Summary and Critique of “Hubris”

The battleship Mikasa, Admiral Heihachiro Togo’s flagship, at the Battle of Tsushima.

The late Alistair Horne has written an important book about hubris that should be required reading by all our leaders — and many citizens. To the Greeks, hubris, the folly of arrogance and overconfidence went hand in hand with peripeteia, the inexorable comeuppance. In this compact and fascinating book Horne looks at broadly interlinked battles in the 20th century that each began in a spirit of hubris for at least one of the combatants, subsequently resulting in their peripeteia, only for the victor to develop its own hubris, leading to future disaster.

He thus connects into a single narrative the Russo-Japanese War (1905), the Nomohan border skirmish between the Soviet Union and Japan (1940), the Battle of Moscow (1941), the Battle of Midway (1942), MacArthur’s disastrous advance to the Yalu (1950), and the defeat of French forces at Dien Bien Phu (1953). It is an instructive approach that Horne at the sunset of his career (it was his last book), handles with masterly storytelling.

Tsushima, 1905

Up to the middle of the 19th century, Japan reposed in isolation, deliberately avoiding contact with the rest of the world. Confronted in 1853 by the superior force of Commodore Perry’s black ships, Japan abruptly changed course and began a crash program to catch up to the West. “In 1868 the young emperor himself spelled out in a…