Victor Davis Hanson's The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation is a chilling, erudite meditation on the fragility of civilisation and the recurring madness of total war. Few historians write with Hanson's combination of classical learning, military experience, and moral clarity, and in this 2024 bestseller he distils decades of study into a gripping exploration of how once-great societies can vanish almost overnight.
Drawing on four catastrophic case studies, the destruction of Thebes by Alexander the Great in 335 BC, the obliteration of Carthage by Rome in 146 BC, the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453, and the conquest of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlán by Hernán Cortés in 1521, Hanson examines how power, arrogance, and blindness intertwine to bring about civilisational collapse. These stories, vividly rendered, read less like remote history and more like mirrors held up to our own troubled century.
Each episode reveals a recurring tragic pattern. Civilisations on the brink of annihilation often mistake their cultural sophistication or moral superiority for invincibility. The Thebans underestimated Alexander's cold determination to make an example of them; Carthage believed its wealth and fortifications could withstand Roman fury; Constantinople's defenders, isolated and betrayed by fellow Christians, fought with desperate courage but without allies; and the Aztecs, divided internally and trusting ritual power over military adaptation, fell to a technologically inferior but ruthlessly unified enemy. In every case, Hanson shows that annihilation was not an accident of war but a conscious policy, a deliberate act of erasure justified by the victors as a moral or strategic necessity.
Hanson's argument extends beyond the chronicles of the ancient world. His epilogue turns toward the present, warning that modern powers, whether complacent democracies or aggressive autocracies are not immune to the same fatal impulses. The parallels to Ukraine, Taiwan, and the broader decline of Western deterrence are unmistakable. Advanced technology and nuclear arsenals may alter the scale of destruction, but not the psychology of it. As Hanson writes, "civilizations die less from the strength of their enemies than from the weakness of their own will."
What makes The End of Everything so compelling is Hanson's ability to fuse the scholar's precision with the storyteller's art. His military expertise animates tactical analysis, the failed logistics of Carthage's final stand, the siege craft innovations that doomed Constantinople, while his broader reflections on hubris, moral decay, and historical amnesia give the book philosophical resonance. Hanson does not simply recount the past; he warns that comfort, affluence, and disunity can be as deadly as enemy armies.
The book has been widely praised by military historians and strategists alike. H.R. McMaster calls it "stupendous," while Barry Strauss hails it as "a profound meditation on human folly and endurance." Even critics who fault Hanson for occasional overemphasis on "Great Man" narratives or for the linearity of his structure, concede that his moral and strategic insights are unmatched.
Ultimately, Hanson's work is both history and prophecy. It asks whether modern societies, fragmented, distracted, and cushioned by prosperity, would fare any better than Thebes or Carthage if confronted by an implacable enemy. The question lingers uncomfortably, especially in an age where deterrence has grown soft and the line between order and chaos feels perilously thin.
For readers seeking more than another retelling of ancient wars, The End of Everything offers something rarer: a sober reckoning with the human tendency to forget that civilisations are mortal. In an era when global instability and moral fatigue seem to grow in tandem, Hanson's message lands with particular urgency.
This is not just history, it is a warning. And it could not be more timely.