Wednesday’s Maxim on Thursday

21 July 2005, 2101 EDT

This one reflects the ongoing debate over the Bush administration’s planning for the Iraq War, not to mention some Democratic complaints about its expense:

Those who try to be tightfisted while waging war always end by spending more. For nothing requires a more boundless effusion of money than war. The greater the provisions, the quicker the undertaking will be ended. Failure to make such provisions, just to save money, will make the enterprise take longer and, what is more, will result in incomparably greater cost. Accordingly, nothing is more pernicious than waging a war by disbursing monies desultorily and without large amounts of cash at hand. For that is not the way to finish a war but to nourish it (Series C, 149)

Filed as: Guicciardini and maxims

Dan Nexon

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.