Victory: Means and End (Symposium: Angelo Codevilla's No Victory, No Peace‪)‬

I've been reading Angelo Codevilla's writings on warfare now for more than a decade. I'll confess that some of what he says frankly provokes me to incredulity and horror, but too much of it has the ring of truth to be dismissed or ignored. I had the good fortune of meeting Codevilla in the fall of 2003 at Princeton University, where I was at the time a lecturer in the Department of Politics, and he had just arrived from Boston University as Visiting Professor of Politics, care of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. The idea for the present symposium on his book No Victory, No Peace originated in his undergraduate course at Princeton, "War and Peace," for which I served as teaching assistant (and, in the spirit of formations permanentes, as overgrown student).1 During that semester, as might be expected, we worked our way through the standard issues of warfare and international relations--soft power, coercive diplomacy, economic statecraft, intelligence, strategy, and all the rest.