Personal Reflections on Recent History and Strategy

Selected rather than collected, these essays offer an interesting mélange of auto-biography, reflections on others, and comments on issues that have engaged the academic and author Lawrence Freedman, notably the 2003 Iraq War and the Russo-Ukraine struggle. The Sunday Times piece of 22 April 2018 in which he declared Iran and Israel “not natural enemies” is, like others such, not here. The collection is priced attractively and sold strongly by the publishers as being the work of “one of the world’s foremost scholars of warfare, both historical and contemporary … a unique window into a half century of world history”.

As too many books are taken on their own estimation, and Freedman is central to a well-connected national back-patting milieu, it is probable that the book will be reviewed in excessively favourable terms. As a result, it is necessary to offer some caveats, while of course accepting the inherent interest of the book.

Let us start with a fundamental point. Freedman presents himself as offering an historical take on strategy, but his history is limited and he is fundamentally ahistorical in that he does not address the difference(s) of the past(s) adequately. Instead, history becomes, as it were, a data set for the present. There is an interesting aspect of legacy here. Freedman devotes a chapter to his doctoral supervisor, Michael Howard, and makes it clear that his patronage provided key opportunities. Both content and tone are eulogistic, but what is missing is a sense of Howard’s limitations, some of which indeed were carried into Freedman’s work: “There was a deceptive simplicity… He wrote with such authority that you could take what seemed like a bold assertion on trust, because you knew of the erudition and contemplation that was behind each paragraph. He could capture in a few sentences great swathes of history by keeping his focus, and then illuminating the argument with an appropriate quote or vignette”.

Unfortunately, what this amounts to was that Howard, in much of his work, could be opinionated and superficial. Freedman, for example, cites War in European History, but this book largely leaves out Eastern Europe, Scandinavia. . . . . Well, do not get me started. It is a very weak work. Similarly, necessary complexities are omitted in Michael Howard’s The Continental Commitment (1971). Freedman’s view that Howard “established military history as a serious field of scholarship with a book on the Franco-Prussian war” just shows how little he knows about the field.

Instead, what was crucial was patronage and Freedman himself emphasises Howard’s connections, although he does cut to the quick: Piers Mackesy, a far better scholar in the subject, should have got the Chichele chair in 1977, not Howard, just as, arguably, Brian Bond in 1982 would have been a more appropriate choice for War Studies than Freedman. He was certainly more experienced as an historian of war. Freedman, who (like Howard) lacks the forensic interest or skill of a Namier, Elton, Cowling, or Clark, does not trace such elements, through, but they are crucial in explanation. In contrast, Freedman appears to understand this when commendably and ably addressing texts in his presentation of Tony Blair’s Chicago speech, which he drafted, and in his valuable discussion of the Chilcot inquiry on the Iraq war, on which he served. Ultimately, Freedman’s excursions beyond a somewhat restricted account of the post-1945 world rests mostly on Strategy: A History (2013). Yet that also has a limited approach, and Freedman certainly lacked the quest for past probing shown by the impressive Colin Gray, to whom he devotes a chapter in his new book.

In Strategy: A History, as elsewhere in Freedman’s work, including this volume, (and also so for Howard), there is a failure to engage with China other than in the persons of Sun Tzu and Mao, neither of whom in practice was “typical” of Chinese strategy. There can also be a failure to engage with India. (See my review of his Strategy: A History). There is also a lack of consideration of strategic geography and geopolitics. Unlike Hal Brands’s recent Eurasian Century. Hot Wars, Cold Wars, and the Making of the Modern World (2025) (my review of Brands is here), we are not in the world Mackinder considered, or reconsidered. John Bew, a KCL chairholder, describes the book as pondering “the ever-darkening geopolitical storm clouds as far as most of the world is concerned on the horizon”, which is wrong.

Naturally, no writer can cover everything, but the selection of what to address is instructive. So, even more, is the extent to which choices, lacunae and gaps are addressed. That is not Freedman’s style. Approvingly, he quotes Howard saying at a public lecture “Didn’t I do well”. Freedman appears to feel the same. Actually, all any of us can do is offer interim reports. Despite the puffery, both Howard and Freedman speak to a particular Anglo-American “moment” in writing on this subject. Both work and moment require contextualisation, not in order to suggest simply that they were of limited value, because that is the case for all of us, but rather to explain the limits as well as the value. Freedman fails to do this. It is a pity, as authors are best placed to assess their flaws and the serendipities of work and career, support and opposition. In the meantime, doubtless he will receive plaudits, but, unfortunately, they will probably only clarify the weaknesses of a tradition — or, shall we say, a successful faction.

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Our Reviewer: Jeremy Black, Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Exeter, is a Senior Fellow of the Center for the Study of America and the West at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He is the author of an impressive number of works in history and international affairs, frequently demonstrating unique interactions and trends among events, including The Great War and the Making of the Modern World, Combined Operations: A Global History of Amphibious and Airborne Warfare, and The War of 1812 in the Age of Napoleon. Works he has previously reviewed here include Empireworld: How British Imperialism Shaped the Globe, Why War?, Seapower in the Post-Modern World, Mobility and Coercion in an Age of Wars and Revolutions, Augustus the Strong, Military History for the Modern Strategist, The Great Siege of Malta, Hitler’s Fatal Miscalculation, Superpower Britain, Josephine Baker’s Secret War, Captives and Companions. A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World, War and Power: Who Wins Wars—and Why, The Pacific’s New Navies, No More Napoleons, Republic and Empire. Crisis, Revolution, America’s Early Independence, The Fate of the Day, The Maginot Line: A New History, The Nuclear Age. An Epic Race for Arms, Power and Survival, Daring to Be Free: Rebellion and Resistance of the Enslaved in the Atlantic World, Mexico: A 500-Year History, and A World Safe for Commerce: American Foreign Policy from the Revolution to the Rise of China, .

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