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March 6, 2026

Strategic Theory and Clausewitz’s Trinitarian Test

Lukas Milevski
©2026 Lukas Milevski

ABSTRACT: Carl von Clausewitz’s trinity represents a qualitative test for strategy in both theory and practice. With the trinity, Clausewitz transforms competing influences into a mark of mark of theoretical quality. Synthesizing several translations of Clausewitz’s On War and interpretations by experts such as Hew Strachan, Antulio J. Echevarria II, and Frank G. Hoffman, this article suggests that Clausewitz believed that good theory encompasses and accounts for all fundamental forces of war, whereas bad theory emphasizes the extremes of one force. The trinity compels mandatory considerations for students of theory, war planners, and practitioners.

Keywords: Clausewitz, trinity, trinitarian, theory, strategy

 

Carl von Clausewitz’s trinity has received a surfeit of attention over the past few decades for reasons good and bad. Bad reasons have usually included misreading or misunderstanding the half page of text that represents the core of Clausewitz’s discussion of the trinity, leading to a surge of works in the 1990s arguing Clausewitz was growing obsolete. But ironically, this surge triggered more careful scholarship about the trinity. In this sense, bad reasons triggered good reasons, which included teasing out the trinity and its weight in Clausewitz’s analysis of war beyond the mere half page, demonstrating the degree to which the fundamental forces described by the trinity are present in and affect war, even if they were not addressed again as a trinitarian unit. Despite all this attention, one can usefully say more about the trinity.

Clausewitz’s trinity represents a qualitative test for strategic theory. This test emerges from Clausewitz’s intellectual circumstances; he was torn between the rationalist, French-led European Enlightenment on one hand and the irrationally minded German Romanticism on the other. Seeing value in both movements, Clausewitz disagreed with the extremes within the movements and sought to chart a middle course. The trinity is the most articulate consequence of this effort. In the trinity, Clausewitz reflects a self-awareness of how these larger intellectual forces affected his theory. But Clausewitz implicitly transforms this influence into a mark of theoretical quality: Good theory encompasses and accounts for all the fundamental forces of war, whereas bad theory hews to the extremes of one force or another. Despite the emphasis on theory, Clausewitz’s trinitarian test is not a concern for scholars alone. Rather, because any strategy in practice embodies a theory of success, the trinitarian test is also crucial for practitioners who plan and conduct military operations in war.

The argument consists of four steps. First, this article discusses the trinity and the debates about it since the 1976 translation of On War. Second, the article discusses Clausewitz’s intellectual context and how it shaped his thinking about how to think about war. Third, the article explains the trinity as a test for strategic theory in general and explores how the trinity is also a test for strategy in practice as a theory of success. As such, Clausewitz’s implied trinitarian test is just as pertinent for practitioners as it is for theorists.

The Trinity

Clausewitz’s trinity has been at the center of debates about Clausewitz and his relevance ever since Michael Howard and Peter Paret’s translation of On War was published in 1976. This translation, which was accessible and published by an academic press, emerged right as the US Army was engaging in an enormous amount of soul-searching after the failure of the Vietnam War. Every translation involves linguistic and content judgments, and Howard and Paret presented a modern, liberal, Western Clausewitz who spoke to the challenges of the nuclear age; the emerging notion of the operational level of war; and a comfortable, state-centric view of the world. This interpretation of Clausewitz became instantly fashionable. Clausewitz’s popularity only increased a few years later, when Harry G. Summers wrote his critical analysis of American strategy in the Vietnam War. Notably, Summers leaned substantially into Howard and Paret’s impression of Clausewitz. At the centerpiece of his analysis was Clausewitz’s trinity, which Summers depicted as the state, the people, and the armed forces.1

