Yet Napoleon wasn’t simply a dictator making grand pronouncements based on a whim. His wars, each of them, were launched with a clear political endstate in mind. His status, then, as commander of the army virtually ensured that the military wouldn’t stray from those clearly-conceived national goals. When trying to understand Clausewitz’s obsession with defining war in political terms, one need look no further than the man who wielded both diplomacy and warfare like a matched pair of swords, the one always complementing the other.