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Germanic tribes became settled, Christianized, and more Western than ever before.
    The dramatic European expansion of the sixteenth century may well have been energized by Western excellence in firearms and capital ships, but those discoveries were themselves the product of a long-standing Western approach to applied capitalism, science, and rationalism not found in other cultures. Thus, the sixteenth-century military renaissance was a reawakening of Western dynamism. It is better to call it a “transformation” in the manifestation of European battlefield superiority that had existed in the classical world for a millennium and was never entirely lost even during the darkest days of the Dark Ages. The “Military Revolution,” then, was no accident, but logical given the Hellenic origins of European civilization.
    We should not expect to see precisely in Greek freedom, American liberty; in Greek democracy, English parliamentary government; or in the agora, Wall Street. The freedom that was won at Salamis is not entirely the same as what was ensured at Midway, much less as what was at stake at Lepanto or Tenochtitlán. All ideas are in part captives of their time and space, and much of ancient Greece today would seem foreign if not nasty to most Westerners. The polis would never have crafted a Bill of Rights; in the same manner, we would not turn our courts over to majority vote of mass juries without the right of appeal to a higher judiciary. Socrates would have been read his Miranda rights, had free counsel, never have testified in person on his own behalf, been advised to plea-bargain, and when convicted would have been free on bail during years of appeal. His message, which seemed radical to his Athenian peers, would strike us as reactionary in the extreme. The key is not to look to the past and expect to see the present, but to identify in history the seeds of change and of the possible across time and space. In that sense, Wall Street
is
much closer to the agora than to the palace at Persepolis, and the Athenian court akin to us in a way pharaoh’s and the sultan’s law is not.
    THE WESTERN WAY OF WAR
    The West has achieved military dominance in a variety of ways that transcend mere superiority in weapons and has nothing to do with morality or genes. The Western way of war is so lethal precisely because it is so amoral—shackled rarely by concerns of ritual, tradition, religion, or ethics, by anything other than military necessity. We should not be held captive by technological determinism, as if the tools of war appear in a vacuum and magically transform warfare, without much thought of either how or why they were created or how or why they were used. Even the monopoly of superior Western technology and science has not always been true—Themistocles’ triremes at Salamis were no better than Xerxes’, and Admiral Nagumo’s carriers at Midway had better planes than the Americans did. The status of freedom, individualism, and civic militarism at those battles, however, was vastly different among the opposing forces. As these encounters reveal on nearly every occasion, it was not merely the superior weapons of European soldiers but a host of other factors, including organization, discipline, morale, initiative, flexibility, and command, that led to Western advantages.
    Western armies often fight with and for a sense of legal freedom. They are frequently products of civic militarism or constitutional governments and thus are overseen by those outside religion and the military itself. The rare word “citizen” exists in the European vocabularies. Heavy infantry is also a particularly Western strength—not surprising when Western societies put a high premium on property, and land is often held by a wide stratum of society. Because free inquiry and rationalism are Western trademarks, European armies have marched to war with weapons either superior or equal to their adversaries, and have often been supplied far more