This understanding of the trinity immediately became gospel. Once the Cold War ended and the old, state-centric assumptions of the world began to be challenged by the collapse of states like Yugoslavia and the surging strategic and political importance of nonstate actors, a bandwagon formed against Clausewitz. Martin van Creveld, for example, declared the emergence of a post-Clausewitzian, posttrinitarian world: “[C]ontemporary ‘strategic’ thought about every one of these problems is fundamentally flawed; and, in addition, is rooted in a ‘Clausewitzian’ world-picture that is either obsolete or wrong.” Van Creveld relied on the state, people, and armed forces trinity to build his case: “That organized violence should only be called ‘war’ if it were waged by the state, for the state, and against the state was a postulate that Clausewitz took almost for granted.” Further, “rmies were defined as organizations which served the government, whether monarchical, republican, or imperial.” Thus, van Creveld concluded, “Clausewitz’s ideas on war were wholly rooted in the fact that, ever since 1648, war had been waged overwhelmingly by states.”2

Mary Kaldor followed, basing her criticism of Clausewitz and so-called “old wars” on the same trinity of state, people, and armed forces. Indeed, Kaldor assumed this trinitarian interpretation with indecent haste: “Clausewitz defined war as ‘an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfill our will.’ This definition implied that ‘we’ and ‘our opponent’ were states, and the ‘will’ of one state could be clearly defined. Hence war, in the Clausewitzian definition, is war between states for definable political end, i.e. state interest.” The logical leaps and unsubstantiated assumptions required to make Kaldor’s argument are staggering but largely invisible to many whose engagement with war in particular or international relations in general had focused (plausibly exclusively) on the state up until the 1990s. The modern, liberal West’s interpretation of Clausewitz has been laden by the region’s own intellectual baggage and biases that reflect Western interpreters more than Clausewitz.3

The influence of—or at least, the willingness to publish—this misreading finally began petering out in the mid-2000s. Phillip Meilinger wrote to refute Clausewitz as an icon in language that reflected the misreading. For example, Meilinger asserts, “Not only do other cultures have differing views on what constitutes rational acts of policy, but also the role of the military in their societies and the fundamental balance between civil and military affairs may be far different than our own—their ‘trinity’ (if it exists at all) operates under laws and formulae we do not understand.” Meilinger’s claim is true as such, but it still rests upon a misunderstanding of the trinity, which says more about the dominant understanding of the trinity in the US military than Clausewitz’s theory.4

The common thread of these examples is that they adhere to a fundamental misreading of Clausewitz; indeed, one might be even more damning and specify they have fundamentally misread a mere half page of Clausewitz’s work. Clausewitz comes through clearly in every translation, whether by J. J. Graham (1873), O. J. Matthijs Jolles (1943), or Howard and Paret (1976). Graham’s “wonderful” trinity consists of “the original violence of its elements, hatred and animosity, which may be looked upon as blind instinct”; “the play of probabilities and chance, which make it a free activity of the soul”; and “the subordinate nature of a political instrument, by which it belongs purely to the reason.” Jolles refers to the “strange” trinity, comprising “the hate and enmity which are to be regarded as a blind, natural impulse”; “the play of probability and chance, which make it a free activity of the emotions”; and “the subordinate character of a political tool, through which it belongs to the province of pure intelligence.” Howard and Paret translate Clausewitz’s “wondrous” trinity as “primordial violence, hatred, and enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force” on the one hand; “the play of chance and probability within which the creative spirit is free to roam” on the other; and “its element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to reason alone.”5

These quotes are a more accurate representation of the trinity. Notwithstanding variations among the translations, all three agree the first force is substantially uncontrollable, being blind and primordial. Human agency becomes sublime in response to chance, given references to the soul, emotions, and creative spirit, and war is subordinated to higher purpose through the application of reason or intelligence. But all three translators are unhelpful in implying some sort of exclusivity or purity—and therefore, undue emphasis—to the third force. Only after establishing the trinity does Clausewitz relate each force to the “secondary trinity” commonly referenced in Clausewitz literature: the people, the army, and the government, respectively.

