All these words refer to actions initiated against other persons or groups, especially in wars. Aggression means unprovoked belligerent action, as by one nation upon the territory of another. An attack is aimed at injuring or destroying others, often by catching them off guard and unprepared. An assault is a violent attack , so violent that it often implies personal abuse motivated by envy, malice and the like. Both attack and assault can be applied to any violent conflict, verbal as well as physical: a personal assault on the character of the chairman; a vigorous attack on the fiscal policy of the present government.

• We will continue to resist aggression because tyranny must be resisted; The attack came just before dawn; The final assaults were designed to clear the last remnants of enemy resistance.

Aggression , as the above example illustrates, is now widely used among diplomats to describe a variety of actions contrary or hostile to the interests of their own countries; aggression is thus a linguistic casualty of the cold war, and has lost much of its meaning. Assault suggests ?perhaps more than attack ?the element of suddenness and surprise, as evidenced by the expression "surprise attack "; such emphasis is unnecessary with assault . In psychoanalytic usage aggression is a tendency towards hostile action. This sense has led to a number of analogous popular usages: He’s just taking out his aggressions on me!

An offensive is a movement or position of offence or attack . In some contexts it is interchangeable with attack , but in others it applies to a large-scale co-ordinated military campaign of men and matériel: a major new offensive was launched in the western front. In recent diplomatic language, offensive is sometimes used synonymously with initiative: a peace offensive in the form of a three-point offer to negotiate an end to the war.

ANYONYMS: defence, repulsion, retreat, surrender, withdrawal.