Nowadays, conquest is for losers

MORE than a century has passed since Norman Angell, a British journalist and politician, published The Great Illusion, a treatise arguing that the age of conquest was, or at least should be, over. He didn't predict an end to warfare, but he did argue that aggressive wars no longer made sense - that modern warfare impoverishes the victors as well as the vanquished.

He was right, but it's apparently a hard lesson to absorb. Certainly Vladimir Putin never got the memo. And neither did our own neocons, whose acute case of Putin envy shows that they learned nothing from the Iraq debacle.

Angell's case was simple: plunder isn't what it used to be. You can't treat a modern society the way ancient Rome treated a conquered province without destroying the very wealth you're trying to seize. And, meanwhile, war or the threat of war, by disrupting trade and financial connections, inflicts large costs over and…