I’m sure most of you have read the famous popular historian Barbara Tuchman’s book about the beginning of WWI called “The Guns Of August.” (I’ve always thought of it as the “when boys wanna use their toys” thesis — a technological revolution sparks the desire to use new weaponry.) This piece in the NY Times today (gift link) by foreign policy analyst Yonatan Touval offers a different perspective and it’s so right on:
Four weeks into the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, one conclusion is already difficult to avoid. Our leaders preside over an extraordinary machinery of destruction, but they remain strikingly obtuse about human beings — about their pride, shame, convictions and historical memory.
The war’s architects appear to have assumed that killing a nation’s leaders, dominating airspace and destroying infrastructure would produce regime collapse in Tehran and strategic clarity in Washington and Jerusalem. Instead, Iran, though badly weakened, has managed to disrupt shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, drastically widen the war’s economic radius and force Washington into the old, unglamorous business of soliciting allied help after entering a war confident that it would be swift and decisive.
It is tempting to describe this as a failure of intelligence. Technically, it is not. The spycraft kind of intelligence behind the war planning and execution is extensive. Recent reporting suggests that Israeli intelligence spent years penetrating Tehran’s traffic cameras and communications networks and built what one unnamed Israeli source described to CNN as an A.I.-powered “target-production machine” capable of turning enormous volumes of visual, human and signals intelligence into precise strike coordinates. That is an extraordinary achievement of surveillance and targeting.
Yet never has so much been seen, so precisely, by so many people who understand so little of what they are seeing. A system can tell you where a man is. It cannot tell you what his death will mean for a nation. Such systems are trained on behavior, not on meaning — they can track what an adversary does but not what he fears, honors, remembers or would die for.
This is the recurring illusion of overequipped leaders: Because they can map the battle space, they think they understand the war. But war is never merely a technical contest. It is shaped by grievance, sacred narrative, the memory of past humiliations and the desire for revenge. Those are not atmospheric complications added to an otherwise technical enterprise. They are what the war is about.
So the familiar errors appear. The war planners imagine that a regime can be decapitated into collapse, whereas external attack often does the opposite — binding a battered state more tightly to a society newly united by injury, humiliation and rage. They imagine that destroying conventional assets would settle the matter, as if legitimacy, wounded sovereignty and collective anger were secondary rather than the war’s actual terrain. Planners who took their adversary’s self-understanding seriously — rather than discounting it as propaganda — might have anticipated that an attack would not weaken the regime’s narrative but instead fulfill it. They might also have foreseen the paradox that systematic decapitation does not produce negotiators. It removes them.
Read the whole thing. It’s a fundamental problem with our leadership and most of the strongman dictator types.
Trump thinks everything is about coercive “deals” and money and he’s wrong. The tech bros are all in on their new technology and they’re wrong. And the warmongers like Pete Hegseth, as usual, think it’s about military “toughness” and superior hardware and they’re wrong too. (Trump buys into that as well, as we’ve seen with his insistence that Ukraine could not possibly resist Russia and now, probably, Iran.) None of these people have any idea how actual humans think because they’re so solipsistic that they think everyone is just like them. And even then, they don’t actually know themselves so that’s wrong too.
We see this phenomenon all over our politics and the culture at large. Trump didn’t anticipate that Americans would actually resist his authoritarianism because he promised to bring the bread and circuses. He’s certainly brought the circus but it isn’t a fun one, at least for most people. And the bread is stale and expensive. He just assumed he could use lies, hype and bribes to make yet another of his “deals” with the American people and everyone would end up loving him. It turns out that many people actually care about something more than money and being entertained by hurting vulnerable people. Go figure.
These people do not understand how other people feel and think because they have no empathy. Our leading tech lord Elon Musk even likes to say “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy” so they are actually proud of it. They think it’s a brilliant insight. But he’s wrong too. It’s vitally important to have empathy if you need to understand your adversaries — and your friends.
This is a big reason why they are so incompetent at governance. They just don’t understand what motivates people besides fear and they assume that always leads to capitulation. They couldn’t be more wrong.
As Touval writes:
What this war exposes, then, is a failure not only of strategy but of literacy. Literature and history, at their most serious, train precisely the faculties these leaders lack: the capacity to grant that other minds are not transparent to us, and are governed by purposes not our own. A mind tutored by history and literature knows that actors in the grip of a sacred cause tend to mean what they say — and that bombing a founding myth is more likely to consecrate it than to dissolve it.
This is what happens when you elect rich imbeciles who have no empathy and no intellect. You get barbarians.
