By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

What Stories Do in an Age of Conflict

Since 1989, an estimated four million people have died as a result of armed conflicts around the globe—740,000 between 2021 and 2024 alone. A thorough understanding of these violent decades and of today’s persistent geopolitical volatility demands policy expertise, of course, but it also calls for a perspective beyond the realm of political science, which for all its rigor does not always account for certain human elements of war: desire for glory, thirst for vengeance, and other irrational passions that shape the belligerence of warriors and nations. In other words, the stuff of literature.

Nations weave myths out of victories and erase defeats with the promise of future triumphs. They tend to calibrate “bad” wars against “good” ones while memorializing the latter with a wistfulness that lures them into vainglorious and ultimately inglorious quests for new conflicts.

There are a few things to know about stories. First, humans have fed on them for millennia, from the Bible and the epic in ancient times to the nineteenth-century novel and the twenty-first-century Marvel franchise. Second, the hard-nosed realists and instrumentalists who are most contemptuous of the worth of stories, in particular of fictional ones, and wary of the enterprise of literary study, are often the most gullible consumers of fables, swept away by the power of fictions yet ignorant of their limits, constraints, and capacity to delude.

 Third, the story has become many people’s primary way of understanding the world. As the literary theorist Peter Brooks argues in his 2022 book Seduced by Story, “Narrative seems to have become accepted as the only form of knowledge and speech that regulates human affairs.” In the process, Brooks observes, the story has eclipsed rational argument as the dominant purveyor of social, political, and historical truths.

We operate in a world in which the teller of the best story triumphs over the one who reasons most clearly. The most successful stories attain the quality of myth, at which point, as Brooks writes, “their status as fictions... is forgotten and they are taken as real explanations of the world.” In the face of this “narrative takeover,” Brooks exhorts readers “to oppose critical and analytical intelligence to narratives that seduce us into the acceptance of dominant ideologies.” What listeners and readers need, he urges, is “to resist a passive narcosis of response.”

Given the ubiquity of stories and humanity’s vulnerability to them, citizens today would be wise to practice the skills of literary analysis, the very techniques routinely derided and devalued in a world committed to technology and tribalism. So many seem eager to be rid of the labors of thought and expression—the very labors that define them as free and autonomous human beings—by ceding them to generative artificial intelligence.

One way to think about the current state of the world is to imagine it occupying the intersection of story and war. The story has gained ascendancy as a vehicle for understanding the world while the ability to interpret narrative has atrophied. At the same time, the present era is an epoch in which wars go on seemingly forever—now simmering, now boiling—without end. In the absence of definitive ends and conclusive victories, we crave a good war story.

There is, of course, a strict sense in which fighting and storytelling are opposed: stories create, wars destroy. At crucial moments, however, one force surrenders to the other to produce an ambiguous collaboration. Writers have long boasted that the soldier is nothing without them: the poet and the novelist keep the soldier’s exploits alive for posterity. It is likewise axiomatic that the writer is nothing without the soldier: no war, no epic; no war, no war movie; no war, no War and Peace.

Competing stories tempt people and nations into war. Once embroiled in conflict, participants and spectators layer on more stories to make sense of their relationship to its violent cauldron. The postwar period offers fertile ground for narratives about war’s origin, prosecution, and conclusion. Storytelling is an individual and a collective enterprise. Personal remembrance becomes interwoven with political fiction, historical fact, and mythological distortion in the flood of stories that customarily follows a war.

U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower introduced the concept of the “military-industrial complex” decades ago, in his 1961 farewell address. “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,” he warned. “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” One can debate whether the president was describing a new phenomenon or simply naming an old relationship between the public figures who authorize wars and the private actors who stand to profit from them. But he was also telling a story about how and why wars start: one that linked war-making with a pathological condition (a “complex”). This narrative was at odds with the supremely heroic story, which he helped to write, of World War II—the “good war” that made him famous.

More than six decades later, what has emerged is a military-narrational complex, in which war presents too good a story not to tell, over and over again. States, and now nonstate actors, have been engaging in wars of various kinds almost constantly since World War II. Each time, they seem to search for a story that yields the narrative satisfactions associated with that war: just causes, clear and powerful story lines of liberation and righteous vengeance, unambiguous heroes and villains, definitive ends. Yet not one of the sequels to World War II has measured up to the original tale.

