ICAF Symposium Series

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Surviving Defeat

The ultimate test of a nation’s vitality is whether it can respond effectively to failure. Most often, failure takes the form of a major military defeat which calls into question not only the viability of a nation’s defense but of its economic, political and social systems as well. Whether and how a nation succeeds in drawing lessons from failure and is able to redefine its grand strategy can be a matter of life and death for both individuals and states.

This symposium will look closely at historical cases of existential defeat by examining how select nation-states responded to failures – whether military, economic, diplomatic, informational in nature, or some combination thereof – and will try to identify the factors that determined whether (or how) the nations under consideration were able to successfully reinvent themselves.

Invited speakers will explore both ancient and more recent examples of catastrophic defeat. Case studies will include the Athenian failure in the Peloponnesian War; Rome’s defeat at Cannae in 216 BC; a comparative analysis of the French responses to the defeats of 1870 and 1940; the role of defeat in Balkan culture and politics in the 19th and 20th centuries; the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in 1918 and emergence of Turkey as a “modern” state; Germany’s responses to the defeats of 1918-1919 and 1945; the Arab response to Egypt’s defeat of 1967; and the erosion of British influence in Asia in the aftermath of the surrender of Singapore in 1942.