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Even if you’ve never read On War, you probably know Carl von Clausewitz’s famous dictum that “war is the continuation of politics by other means.” His point was that war should always have a clear political objective, which must guide the choice of strategy and the manner in which military power is used. Brilliant battlefield achievements are meaningless if they fail to produce the desired political results.

I’ve been thinking about this issue a lot lately, and I’m beginning to wonder if war in today’s world is increasingly pointless. I say that with considerable trepidation, because past predictions that war was increasingly costly and likely to become less frequent have not fared well. In 1849, for example, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “War is on its last legs, and universal peace is as sure as is the prevalence of civilization over barbarism.” Before World War I, a Polish banker named Jean de Bloch argued that military technology had made war too dangerous, and that it was becoming impossible “except at the price of suicide.”

Even if you’ve never read On War, you probably know Carl von Clausewitz’s famous dictum that “war is the continuation of politics by other means.” His point was that war should always have a clear political objective, which must guide the choice of strategy and the manner in which military power is used. Brilliant battlefield achievements are meaningless if they fail to produce the desired political results.

I’ve been thinking about this issue a lot lately, and I’m beginning to wonder if war in today’s world is increasingly pointless. I say that with considerable trepidation, because past predictions that war was increasingly costly and likely to become less frequent have not fared well. In 1849, for example, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “War is on its last legs, and universal peace is as sure as is the prevalence of civilization over barbarism.” Before World War I, a Polish banker named Jean de Bloch argued that military technology had made war too dangerous, and that it was becoming impossible “except at the price of suicide.”

In a similar vein, Norman Angell’s The Great Illusion, first published in 1909, warned that interdependence meant that the costs of great power war would exceed any possible benefits. More recently, scholars such as John Mueller and Steven Pinker have each argued that war was becoming obsolescent, if not obsolete, only to see new conflicts erupt on a scale they did not expect. As the late military historian Michael Howard quipped in his review of Mueller’s book Retreat from Doomsday, a prudent man reading that war is dying out “will check that his air raid shelter is in good repair.”

So I’m not going to tell you that war is disappearing. It’s not. It’s just becoming increasingly pointless. Consider the recent historical record.

The United States has fought a lot of wars since World War II, and none of them were fought against a genuine peer competitor or even another great power. Instead, the United States has gone up against a bunch of weak states, most of whom lacked powerful allies. Yet with the exception of the first Gulf War in 1991 and the trivial invasion of mighty Grenada in 1983, its........

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