Angelo Codevilla asks, What does it mean for the United States to be at peace? How is it to be won and preserved in our time? Noting that our government’s increasingly unlimited powers flow in part from our statesmen’s inability to stay out of wars or win them and that our statesmen and academics have ceased to think about such thing. the purpose of this book is to rekindle such thoughts.
The author reestablishes early American statecraft’s understanding of peace—what it takes to make it and what it takes to keep it. He reminds Americans why our founding generation placed the pursuit of peace ahead of all other objectives, excepting the “quiet and peaceable life” that peace would allow. Peace shows how they tried to keep the peace by drawing sharp lines between America’s business and that of others, as well as between peace and war. He shows how our twentieth-century statesmen confused peace and war as well confusing the United States’ affairs with that of mankind’s. The result, he shows, has been endless war abroad and spiraling strife among Americans. Codevilla provides intellectual guidelines for recovering the pursuit of peace as the guiding principle by which the US people and statesmen may navigate domestic as well as international affairs.