The counterattack against the false reading of the trinity began quickly and gained momentum through the years. In the mid-1990s, Edward Villacres and Christopher Bassford sought to reclaim the trinity, directly repudiating the wrong interpretation and providing an interpretation of the primary trinity that was perhaps more easily digestible for military officers. Indeed, virtually everyone who took the trinity seriously ceremoniously criticized Clausewitz’s misguided interpreters, almost creating a ritual.6

More interesting than merely repudiating the wrong reading of the trinity has been scholarship that has sought to clarify the meaning and importance of the primary trinity. This trend, together with the counterattacking literature already described, formed an important part of the effort to keep Clausewitz relevant to the modern era. Hew Strachan wrote, “[T]he trinity has provided those anxious to prove Clausewitz’s continuing relevance with plenty of food for thought.” Alan Beyerchen was one of the first to embark on the quest of explaining Clausewitz’s continuing relevance through the trinity, connecting it to the emerging, popular science of nonlinearity; identifying Clausewitz as an apostle of nonlinearity in war before such a science even existed; and explicitly identifying the trinity as one of the major founts of such nonlinearity. Others would highlight the trinity in various ways, moving it closer to the heart of Clausewitz’s theory of war over subsequent years—or at least demonstrating its analytical usefulness. Ultimately, two young authors—Thomas Waldman and Colin Fleming—dedicated book-length treatments to the trinity. Fleming’s main theme was how to reconcile what he saw as a major tension in Clausewitz’s theory: The trinity, which identifies the three forces as equivalent, contradicts his separate claim war is instrumental and a continuation of politics by other means. Waldman took a more general approach by exploring how each of the three elements of the trinity infuses the rest of Clausewitz’s theory of war, even if they are only packaged together as the full trinity on just one page of the book.7

The misguided criticisms of Clausewitz’s trinity seem to have vanished, swept away by the weight of the new scholarship. Putting the nail in the coffin has been an even newer research focus in Clausewitz studies—sometimes touching on the trinity but largely distinct from it—that nonetheless counteracts the old, state-centric, secondary trinity misreadings. This newest wave demonstrates the degree to which Clausewitz was also a theorist of insurgency and his engagement with ideas pertaining to small wars contributed significantly to the formulation of his overall theory of war. The result of this Clausewitz scholarship is a highly developed awareness of the trinity as arguably the centerpiece of Clausewitz’s whole theory of war and a hopefully definitive end to the misreading of the trinity. This awareness is critical for understanding Clausewitz’s magnum opus and for transforming the trinity into a sophisticated tool by which past, present, and perhaps, even future war can be analyzed. These impacts are worthwhile for Clausewitz scholarship and beyond, but more remains to be uncovered about Clausewitz’s trinity. The “X” to mark the spot comprises a single sentence, the penultimate paragraph of the half page that discusses the trinity: “Our task therefore is to develop a theory that maintains a balance between these three tendencies, like an object suspended between three magnets.”8

The Trinity’s Intellectual Context

To understand the implications of the previous sentence, one must turn to the intellectual contexts from which On War emerged—particularly, how Clausewitz understood his intellectual context, with which he was quite dissatisfied. Clausewitz and his theory of war were the products of two clashing cultural and intellectual movements: the Enlightenment and German Romanticism. Dedicated to promoting rationalism and reason over superstition and tradition, the former was an intellectual movement that swept through much of Europe (from its origin in France) during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In moderate form, the Enlightenment focused on understanding the world using reason. In more extreme forms, the Enlightenment sought to transform the world through the application of reason. German Romanticism emerged during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a reaction against the Enlightenment, the movement’s major themes being the rejection of pure reason in favor of irrationality, the supernatural, and the central importance—to history, the state, and so on—of people as individuals, with the notion of genius as the unifying epitome of all three themes.

