"Edward N. Luttwak's The Pentagon and the Art of War confirmed his reputation as the most brilliant and controversial defense analyst and military historian writing today. Now, in On the Meaning of Victory, Luttwak examines the strategic and foreign-policy problems and possibilities facing the United States in the 1980s and beyond. In a series of incisive essays - some reprinted from Commentary, The Washington Quarterly, and elsewhere; others published for the first time in this volume - Luttwak analyzes the threat of nuclear war; the poverty of strategic thinking among the American defense establishment; the economic and political dimensions of military strategy and the delicate interplay of politics, personalities, and history in the making of policy."--Book Cover.