"If you are strong and fighting the weak, then if you kill your opponent then you are a scoundrel... if you let him kill you, then you are an idiot"
About this Quote
Van Creveld’s line is built like a trap: it forces you to feel the moral no-win that clings to asymmetric conflict. Put a “strong” actor in a fight with a “weak” one and every outcome becomes reputationally toxic. Win, and you’re a bully; lose (or accept loss), and you’re incompetent. The brilliance is its bluntness: he’s not offering a code of honor so much as diagnosing a public-relations geometry where power itself warps the meaning of violence.
The subtext is that modern war is no longer judged primarily by battlefield outcomes but by narratives of legitimacy. When strength is visible and weakness is theatrical - the insurgent with an RPG, the state with drones, armor, and TV studios - killing looks like cruelty, restraint looks like failure. Van Creveld, a historian of how states fight and how they unravel, is pointing at the strategic dilemma underneath the ethical one: the “strong” side can’t translate capacity into acceptable action. Its superiority becomes evidence against it.
Context matters: this is the post-colonial, post-Vietnam, late-20th-century world where conventional dominance often meets irregular resistance, and where media, international law, and domestic politics sit inside the battlespace. His phrasing is intentionally uncharitable - “scoundrel” and “idiot” are schoolyard words - because he’s mimicking the simplified moral verdicts that publics deliver. The quote works by making you see that asymmetry is not just a military condition; it’s a judgment machine that grinds the powerful down either way.
The subtext is that modern war is no longer judged primarily by battlefield outcomes but by narratives of legitimacy. When strength is visible and weakness is theatrical - the insurgent with an RPG, the state with drones, armor, and TV studios - killing looks like cruelty, restraint looks like failure. Van Creveld, a historian of how states fight and how they unravel, is pointing at the strategic dilemma underneath the ethical one: the “strong” side can’t translate capacity into acceptable action. Its superiority becomes evidence against it.
Context matters: this is the post-colonial, post-Vietnam, late-20th-century world where conventional dominance often meets irregular resistance, and where media, international law, and domestic politics sit inside the battlespace. His phrasing is intentionally uncharitable - “scoundrel” and “idiot” are schoolyard words - because he’s mimicking the simplified moral verdicts that publics deliver. The quote works by making you see that asymmetry is not just a military condition; it’s a judgment machine that grinds the powerful down either way.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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