A sane person hopes any course of action he pursues will produce more good than harm. Therefore, the sane person avoids courses of action where the downside risks are immense, possibly even world-ending, and the benefits are difficult to perceive, possibly non-existent. Measure the pros and cons any way you like—profit and loss, joy and sorrow, moral acclaim and denunciation, pride and shame—the underlying basic principle is still obvious: Avoid catastrophic losses and situations where you can’t tell whether catastrophic losses are likely.
That means war should be a last resort. Terrible things are all but guaranteed when you go to war, unexpected things, even if you win.
Contrast that bit of good sense—whatever you may think of Iran and the current U.S. war against Iran—with Trump crowing about the war on his Truth Social site, saying, “Just sit back and relax, it will all work out in the end—it always does!” It’s nice that he’s an optimist, but this may be the most vapid attitude toward military conflict and the moral responsibility surrounding it ever uttered, not just by a president but by anyone, unless perhaps we count eight-year-old boys saying things like, “You always gotta smash bad guys to death when you see ’em no matter what!”
Yet the imaginary battlefields of the eight-year-olds, where victories are complete and glorious, don’t tend to include third-best and fourth-best scenarios such as the reported Israeli/U.S. plan to install former Iranian president (and relative moderate) Mahmoud Ahmadinejad after 2026 hostilities, since which time Ahmadinejad’s main involvement in the conflict seems to have been losing a house to a U.S. aerial bombing raid.
With the conflict dragging on and both its goals and justifications murky, it seems unlikely to end with anything like the simple final battle Norman Podhoretz imagined in his (ostensibly non-fiction) book World War IV two decades ago, slightly after the peak of George W. Bush-style thinking. Podhoretz imagined a victory flag being raised over the rubble of the last terrorist base, ending the threat of Islamofascism once and for all. In the real world, barely a generation after that book came out, New York City, where people still speak of the Ground Zero rubble with reverence, has a socialist Muslim mayor and the Iran conflict could prove the reason for voters ending the Republicans’ control of Congress in a month and a half.
Not only does the U.S.’s clash with the Islamic world look like one through which we cannot “sit back and relax,” it looks as though its current anti-Iran manifestation could be less like Podhoretz’s World War IV and more like a combination of World War I and World War III: that is, a meaningless, chaotic morass followed by horrible nuclear devastation.
Before that arrives, we’re also subject to domestic consequences such as Trump’s recently-resigned twentysomething press secretary Karoline Leavitt telling an anxious nation that the President never takes strategic options such as reinstating the military draft “off the table.” Sounds tough and decisive to some aggressive geezers out there, I’d imagine, but rounding people up by force and making them work for any cause, whether military or tree-planting, is still slavery (as pivotal anti-draft libertarian economic advisor Milton Friedman understood last century).
If some Americans are willing to foist a cost that high upon their fellow citizens, they ought at least to be able to explain very clearly and emphatically what their fellow citizens would be getting as a benefit, preferably not a highly speculative one.
Add to these uncertainties such bizarre footnotes as Ukraine attacking a Russian/Iranian convoy and thereby threatening to entangle current European and Middle East conflicts into one larger mess, and you have a—well, I almost typed “formula for widening violence,” but again, “formula” is one of those rhetorical constructions that falsely implies everything’s under control and going according to some plan, like those academic calculations early in the Vietnam War by our “best and brightest” minds showing it was all winnable, all smooth sailing on a very high-tech boat.
Maybe we’re fortunate that so little effort went into preparing American citizens for this war. Some commentators sound understandably disappointed that the President and his administration barely bothered to pave the way for the Iran War in the preceding months, not explaining what other options were available or precisely which misdeeds demanded military action, aside from post hoc rationales such as reopening the Strait of Hormuz. That looks terribly irresponsible, but consider the likely alternative: months of mounting bluster from Trump and slapdash, propagandistic arguments about U.S. patience being exhausted, sacred waterways or pieces of land being violated in an unprecedented fashion, etc.
Trump deciding to bomb or invade things more or less on a whim without explanation may spare us a lot of bad arguments and the spectacle of about half the intelligentsia indulging in doublethink for a season. A war that began without any of us thinking about it or being morally invested in it is one that, perhaps, can be ended without the usual pain and angst about “abandoning the cause” and “disgracing our ancestors on the battlefields of Normandy” and so forth. Give peace a whimsical chance for a change.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey