Publisher's Synopsis
This book adresses two fundamental questions about the nature of war: why reasonable people sometimes lead their nations into self-made traps of destructive proportions and why nations finding themselves in a deep mess of their own doing tend to deepen their troubles and make it harder for themselves to escape those traps.;The study is organized in three parts around the various stages of war. The first focuses on the causes of war; the second on the processes of war management; and the third examines those short and long term implications of war which turn on its head the notion of war as an instrument of policy.
