War & Peace Quote by Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche’s line is less battlefield advice than a cold-eyed diagnosis of how power actually moves: rarely through principled confrontation, often through opportunistic triangulation. “Another enemy” implies you don’t defeat a hostile force by meeting it head-on with moral purity or even superior argument, but by redirecting pressures already in the system. Create a rival, amplify an existing faction, exploit a fracture. The weapon is not virtue; it’s leverage.

The subtext is pure Nietzschean skepticism about idealism. He’s suspicious of people who claim to fight “the enemy” on behalf of Truth, Justice, or the Good, because that posture often masks a more basic drive: the will to power. By recommending an enemy as the countermeasure, he exposes conflict as productive, even necessary. Enmity becomes a tool for cultivation and selection, a way to test strength and reveal hidden alliances. It’s a strategic view of morality: ethical language frequently arrives after the fact, as PR for instincts and interests.

Context matters. Nietzsche wrote in a Europe thick with nationalism, culture wars, and increasingly organized mass politics, where “enemy-making” was becoming a modern technology. He also spent years dismantling Christian moral frameworks that sanctified meekness and framed opposition as sin. Here he flips the script: hostility is not inherently corrupting; it can be deployed, managed, instrumentalized.

The irony is that the quote doubles as a warning. Once you start using enemies as weapons, you normalize permanent antagonism. You may win the immediate fight and still end up living in the machinery of enmity you built.