During his March 9, 2015 radio show, Yaron Brook recommended a book by the late John David Lewis, Nothing Less than Victory. This book provides a historical look at how “aggressive, strategic military offenses can win wars and establish lasting peace, while defensive maneuvers have often led to prolonged carnage, indecision, and stalemate.”  Several people in the show chat mentioned that there was an audio version of the same, or similar, material available at the Ayn Rand e-store in the lecture series titled Defensor Patriae: The Homeland Defense in History.

The video below from 2005 is a shorter version of this lecture series, and at only 2 hours, more or less equally split between the main lecture and a Q&A period that includes Yaron Brook, is well worth taking the time to watch. I found this to be a very fascinating survey of four conflicts over the course of more than 2000 years that show a pattern of defensive, appeasing action leading to bad results while forceful action in self-defense, taking the fight to the enemy’s own territory, leads to lasting peace. I found especially relevant the story of Roman Emperor Aurelian who built the walls of Rome around 270 A.D.

One of my favorite quotes came when Lewis spoke of the situation which the United States is currently in with regard to militant Islam as an emergency and that the goal should be to get out of the emergency and back to normal as quickly as possible. Likening such a situation to a flood, he said:

A proper response to a flood is to build dams and tame the water, not to create a federal department of water management charged with telling everyone that drowning is a fact of life.

During the Q&A period, which I always find interesting, Yaron Brook made this point:

It is only our weakness that makes our enemies possible.

One person asked if it would make any difference to send a copy of the talk to President Bush or Condoleeza Rice. Yaron’s answer was that he didn’t think it would make any difference, even if they had been present at the talk. They simply would not be able to learn anything from because of their views. Dr. Brook went on to say that after the 9/11 attacks ARI sent government officials copies of an essay by Leonard Peikoff, End States Who Sponsor Terrorism, and, some years later, a book by Peter Schwartz, The Foreign Policy of Self-Interest: A Moral Ideal for America, and got essentially no response from anyone.