"No war is inevitable until it breaks out"
About this Quote
Fatalism is a comfort food for policymakers: it dissolves culpability in a warm bath of “forces” and “history.” A. J. P. Taylor’s line cuts straight through that alibi. “No war is inevitable until it breaks out” is deliberately cheeky, almost tautological, but the tautology is the point. He’s mocking the way governments and commentators retroactively narrate catastrophe as destiny, smoothing messy decisions into a clean, cinematic arc.
As a historian, Taylor is picking a fight with the grand theories that treat wars as mechanical outcomes of alliances, arms races, or national “character.” The subtext is procedural and prosecutorial: if nothing is inevitable beforehand, then every step toward war contains alternatives, misreadings, bargains rejected, off-ramps ignored. The sentence quietly drags agency back into the room. It insists that leaders are not passengers of “the tide of events”; they’re drivers who can choose to brake, swerve, or accelerate.
Context matters. Taylor’s mid-20th-century work, especially his revisionist take on the origins of World War II, challenged the moral clarity of neat causation. He didn’t deny aggression or ideology; he distrusted monocausal stories that let institutions and statesmen off the hook. The phrase also captures a cold truth about contingency: war often arrives through accumulation, not a single thunderclap. Until the shooting starts, diplomacy still exists, miscalculations can be corrected, and domestic politics can shift.
The sting is in the last clause. Once war “breaks out,” inevitability is manufactured after the fact - not by fate, but by the irreversible logic of violence.
As a historian, Taylor is picking a fight with the grand theories that treat wars as mechanical outcomes of alliances, arms races, or national “character.” The subtext is procedural and prosecutorial: if nothing is inevitable beforehand, then every step toward war contains alternatives, misreadings, bargains rejected, off-ramps ignored. The sentence quietly drags agency back into the room. It insists that leaders are not passengers of “the tide of events”; they’re drivers who can choose to brake, swerve, or accelerate.
Context matters. Taylor’s mid-20th-century work, especially his revisionist take on the origins of World War II, challenged the moral clarity of neat causation. He didn’t deny aggression or ideology; he distrusted monocausal stories that let institutions and statesmen off the hook. The phrase also captures a cold truth about contingency: war often arrives through accumulation, not a single thunderclap. Until the shooting starts, diplomacy still exists, miscalculations can be corrected, and domestic politics can shift.
The sting is in the last clause. Once war “breaks out,” inevitability is manufactured after the fact - not by fate, but by the irreversible logic of violence.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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