Edward Luttwak, Grand Strategy and the Facts

Edward Luttwak,"The Best and the Fastest," TNR, 31 August, reviews Christopher Kelly's The End of Empire: Attila the Hun and the Fall of Rome and Christopher I. Beckwith's Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age To the Present. Luttwak has no fear of being wrong on the facts.* In this review, he reports academic disinterest in military history, even though, when compared with history's other traditional forms, it flourishes in the academy.

Yet, Luttwak's outsider's perspective occasionally raises questions that academic insiders may have missed. His

The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire from the First Century AD to the Third is controversial among professional historians. Luttwak is seen as an outsider and non-specialist in the field. However, his book has raised questions about the Roman army and its defense of the Roman frontier. Luttwak asked"How did the Romans defend the frontier?", a question that he argued had been lost in the professional discourse that focused on demographics, economics and sociology. Although many professional historians reject his views on Roman strategy, his 1976 book has increased interest in the study of the Roman frontiers....

Since the 1980s, Luttwak has published articles on Byzantium. His new book, The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire, will be published by Harvard UP.

*Many of us were offended by Luttwak's claim in the NYT last year that Barack Obama would be regarded as an apostate in the Muslim world and was likely to be assassinated by its terrorists. After consulting well-informed scholars, the Times' public editor agreed with us that Luttwak was wrong on the facts and given to extreme language. More recently, Luttwak's"Why U.S. Diplomacy Will Fail With Iran," WSJ, 12 August, includes a bizarre misreading of the overthrow of Mohammed Mosaddeq as Iran's Prime Minister in 1953. He must, surely, know better.