War: no longer politics by other means – Clausewitz, Fukuyama and Ukraine

Only the most dedicated academic has actually read Carl von Clausewitz’s On War. The rest of us gravely intone the well-worn, and paraphrased, aphorism that “war is politics by other means” and hope to bluff our way through as savants of the Prusso-German canon of strategic thought. But Clausewitz was on to something and how curious it is to note that in the real world, in the wars we fight now, the link between war and politics has become ever more tenuous. Volodymyr Zelensky is not entirely correct when he asserts that all wars have to end with some sort of agreement. Wars of national surviv…