Hoplites is well regarded. His Western Way of War stuff is seen as interesting but wrong.
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But your tweet neatly sums up the weaknesses of the VDH version: it includes all of the 'Western' victories, but excises all of the failures. He also cuts out any European state which might be inconvenient to this argument.
E.g. Visigothic Spain, Post-Roman Greece, Hungary writ-large. The more you actually know about the topic, the more the exceptions and caveats - unacknowledged in books like Carnage and Culture - pile up, until they overwhelm and bury the argument.
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And that's the rub - Carnage and Culture is seductively plausible to someone who knows very little about the topic, but obviously flawed for those whose knowledge runs deeper.
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Neat trick: if I agree with VDH, it’s because I’m ignorant! As if I didn’t know about Visigothic Spain. Nice try: but I do know all about it and thing like it are the exceptions which prove the rule: which wound up with a Reconquest of Spain rather than a Muslim France.
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