Welcome back to conversations. I'm Bill Crystal and I'm very pleased to be

have with me today Donald Kagan, distinguished longtime professor I guess now

Professor Emeritus at Yale University.

Thanks for being here.

Pleasure to be here.

That's great to have you.

So I told someone in Washington I was coming down to coming up to New Haven to do a

conversation with you and Donald Kagan he said oh I love

Don Kagan he's the war guy. So you're a great professor distinguished ancient

historian yet in Washington you're known as the war guy I think that's mostly because of your book, the

terrific book, the origins of war, but talk about the book

and about war.

Well, the book is called On the Origins of war and the preservation of peace.

Yeah, people drop the second.

They do drop the second part.

And I said, but I think that the connection is very crucial

and to infrequently attended to and the other rest of the title a little bit of it

is owed to Clausovitz who wrote his famous essay on war.

Well, I'm concerned, particularly with the origins,

how wars come about, not how you fight them.

But the other thing is, I think there's an inherent important linkage between thinking

about how wars come. And then since most of us find it unfortunate when wars come most of the time, how in fact

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