The U.S. Marine Corps War Memorial, Arlington, Virginia, March 2025

 

Page Turners

It is a truism that history is written by the winners, yet it is often the losers who tell the better story—an “if only” myth that has endless permutations: If only the bad weather had held off. If only the radio hadn’t malfunctioned. If only the colonel hadn’t been sick. If only the general hadn’t been quite so ambitious. If only our hands hadn’t been tied. If only we had the resources of our enemy, or the requisite political will. At war’s end, the narrative that develops valorizes physical courage, glorifies battlefield heroics, and vilifies hubris. It distorts the relationship between war and politics while also devaluing two decidedly unromantic virtues that can prevent war—prudence and restraint—and ignoring the role of chance and disorder. The Confederate “lost cause” narrative that developed in the wake of the American Civil War, which romanticized the antebellum Southern way of life and turned the conflict into a chivalric tragedy, offers a case in point. So, too, does the obsession, during the Reagan and first Bush administrations, with winning a war (even a cold one) to “kick” the Vietnam syndrome that had seemingly eclipsed the victorious story of World War II.

Humans are always drafting and revising war stories, even when they aren’t actively fighting. Indeed, they routinely write themselves into and out of wars. Anticipating and preparing for war leads quite naturally to accepting its inevitability. An example of this dynamic is the British-German antagonism that precipitated World War I. It wasn’t structural pressures, important as they were, that sparked World War I. War broke out thanks to the contingent decisions of individuals and a profound lack of imagination on both sides. One could also see in this a resemblance between this early-twentieth-century doom loop and the current attitudes toward U.S.-Chinese relations: Any opening for cooperation, even on key issues, gets lost in mutual recriminations, petty irritations, and deepening strategic mistrust. FirstWWreassessment2.html

This is the domain of grand tragedy. Potential adversaries interpret political action in zero-sum terms; see malice and evil design in mere blunders and coincidence; trumpet necessity rather than navigate choice; and, in extreme cases, invent pretext or promise profit to make more palatable a dubious cause. In The Mayor of Casterbridge, his 1886 novel about a man who attempts to outflank the great error of his past, the English writer Thomas Hardy offers an interpersonal version of the geopolitical misconstructions Westad articulates. Individuals tend to misunderstand each other’s motives, Hardy writes, because “we attribute to an enemy a power of consistent action which we never find in ourselves or in our friends.”

When it comes to violent conflict, the costs of this tendency are supremely high. With stunning celerity, possibility becomes probability and then certainty, as readers reject the quiet, circuitous, and unglamorous narratives of prudential compromise, ambiguous diplomacy, or incremental progress. The journalist and critic Carlos Lozada has called attention to the hawk’s “narrative advantage” over the dove. “It is unfair, but tales of war tend to be more exciting than stories of peace,” Lozada wrote in The New York Times in 2023. “Dire scenarios of risk and escalation are almost always more captivating than those dissenting voices that explain how to avoid a fight.” Hawks might whip up enthusiasm by waving a bloody shirt or recalling a stab in the back. Sometimes the case for war’s inevitability is couched in expressions of rue and reluctance. U.S. Air Force General Mike Minihan, now retired, followed that pattern when, as commander of Air Mobility Command, he began a 2023 memo on China: “I hope I am wrong” before revealing, “My gut tells me we will fight in 2025.”

War stories work because it is, quite simply, much easier to define oneself against an enemy than it is to look within. They win because can-do cultures, such as those within the military, require objectives and need to believe that victory is achievable. War stories have acquired even greater momentum since railroads and military staff colleges emerged in the late nineteenth century, when states committed themselves to the business of planning—a serious work that nevertheless entails playing war games and imagining scenarios. Preparing to meet a host of contingencies entails writing a series of scripts that predict the future.

The British military historian John Keegan revealed the hazards of this kind of planning in his anatomy of the Schlieffen Plan, the German strategy for fighting a two-front continental war that was devised, in 1905, by the chief of the army’s general staff, Alfred von Schlieffen. Schlieffen grounded his plan in the “mathematical realities” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but also, as Keegan notes, in “wishful thinking.” After all, Keegan continues, “plans do not determine outcomes.” Schlieffen’s fixation on the Carthaginian general Hannibal’s masterful envelopment of the Romans at Cannae, combined with a desire to reproduce the German victories of the Franco-Prussian War, distorted his math: “The dream was of a whirlwind,” Keegan observes; “the calculations warned of a dying thunderstorm.” The German army’s general staff largely ignored the frank acknowledgment, buried deep in the plan, that the Germans were “too weak” to bring it to fruition. In the end, Keegan writes, when Kaiser Wilhelm II “might have put brakes to the exorable progression of the Schlieffen Plan, he found he did not understand the machinery he was supposed to control, panicked and let a piece of paper determine events.” Once written, the script’s fantastic promise distracted its readers from the fatal holes in its plot.

As soon as a battle or a war has been fought, victors and losers alike begin to tell different stories. Official stories have a deliberate, not necessarily sinister, design. The rise of the PowerPoint “storyboard” in the U.S. military during the global “war on terror,” for example, helped ensure that every engagement would be recorded a particular way. One need only search the web for a “U.S. Army storyboard template” to see how institutionalized narratives can homogenize experience by molding episodes into a particular form or genre until all content starts to look and sound alike.

 

 

For updates click hompage here