 With some interesting exceptions (e.g., John McAuley Palmer, Robert M. Johnston, Hoffman Nickerson), Clausewitz had little influence on American military thought before 1945 other than via British writers, though Generals Eisenhower and Patton were avid readers.He did influence Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky and Mao Zedong, and thus the Communist Soviet and Chinese traditions, as Lenin emphasised the inevitability of wars among capitalist states in the age of imperialism and presented the armed struggle of the working class as the only path toward the eventual elimination of war.Because Lenin was an admirer of Clausewitz and called him "one of the great military writers", his influence on the Red Army was immense.