Strategy and slaughter

Colin Gray's ‘Clausewitz Rules, OK’ was the one contribution to the Interregnum special issue of this Review that engaged the problem of modern war in general. Issues of war and peace were represented only patchily in a volume aiming to reflect on the ‘post-Cold War’ decade, but put together before ‘9/11’ brought it to an abrupt end. The Balkans didn't play a large part in William Wallace's account of Europe; unstable Asian great-power rivalries and local wars, which could make Rosemary Foot and Andrew Walter's ‘Pacific Century’ anything but pacific were barely noted; while Caroline Thomas wrote about the Third World without mentioning Africa's wars. The Middle East, Rwanda and genocide were not covered. Bruce Cumings' wise reflections on the military bases of American liberalism, a brief discussion of the ‘new interventionism’ by Geoffrey Hawthorn, and dutiful mentions of Kosovo across the chapters, hardly compensated for these omissions.