Clausewitz reserved his sharpest words for the pretensions he identified in Enlightenment-era military theory, which he tended somewhat unfairly and negatively to oversimplify and caricature. In writing of the eighteenth-century proliferation of military theory, Clausewitz stated a “maelstrom of opinions, lacking in basic principles and clear laws round which they could be crystallized, was bound to be intellectually repugnant.” Engaging one particular theory of operations, Clausewitz concluded, “All this led to a purely geometrical result, which is completely useless.” Contrasting the military theories of the Enlightenment with actual practice, Clausewitz viciously lamented, “Pity the soldier who is supposed to crawl among these scraps of rules, not good enough for genius, which genius can ignore, or laugh at. Pity the theory that conflicts with reason!” Clausewitz was not impressed, or affected not to be impressed, by the sum of intellectual development on theories of war and warfare.9

Scholarship about Clausewitz and his place in the intellectual history of strategic studies has perhaps taken his harsh interpretation of his predecessors too much at face value. For instance, Azar Gat accepts the picture Clausewitz painted, noting “rmies operated in space, and while geography offered concrete knowledge of this space, geometry was to provide a precise instrument for analysing and regulating the movements of armies within it. This ideal attracted all the military thinkers of the Enlightenment, but was not pursued rigorously until Bülow.” Waldman similarly asserted, “Five thinkers stand out as exemplars of the military-scientific tradition, all of whom Clausewitz was familiar with: Saxe, Guibert, Lloyd, Bülow, and Jomini.” Waldman also admitted, “It would be unfair to claim that this was all these theorists contributed to the study of war or that Clausewitz was simply reacting against, rather than building on, their ideas.” As Waldman notes, Clausewitz’s perspective is not necessarily wrong, but as written, it is incomplete, and more recent research has begun qualifying his interpretation of the Enlightenment’s systematization of warfare, albeit often only incidentally. For example, Henry Humphries Evan Lloyd, a Welsh mercenary general, stated geography and physical space was central to his understanding of military operations, and Lloyd was probably second only to Adam Heinrich Dietrich von Bülow, in this regard. But simultaneously, Lloyd remarked, “[O]ne of the great errors committed by all those who write and speak of manoeuvres is that they never think of the enemy, & always propose doing this, or that motion, without asking themselves what the enemy would or might do.” Notwithstanding Clausewitz’s occasional vitriol, his predecessors in theory were not complete slaves to geometrical caricatures of rationality.10

Military theorists working from German Romanticism rejected many of the intellectual pretensions of Enlightenment predecessors and counterparts. As Gat explains of Georg Heinrich von Berenhorst’s perspective, “[T]he art of war, like the rest of the sciences and the arts, advanced knowledge and supported innate talent. However, it was not based on immutable laws but was rather associated with the unknown and uncontrollable modifications of the human spirit, and operated in an environment saturated with will-power and emotions.” Indeed, as Berenhorst observed, “What is the use of rules when one is covered up to one’s ears with exceptions?” Similarly, Berenhorst wrote to an acquaintance that plans “are rendered absurd in one way or another by unforeseen circumstances. Then should we proceed without any plan just into the blue? I wish I could reply ‘yes,’ but fear of the gentlemen who think in formulae holds me back.” Yet—ironically—conceding important ground to the Enlightenment, this last statement starkly demonstrates the limits of the German Romantic for military thought. Ultimately, military action cannot be practiced totally ad hoc; it must have at least a certain degree of planning and direction. Even Berenhorst appeared to have difficulty believing a purely Romantic alternative was sufficiently credible.11

Ultimately, Clausewitz believed the Enlightenment theories of war often sought to control war and warfare as finely as possible, even to unrealistic degrees. Conversely, the Romantic tradition embraced the personal, impressionistic experience of chaos in warfare. Clausewitz drew on Enlightenment and Romantic traditions of understanding the world because he recognized neither sufficed for the development of a theory of war sufficient for understanding, let alone practicing in, the real world. Ultimately, Clausewitz was a child of the moderate Enlightenment: “[H]e had read the works of the Enlightenment, and, for all his damning comments about certain military theorists, he was determined to write a theory of his own.” A key difference would be in theoretical standards.12

