War & Peace Quote by Daniel Pipes

Pipes is poking at the modern faith that conflict is mostly a misunderstanding waiting for the right conference room. The line lands because it refuses the comforting script of history-as-therapy: that if adversaries talk long enough, violence dissolves into compromise. Instead, he frames war as an argument settled not by mutual enlightenment but by exhaustion, coercion, or collapse. It’s a realist provocation, and it’s meant to sound like blasphemy in an era that treats “the peace process” as an automatic moral good.

The intent is polemical: downgrade diplomacy from savior to accessory. By saying “in general,” Pipes gives himself an escape hatch, but the thrust is absolutist. “One side giving up” is deliberately blunt, stripping away the euphemisms policymakers prefer - “de-escalation,” “confidence-building,” “mutual security arrangements” - and recoding outcomes as surrender or submission. The subtext: negotiations often ratify realities created by force. Treating talks as the engine of peace lets leaders claim credit while avoiding the uglier fact that wars typically end when the balance of power makes continuing irrational or impossible.

Context matters because Pipes is associated with a hawkish strain of Middle East commentary that distrusts diplomatic engagement with actors seen as ideologically committed to maximal goals. In that frame, diplomacy can become theater: a way for a determined side to buy time, rearm, gain legitimacy, or fracture the opponent’s will. The line is designed to stiffen resolve and to shame what he would call “process worship.”

It works as rhetoric because it’s rude to the listener’s preferred self-image: reasonable, humane, postwar. Pipes is betting that discomfort is clarifying - that peace isn’t made by words, but by leverage.