War & Peace Quote by Martin van Creveld

Van Creveld’s sentence is built like a cold clasp of the hand: no uplift, no romance, just a grim cost-benefit claim dressed as historical sobriety. The pivot is “since Hiroshima,” a date that functions less as a reference point than as a moral discontinuity. After nuclear weapons, he implies, war stops being a contest of wills and becomes a question of self-erasure. That single clause narrows the reader’s imaginative options: you don’t get to debate bravery or strategy when the board itself can be incinerated.

The intent is clarifying and polemical at once. “Best, perhaps the only” performs a careful shrug toward the usual alternatives - diplomacy, institutions, norms - while quietly demoting them to secondary roles. What looks like modest hedging is actually rhetorical pressure: if you concede even a little that “only” might be true, you’ve accepted deterrence as the adult policy and everything else as aspirational theater.

The subtext is the classic, unsettling bargain of the nuclear age: peace purchased not by mutual understanding but by mutual vulnerability. He’s also smuggling in a definition of “curb war” that matters. It doesn’t mean eliminating violence; it means preventing large-scale interstate war by making escalation irrational. That aligns with a post-1945 reading of great-power restraint, but it also exposes the ethical sting: stability is achieved by perfecting the capacity for annihilation.

Contextually, van Creveld writes from a tradition skeptical of liberal faith in permanent progress. His line is less celebration than diagnosis, implying that modern peace may rest on a paradox: the safest world is one where the ultimate move is unthinkable because it is, quite literally, suicidal.