The Trinitarian Test

Thus emerged the trinity—the control and subordination of war and warfare to politics which Clausewitz had derived from Enlightenment theories—whereas the blind, natural force of violence, hatred, and enmity represent input from the Romantic tradition. Chance and probability represent the final aspect of the trinity, a most basic insight that sometimes only experienced practitioners truly understand. In war, things can always go wrong. Therefore, one must return to Clausewitz’s self-imposed theoretical task: “to develop a theory that maintains a balance between these three tendencies, like an object suspended between three magnets.” This task constitutes a trinitarian test for theory. But what is the test, and what does it mean?13

First, given Clausewitz’s sharp, if perhaps not entirely fair, words about the state of military theory, any task he set for himself as a theory builder can and (perhaps should) be taken as a crucial standard of theoretical quality he believed to be previously missing—a quality that would reflect the comprehensive and nonlinear complexity of war and warfare. Therefore, the trinitarian approach is part of the standard of theory building Clausewitz set. But given Clausewitz’s views on previous theories, the trinitarian approach also represents an intellectual invitation, if not challenge, for others to meet this standard as well. Accounting for and balancing all three fundamental tendencies of the trinity, the standard is Clausewitz’s interpretation of his task and a generic feature of good military theory, no matter the author. This standard is just as relevant today as it was 200 years ago.

The standard retains its relevance because the three trinitarian forces so eloquently, parsimoniously, and accurately grasped the complex, nonlinear reality of war and warfare. Some theories may be more exhaustively accurate than the trinity, but they lose on eloquence and parsimony; others are more parsimonious but lack accuracy. The trinity strikes an elegant balance. Moreover, to this day, strategists must still face each of the three forces in war and warfare—and virtually no development on the horizon can potentially change this reality. The one exception, however plausible or implausible it may be, is arguably artificial intelligence capable of doing strategy, which could be a truly nonhuman and inherently alien intelligence. But until this development comes to pass, Clausewitz’s trinity remains salient—and so does the trinitarian standard for strategic theory. A theory of strategy that does not intellectually balance the trinitarian forces is an inherently incomplete theory at best—and, depending on the theorist’s intellectual horizons, perhaps grossly incomplete to the degree the theory may be as fundamentally misleading as Clausewitz believed von Bülow’s theory to be.14

A second consideration is determining what Clausewitz meant by requiring theory to “balance” among the trinitarian forces. After all, from moment to moment, in real war, the forces are rarely, if ever, equally significant and in precise balance; thus, they presumably are usually in some degree of imbalance. But such imbalance is superficial from the perspective of general theory. On this point, Nicholas Murray incisively concludes from Clausewitz’s repeated references to card games in On War “[h]is meaning in this context is that any interaction must include all the elements of his trinity and be subject to all their whims.” Regardless of their individual weight, each of the trinitarian forces is always pertinent in some way in cause, conduct, or consequence. For theory to “balance” among the forces, first, it must recognize their natural, nearly inalienable, and constant saliency. Second, theory must educate and intellectually position both the theorist and the user of theory to give due consideration to each trinitarian force, individually and in the context of the other forces throughout their engagement with the phenomenon of war and strategy. The trinitarian test demands the theory be structured and enunciated such that it may continuously enable the multidimensional trinitarian analysis, no matter the immediate context or level of analysis.15

A third feature of this trinitarian theoretical standard is it implicitly encourages theory to be at least tolerant of, and even embrace, nonlinearity and complexity. This theoretical challenge was difficult in Clausewitz’s day, and the challenge remains difficult in ours because the West’s mainstream understanding of causation—of cause and effect—is mechanistic and linear. The West’s most popular understanding of causation since at least the early twentieth century is Humean, named after David Hume, the Scottish enlightenment philosopher, though the inclination to interpret the universe mechanistically originated even earlier with René Descartes. Humean causation emphasized regular occurrences that were directly observable and, thus, mechanistically and linearly efficient as causal explanations.16

