The nation that will insist upon drawing a broad line of distinction between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking by cowards.
-- Sir William Francis Butler
By lucidly revealing the common threads that connect the ancient confrontations between Athens and Sparta and between Rome and Carthage with the two calamitous world wars of the 20th century and the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kagan reveals new insights into the nature of war--and peace--that are vitally important and often surprising.