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The first dimension of temporality addressed in this book is the trajectory of Western military power. The roots of Western military superiority and their durability define a great debate in the field, namely over the importance of the so-called military revolution in shaping the West’s trajectory in the international system and the extent to which it depended on certain institutional practices, as opposed to brute material power.

Michael Roberts broke new ground in 1955 by introducing arguments about a “military revolution.”¹³ In his view, a combination of changes in tactics (volley fire, artillery, and cavalry charges) and strategies (related to the conduct of the Thirty Years’ War) led to an increase in the size of armed forces, leading in turn to the emergence of the modern state, which had to establish the bureaucratic apparatus for extracting the resources required to wage wars. This self-reinforcing feedback loop of more resources leading to more military power and even more resources was famously summarized by Charles Tilly: “war made the State and the State made war.”¹⁴ Geoffrey Parker subsequently connected military revolution to the rise of the West in the international system. His causal paths differed slightly from those identified by Roberts (seeing guns and fortifications rather than tactical innovation as the drivers of change), but more significantly Parker explicitly linked the military revolution to the rise of Western domination in the international system: “the key to the Westerners’ success in creating the first truly global empires between 1500 and 1750 depended upon precisely those improvements in the ability to wage war which have been termed ‘the military revolution.’ ”¹⁵ In this perspective, the gain in military effectiveness granted by the military revolution allowed Western countries to dominate, and thus subjugate, the empires they encountered in the Americas, Asia, and Africa: Western domination was established at gunpoint, thanks to the military revolution.

This argument has triggered an important debate among military historians,¹⁶ with recent works questioning the logic of the revolution and Europe’s expansion. First, the “military revolution” was not limited to Europe, since elements of it are found in many other empires at the time: the Chinese, for example, had already invented gunpowder and reached the key milestones of military and administrative modernity by 1200.¹⁷

Second, the “revolution” did not give any kind of military edge to the Europeans, since Western expansion until the nineteenth century was not conducted by mass armies of musketeers and pikesmen but instead by tiny expeditionary forces, essentially supported by private entrepreneurs. Those forces were often in awe of the massive empires they encountered in Africa, Asia, and the Americas: European expansion is better explained by a combination of deference to local polities in Asia and Africa, and disease propagation in the Americas, undermining the idea of any Western military superiority.¹⁸

Third, true Western global domination can only be observed with the creation of colonial empires in the nineteenth century. This domination was enabled by a combination of the economic and technological advantages granted by the industrial revolution¹⁹ and an imperial ideology triggering competition between European powers.²⁰ However, this period was virtually over by the 1960s with the decolonization process, and Western countries have failed to use military power effectively in the Global South since then. While this critical engagement with Roberts and Parker is diverse and builds on a variety of factors, it does tend to minimize politico-military factors in favor of momentary industrial might and thus to portray Western preeminence as an accident rather than a systemic characteristic.²¹ Most starkly, perhaps, Western hegemony could be reduced to its superior access to foodstuffs and coal.²²

This literature thus downplays the role of political institutions and principles. Where a material reading of the West’s rise and decline is confined to the past couple of centuries, a political reading extends across millennia and is unsure of whether decline has even set in. There may be a sense of erosion, but the conviction that competing political institutions and principles, which harness and direct military power, have proven superior is simply not there.

Borrowing from Clausewitz, one might venture that the literature on institutions and principles recognizes that Western political institutions change in character over time while contending that their nature remains intact: they were established in ancient Greece and Rome and concern ideas such as civic engagement, blind justice, scientific aptitude, and the instrumental use of military force for political purpose.²³ In a strong version, the implication is that as long as Western governments and societies remain wedded to these principles, they can also remain on at least a continuing, if not rising, trajectory, and not one of decline. Thus Victor Davis Hanson, a strong advocate of the idea of a continuous tradition of Western warfare since the classical era, sees a connection between self-government, the steadfast ability to endure battle and deliver fatal blows, and an enduring Western advantage in warfare.²⁴ However, most analysts take a bleaker view of the ability of Western governments and societies to stick to lasting principles. They see a precipitous decline from vibrant liberal democracy toward hollowed-out democracy, marked by less freedom and civic engagement, and therefore declining power.²⁵

A critical issue in this debate over (political) principle and (material) power in the Western experience concerns the fracture in Western political communities between liberal and bourgeois society and military society. The principle of civilian control and instrumental use of military force for political purposes is enduring but in practice revelatory of a contested and difficult civil–military relationship, and military power and fortune are made at the point where this relationship is forged. The early modern European state as conceived by Roberts and Parker became “strong” because it wedded royal authority, uniformed aristocracy, and organizational muscle, but it remained weak in terms of civic engagement. In the young American republic, the attempt to mimic this type of “strong” state (the Hamiltonian option) lost out to a “light” and deliberately weaker state option (the Jeffersonian option) that favored civic engagement. The outcome was a society of riches but a challenge of politico-strategic leadership at the helm of a state that was supposed to be weak.²⁶

This concern with civil–military relations as embedded within political institutions, and the resulting ability of the state to offer strategic leadership and the superior control of military force for political objectives, is central to the contemporary debate on the West and war. There is a strong argument that Western state institutions have atrophied and become irrelevant to war.²⁷ However, research in the field is more generally focused on adaptions within them, including changes to the civil–military balance, asking time and again whether Western governments in practice possess the requisite experience, training, and habit for politico-military strategy.²⁸ In terms of “military revolution,” this literature suggests that Western decline, if such is the case, is due to a loss not of material muscle but of an institutionalized balance between civil and military communities as practiced by Western leadership.

In analyzing the trajectory of time we follow in these footsteps and understand “the West” as an institutional practice of military power directed by primarily liberal governments and societies. We take note of the debate raging over whether the West remains as a frail but active political force;²⁹ whether its energy has been transplanted to its Soviet/Russian and American peripheries, which have become competing inheritors of the Western tradition;³⁰ or whether the Western aberration in history has ended as the outsized economies of China and India herald an Asia-centric future.³¹ We do not offer a fixed viewed of the geography and boundaries of “the West.” Instead, we suggest that the Western practice of bringing military and liberal communities into balance and governing on this basis—and conducting war on this basis—is fragile, contingent, and difficult. We speak of the West but caution that its historical trajectory in terms of war and order is a matter of enquiry.