Edward Luttwak

I still recall my acute disappointment with Michael Howard’s The Franco-Prussian War, published some thirty years ago. The subject was exciting – what with the desperate German infantry assaults at Gravelotte and the dramatic unveiling of the ultra-secret mitrailleuse – and the book was thick enough to promise much good fun to any schoolboy eager to read of battles with a threepenny bag of crisps at his side. Gravelotte was there all right, and the siege of Sedan too, but both only in miserably cursory fashion, with none of the stirring evocations of daring fights that filled the pages of the paperbacks that gave us the British version of the Second World War slice by heroic slice. Instead of leaving behind the dreary complexities of polities, society, economy and culture to march the reader straight into the dramatic simplicities of combat, Michael Howard’s prelude was interminable, and when he finally reached the battle-field he left it again almost immediately, to revert to his portrayal of two regimes and two societies at war.’

If Galtieri’s junta had prepared for war in 1982, even to the minimal extent of equipping Argentinian fighter-bombers properly, Mrs Thatcher’s Enterprise of the Falklands would almost certainly have failed, thereby ensuring that Argentina would still today be ruled by a triumphalist military élite, inept mismanages of a decaying economy, impotent spectators of the country’s social disintegration, and of course both cruel and corrupt. As it is, defeated Argentina is undergoing a profound economic reconstruction and making unprecedented progress towards democratic governance, while Britain has paid a large penalty for a very small war.

The extrovert author of numerous books, including the highly enjoyable Affluent Society and Great Crush of 1929, longtime Harvard professor (now emeritus), once New Delhi’s greatest celebrity (since Edwina) as Kennedy’s Ambassador to India, witty excoriator of the scholarly pretences of his fellow economists and of all manner of other balderdash, John Kenneth Galbraith’s only reticence hides a skilfully disguised but intense puritanism. He may not suffer the classic puritan’s agonies at the thought that somebody, somewhere is having a good time, but if contentment is a goal for the rest of us, it is clearly a goad for Galbraith, for whom it is only the tolerant companion of evils that a suitably restless discontent might abolish. After reading this far from unpersuasive essay inflated into a book by means of an uncrowded typeface and thick paper, one feels morally certain that his starting point was not the derived evils, but contentment itself. And in lieu of one chapter of conclusions he has two on the inevitable punishments to come (‘The Reckoning I’ and ‘The Reckoning II’, à la Stephen King) and a final mournful coda, ‘Requiem’ – for unlike redemptionists who denounce sin and threaten hellfire only to preach and promise salvation, Galbraith forecasts an inevitable downfall of relative economic decline, further tormented by underclass uprisings of the South-Central LA variety.’

The highly practical Hellenistic solution to Britain’s insatiable Churchill/Finest Hour cravings would have been to establish a regular cult, with its own dedicated priests, rituals and sanctuaries. Facing a brazen engraving of the famously pugnacious 1941 Karsh photograph, surrounded by appropriate symbols or even original relics of Spitfires, Sten guns, Home Guard pikes and Montecristo cigars, listening to quadrophonic recordings of the major speeches in His own voice, peering into side-chapels dedicated to His companions (Beaverbrook, Birkenhead, Bracken), the average gent thrown into despair by the latest debacle of the British economy could swiftly revive his flagging spirits. Then on his way out of the shrine he could perhaps pause to purchase a Churchill amulet from one of the attending priests robed in 1940-style battle dress, with tin helmet and gas-mask satchel.

When Gianni de Michelis, then Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Italy, attended a semi-official Nato anniversary conference organised by Washington’s Centre for Strategic and International Studies, and held with some formality at the Palais d’Enghien in Brussels, he was accompanied by a handsome blonde with unspecified duties on the state-owned ENI or possibly the...