Word: hansons
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...carriers drawn largely from free property owners with a substantial stake in a battle's outcome - established infantrymen as the centerpiece of European military power. At the Battle of Poitiers (A.D. 732) Frankish infantry, the phalanx's latest adaptation, routed much-feared Muslim cavalrymen. The Franks' victory confirmed, says Hanson, "that good heavy infantry, if it maintained rank and found a defensible position, usually defeated good cavalry...
Meanwhile, the West was developing what Hanson calls "the only economic system that works, a rationalist tradition that alone allows material and technological progress, the sole political structure that ensures the freedom of the individual, [and] a system of ethics and a religion that brings out the best in humankind...
...assure readers that he does not believe the West has a monopoly on individual bravery or strategic genius. It's just that culture and history have made Westerners more skilled on the killing fields. And in a passage Osama bin Laden (or Japanese militarists) might have profited from, Hanson points to the way in which the West's Greek-originated ethical ideas generate a murderous indignation: "We in the West call the few casualties we suffer from terrorism and surprise 'cowardly,' the frightful losses we inflict through open and direct assault 'fair...
...Hanson's command of a broad historical canvas is impressive. But his analysis becomes less convincing when he speculates about the future. Today, he says, "deadly Western armies have little to fear from any force other than themselves." His corollary: the West need not worry about non-Western flare-ups (e.g., in the Middle East) as much as a war between two Western armies...
...could find themselves fighting? The U.S. and Europe, says Hanson. He points ominously to "the specter of a pan-European state [that] seems to create unity among its members by collective antagonism and envy of the United States...