dr Marios Evriviades,
we coined names for two of the phenomena
which have once again arisen, as they rise
throughout human history: cratocide,
the murder of nations; and cratogenesis,
the birth of nations. That�s what we will
see increasingly over the coming few decades
as the world re-defines its structures:
nations disappearing and appearing. And that
is one reason why the United Nations, which
saw its task as freezing the status quo
of the world into 1945 terms � the terms of
the triumphant powers of World War II � will
soon become irrelevant.
The end of the Cold War saw
globalization break out, and that spelled
the crumbling of the Westphalian principles,
which had evolved since 1648 as the absolute
definition of sovereignty. And, of course,
that also means that what we are pleased to
call �international law� as a rigidly
codified form of interaction between
societies, will also crash about our ears.
The world is redefining itself, and
essentially many of the artificial, or
abstract, structures which we have built
will be replaced by more fundamental
realities of human interaction and, in time,
they too will become complex, and
entrenched, and then they too will become
sclerotic and brittle, and be replaced.
In many respects, that�s what
The Art of Victory attempts to
understand: the very fundamental, even
genetically-implanted, survival mechanisms
which dictate how we must react and interact
as individuals and societies if we are to
survive and prosper as a species.
As a result, when we discuss
the r�le of war in victory, the book
attempts to grasp the guiding principles as
to when war is productive or
counter-productive. Indeed, because conflict
now entails so many aspects of maneuver,
both physical and psychological, can there
ever in the future be clearly defined
periods of �war� and �peace�, if there ever
were?
Early in The Art of
Victory, I attempt to define how we
reached our current Age of Global
Transformation, which began with the end of
the Cold War. In a nutshell, we saw
societies building the great tools of power:
telecommunications, advanced rapid
transportation means, and, most importantly,
the ability to amass capital. These were the
instruments used by one bloc of
societies to oppose another bloc. But
with the end of the Cold War, instead of
being the tools which divided
opposing societies, they became the tools
which united mankind on many levels.
Humanity, capital, and, most significantly,
ideas could now flow virally around the
globe, something we had not seen since
Genghis Khan�s 13th Century
globalization.
The loss of hierarchies
induces in societies a justifiable, and
arguably visceral, fear for their survival,
and, in the uncertainty which prevails,
individuals and groups emerge which attempt
to re-acquire control over their own
destinies. Herein lie the seeds of
terrorism, of societal re-awakenings, and of
collapse.
In The Art of Victory,
I examine what this means in the immediate
and coming decades, as well as attempting to
define the underlying rationales for
societal evolution and morphing. So the book
looks, for example, at whether Iran can
re-emerge as a great power, or whether
China�s and India�s seemingly inexorable
rise as superpowers can be sustained. What
are the consequences in such scenarios as
far as the rest of the world is concerned?
And, of course, I attempt to highlight the
paths and futures which are available to
individuals as well as to societies. By the
way, there are no guarantees that the
People�s Republic of China, or India, or
Iran, will succeed in their strategic
goals in the coming decades. The PRC
leadership, for example, knows that China is
in a race with itself, to build a durable
victorious society before resource shortages
� including food and water � or population
unrest stop the upward spiral of wealth and
power in their tracks.
In many respects, as the book
discusses, China is massively dependent on
external factors � stable global supply of,
and demand for, materials and capital and
products � at a scale which in many respects
has never before been seen. Equally, if
China�s quest for victory falters in a
decade or two because of resource, food and
water shortages, population unrest, or other
problems, then the internal reaction to such
a crisis could well be a search for a
galvanizing distraction abroad, such as war
with Taiwan or even Japan or the US.
Survival of the leadership at home will
outweigh the logic of broader, longer-term
ramifications. To put it in Washington
parlance: the urgent will always outweigh
the important.
The book ends by offering the
option to see the Age of Global
Transformation as an Age of Opportunity.
Indeed, the book in some respects is
prescriptive: it attempts to define the
maxims by which humanity survives and
triumphs. Moreover, it attempts to take us
past the immediate fashions, or fashionable
morals, which constrain us to short-term
perspectives, and looks toward the
longer-term virtues of survival and human
interaction. It looks at the innate
requirement of nature that we have belief
systems � often expressed as religion or
pseudo-religion � and that we automatically
comprehend at an individual level the
meaning of �justice�, and the meanings of
such concepts as loyalty and duty. These are
not just words, or artificial concepts; they
are, like the inherent need for species to
achieve victory, part of the natural process
of survival. These are devices which enable
us to work cooperatively with others; to
build alliances for security; to drive our
sense of self-worth � of which identity
security is such a critical part � and in
turn enable us to build achievements which
enhance the likelihood of the survival of
our bloodline and species down the
generations.
What I�ve tried to do in
The Art of Victory is to shorten the
linkages between the fundamental drivers of
human survival and the challenges we face
today and into the future. So it attempts to
lay out a philosophy and yet to translate
that philosophy into immediately practicable
actions for individual life, and for the
life of societies.
My hope is that The Art of
Victory will inspire optimism and the
willingness to see vital issues in a broader
and more exciting tapestry. We need to
escape the characteristic which says �I am
rich, therefore I must be smart�, and
realize that our wealth as a global society
may be exactly what blinds us to the great
challenges which face us over the coming
decades. Life is exciting. We need an
operating manual. But, as with our VCRs, the
operating manual is usually only used as a
last resort.