Echoes of War is about history, not current events or potential futures. There is no shortage of commentary offering hot takes on what is happening now, what it supposedly means or what future it portends. As Sir Lawrence Freedman, probably among others, has pointed out, history is littered with futures of war. That is, predictions about the future of war are plentiful and always have been. He also pointed out that most of them turned out to be, shall we say, utter balls (my words, not Professor Freedman’s).

History, that is where we live, not the academic discipline, is rather complicated and many, probably almost all, predictions about the future prove well wide of the mark. The accurate ones only seem fully perceptive in retrospect, and even then, the accuracy is likely only partial or reliant on the lens used to examine it.