This orientation toward mechanistic, linear causation is not a problem of strategic studies alone. The orientation is a feature of Western culture strategic studies have not escaped, despite work by Beyerchen and others exploring the field’s nonlinear, Clausewitzian roots and character. The Western theoretical imagination has difficulty integrating nonlinearity with Western expectations of what theory should be and what it should do—usually, to explain causation reliably. Therefore, strategic studies have not produced many theories that are convincingly nonlinear, nor do those theories (which display a tolerance of or even an embrace for nonlinearity) necessarily encompass the full breadth of nonlinearity, as expressed in Clausewitz’s trinity. Nonlinearity is not the product of any single trinitarian force; rather, nonlinearity is the product of the combined interactions of the trinitarian forces: “[T]he mathematician Henri Poincaré demonstrated that, when an object comes under the influence of three or more forces, its movements become unpredictable . . . the interactions among the forces will cause the object to weave in a varied pattern which no mathematical approach can determine.” Critically, one might also question whether the nonlinearity encompassed within the trinity is the most comprehensive theoretical standard—that is, it may not necessarily be the definitive theoretical standard.17

Nonlinearity was nonetheless somewhat in vogue in the US Army in the 1990s and early 2000s, riding the wave created by the emergence and popularization of the field of nonlinear sciences, plus a few intellectual entrepreneurs, such as John Boyd, who employed nonlinearity in their theories, albeit often casually and sloppily. Theories such as network-centric warfare and counterinsurgency engaged with and even embraced nonlinearity, but they did so in fundamentally divergent ways: “[W]hile one group of nonlinearists saw in a VUCA [volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous] world limits to any one actor’s ability to control the system and therefore advised caution, the other group advised hubris, believing that if the world were chaotic anyway, the United States could gain an advantage by acting to drive the chaos in its preferred direction.” One school of thought shied away from nonlinearity, whereas the other sought hubristically to tame it, to exploit nonlinearity reliably—and thus fundamentally misunderstood nonlinearity. The common thread among these theories was they did not aim to be general theories of strategy as a phenomenon; rather, the theories had been developed to shape immediate military behavior, force structures, and similar institutions.18

One of the very few examples of an attempted nonlinear, general theory of strategy is Edward Luttwak’s paradoxical logic of war and peace. Luttwak posits fundamentally “there is no automatic harmony among the vertical levels of strategy,” which is a compelling insight at an abstract level of war’s nonlinearity. But Luttwak ties his basic insight to the notion strategy in war “tends to reward paradoxical conduct while defeating straightforwardly logical action, yielding results that are ironical or even lethally damaging.” In this latter argument, Luttwak encourages allegedly irrational, paradoxical actions based on strategy’s disharmonious nature. Yet, as one critic asserted, “Rational action is the pursuit of a goal by means appropriate to the context as well as appropriate to the end. All of Luttwak’s examples of the failure of linear logic are actually instances of context-dropping.” Luttwak’s paradox may not be quite as paradoxical as he originally argued. Yet Luttwak’s partial failure usefully demonstrates three salient points:

  1. Clausewitz’s trinity is not the only way to conceptualize nonlinearity in strategic theory;

  2. developing an explicitly nonlinear theory of strategy is quite difficult; and

  3. by comparison, Clausewitz did quite well in his attempt.19

In sum, Clausewitz’s trinity poses a test to strategic theorists to balance properly in their theoretical writings the three most fundamental forces in war and to take care not to privilege one over the others, lest the resulting theory mislead practitioners. Clausewitz posed this task to himself and, implicitly, to his successors. In addition, the task encourages strategic theory to accommodate nonlinearity, though this accommodation has not occurred yet.

A Test Not Just for General Theory

Crucially, Clausewitz’s trinitarian test applies to more than just general theory. In recent years, scholars have increasingly recognized any strategy is a theory of success—that is, a theory is more than a collection of ends, ways, and means haphazardly patched together. Ends, ways, and means are only coherent when a sense of the anticipated causal logic underpinning strategic planning and action is evident. Frank G. Hoffman wrote, “Strategies are theories, which is to say they are purported explanations of how desired effects can be achieved by selected causes of threat and action applied in a particular sequence.” Everything practitioners do is based on some sort of theoretical understanding. Strategists are theorists, albeit of a very practical kind, theorizing in very particular ways to defeat the enemies the strategists are facing.20

Hence, Clausewitz’s trinitarian test is pertinent for practicing strategists. Clausewitz’s challenge remains the same: Does the theory of success make appropriate allowances for the apparent calculations of, by, and for policy as well as the generation of hostility as a result of military operations and the tactical, strategic, and political implications of that generation? Does the theory of success allow for chance events that may impede, if not derail, an operational plan, strategy, or even policy in detailed implementation? In other words, how tolerant is the logic underpinning the strategy of unexpected developments and the emergence of nonlinearity? After all, to quote Murray again, “any interaction must include all the elements of his trinity and be subject to all their whims.” This statement pertains even more strongly to planning and practice, where outcomes truly matter, than to general theory.21

The most obvious recent case of a strategy failing Clausewitz’s trinitarian test is Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Everything had to go right for Russia’s highly taut plan to work. The plan was premised on a political perspective that fundamentally ignored the growth of Ukrainian nationalism triggered by the Russian invasion of Crimea and the Donets Basin in 2014. Russia ignored the hostility that resulted from the ongoing invasion and the invasion that had occurred eight years earlier, thereby doubly failing the trinitarian test. Having been based on such ignorance, Russian planning could not account for the random events and friction generated by interactions between Ukrainian civilians and Russian invaders in the early days and weeks of the invasion. This failing can only be described as a complete intellectual collapse. In the mid-2000s, General Sir Rupert Smith wrote about “war among the people.” But war has always occurred among the people, and they can be strategically relevant agents who generate and act on hostility in ways that can impede or outright derail the theoretical logic underpinning any strategy in practice. The Russians failed to account for two of the trinitarian forces in their initial invasion plan. Therefore, one should not be surprised the initial invasion did not go Russia’s way.22

Conclusion

Clausewitz’s wondrous trinity became more popular from the 1990s onward, benefiting from increasing clarity about what constituted the trinity. This sustained attention has not yet fully plumbed the depths of the trinity and its usefulness to strategic theorists and practitioners who participate in the conception and implementation of strategy. Notably, the trinity poses the same test for theorists and practitioners: Does theory, whether in the form of a general theory of strategy or a theory of success against a particular enemy in war, adequately encompass, incorporate, or otherwise account for the three fundamental forces—primordial violence, hatred, and enmity; the play of chance and probability; and the element of subordination—that affect war? From the Clausewitzian perspective, good theory passes this test, whereas bad theory overemphasizes and falls for the extremes of one force at the expense of reckoning with the other two. The trinity is Clausewitz’s test, left hidden in plain sight for his readers—those who theorize in a general way, those who analyze theories of any kind, and those who plan and act to achieve success in war.

 
 

Lukas Milevski
Dr. Lukas Milevski is an assistant professor (tenured) at the Institute for History at Leiden University, where he teaches strategic studies to bachelor’s and master’s degree students. Milevski publishes widely on strategy in academic and professional journals. He is currently working on a manuscript about how to study strategy.

 
 

Endnotes

  1. 1. Hew Strachan, “The Elusive Meaning and Enduring Relevance of Clausewitz,” in The New Makers of Modern Strategy: From the Ancient World to the Digital Age, ed. Hal Brands (Princeton University Press, 2023), 129–32; and Harry G. Summers Jr., On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War (Dell, 1984).
  2. 2. Martin van Creveld, The Transformation of War: The Most Radical Reinterpretation of Armed Conflict since Clausewitz (The Free Press, 1991), ix, 36, 38, 41.
  3. 3. Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (Polity Press, 2006), 17; and Lukas Milevski, “The Mirage of Post-Clausewitzianism: Understanding War and Politics on the Frontier of Clausewitzian Thought,” Military Strategy Magazine (December 2020): 16–20.
  4. 4. Phillip S. Meilinger, “Busting the Icon: Restoring Balance to the Influence of Clausewitz,” Strategic Studies Quarterly 1, no. 1 (Fall 2007): 136.
  5. 5. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. J. J. Graham (N. Trübner & Co., 1873); Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. O. J. Matthijs Jolles (Modern Library, 1943), 18 and Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton University Press, 1984), 89.
  6. 6. Edward J. Villacres and Christopher Bassford, “Reclaiming the Clausewitzian Trinity,” Parameters 25, no. 3 (Autumn 1995): 9–19, https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol25/iss1/9/.
  7. 7. Hew Strachan, Clausewitz’s On War: A Biography (Grove Press, 2007), 179; Alan Beyerchen, “Clausewitz, Nonlinearity, and the Unpredictability of War,” International Security 17, no. 3 (Winter 1992– 93), 59–90; and J. Stone, “Technology and War: A Trinitarian Analysis,” Defense & Security Analysis 23, no. 1 (2007): 27–40; John Stone, “Clausewitz’s Trinity and Contemporary Conflict,” Civil Wars 9, no. 3 (2007): 282–96; Colin M. Fleming, Clausewitz’s Timeless Trinity: A Framework for Modern War (Routledge, 2013), 2; and Thomas Waldman, War, Clausewitz and the Trinity (Routledge, 2013).
  8. 8. Sibylle Scheipers, On Small War: Carl von Clausewitz and People’s War (Oxford University Press, 2018); and Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Howard and Paret, 89.
  9. 9. Clausewitz, On War, trans. Howard and Paret, 134–36.
  10. 10. Maurizio Recordati Koen, “From Strategiké to Grand Strategy: Essays in the History of Ideas and the Epistemology of Western Strategic Thought” (PhD diss., American University, 2025); Azar Gat, A History of Military Thought: From the Enlightenment to the Cold War (Oxford University Press, 2002), 38; Waldman, War, 21–23; and Huw J. Davies, The Wandering Army: The Campaigns That Transformed the British Way of War (Yale University Press, 2022), 100.
  11. 11. Gat, History, 155–57.
  12. 12. Hew Strachan, “Clausewitz and the Dialectics of War,” in Clausewitz in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Hew Strachan and Andreas Herberg-Rothe (Oxford University Press, 2007), 19.
  13. 13. Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Howard and Paret, 89.
  14. 14. Kenneth Payne, Strategy, Evolution, and War: From Apes to Artificial Intelligence (Georgetown University Press, 2018), 193–215.
  15. 15. Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Howard and Paret, 89; and Nicholas A. A. Murray, “Geniuses Dare to Ride Their Luck: Clausewitz’s Card Game Analogies,” Parameters 53, no. 2 (Summer 2023): 82, https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss2/12/.
  16. 16. Milja Kurki, Causation in International Relations: Reclaiming Causal Analysis (Cambridge University Press, 2008), 60–87.
  17. 17. Thomas M. Kane, Strategy: Key Thinkers (Polity, 2013), 90.
  18. 18. Sean T. Lawson, Nonlinear Science and Warfare: Chaos, Complexity and the U.S. Military in the Information Age (Routledge, 2014), 149.
  19. 19. Edward N. Luttwak, Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace (Belknap Press, 2001), 2, 234; and Gregory R. Johnson, “Luttwak Takes a Bath,” Reasons Papers 20 (Fall 1995): 123.
  20. 20. Frank G. Hoffman, “The Missing Element in Crafting National Strategy: A Theory of Success,” Joint Force Quarterly 97 (2020): 55–64; and Colin S. Gray, Strategy and Defence Planning: Meeting the Challenge of Uncertainty (Oxford University Press, 2014), 30.
  21. 21. Murray, “Geniuses Dare,” 82.
  22. 22. Rupert Smith, The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World (Penguin Books, 2006).
 
 

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