Why We Keep Stumbling into Stupid Wars

Plus: AI companies win coveted "most undue influence" award

Why is the current war happening? If you want to answer that question in a broad sense—in a way that applies not just to the Iran war but to other needless bursts of carnage of the past and future—I would direct your attention to an exchange that took place this week on a New York Times podcast called The Opinions.

The exchange was between Times columnist David French and retired four-star General Stanley McChrystal, and it was an archetypal interaction between two kinds of mindsets—the kind that keeps getting us into wars and the kind that, if it were more common, could keep us out of them.

The roles played by the two men aren’t what you might expect based on their job descriptions. It wasn’t the career Army officer who exemplified the narrowly tribalistic perspective and the writer for the liberal media who offered the more balanced and pacific view. Rather, it was the professional soldier who brought the enlightenment and the journalist who lacked it—and who showed no signs of absorbing any of it.

In a way this isn’t surprising. What McChrystal crucially evinced is the ability to see things from the point of view of other people, including adversaries and enemies—an ability any good military strategist needs. In fact, though I typically call this skill “cognitive empathy,” it is, when employed in certain contexts, also called “strategic empathy.”

As regular NonZero readers know, I consider cognitive empathy a kind of untapped superpower—a human potential that, if more widely realized, could work wonders. Like, for example: it could transform American foreign policy from the blunt and brutal instrument it’s become into something that’s actually good for the world.

A second reason the roles played by these two men isn’t surprising is that French first got wide public exposure in 2016 when Bill Kristol proposed that he run for president. And if Bill Kristol—who as a leading neoconservative played a non-trivial role in getting the US into the Iraq War—would like to install you in the Oval Office, it’s a safe bet that you’re no slouch in the mindless tribalism department.

French was an officer in the Army Reserve, and, like McChrystal, served in the Iraq War. He begins their conversation by noting this shared history and using it to explain to listeners what he calls “the veteran’s perspective on this conflict” with Iran—a perspective he clearly is assuming McChrystal shares with him. This perspective, he says, is “different than the perspective that a lot of the folks who didn’t serve, especially in Iraq, have” and is grounded in awareness of “Iran’s role in the Iraq war, and the losses it inflicted upon us.” He recalls that, while he was in Iraq, “we lost guys to explosively formed penetrators planted by Iranian-backed militias” and then invites McChrystal to take it from there—to elaborate on “what has been the recent American experience in our long-running conflict with Iran.”

McChrystal, though, wants to take the story back in time, not forward. He says, “If we go back to the American experience, starting in 1979,” we remember that “the American embassy [in Tehran] was seized, and there were people chanting ‘death to America’.” And “that was very upsetting,” especially since, before the revolution of 1979, Iran had been America’s staunch ally. So, says McChrystal, post-revolutionary Iran seemed like “a recalcitrant enemy that hated us for some reason we couldn’t really understand.” And that attitude toward Iran was reinforced by the Iraq war experience French had just described. In Iraq, said McChrystal, “they were killing us and we were killing them,” and Iran increasingly seemed like “our lifelong enemies.”

But, he then adds, “I think that’s only part of the story.”

At this point French is either oblivious to where McChrystal wants to take the story or determined not to let him go there. Whereas McChrystal wants to talk about the roots of Iranian hostility toward America, French just wants to keep documenting the hostility. He says, “Well, if you’re going to say that’s only part of the story, we have to keep going.” He notes that, though the “surge” of US forces seemed to have smothered the Iraqi insurgency by 2009, “the story doesn’t end there, of course, General. The story keeps going, and Iranian-supported militias have been a thorn in our side, really, in Iraq ever since.”

French now invites McChrystal to sustain this theme: “Let’s pick it up after the surge. What happens next?”

McChrystal, God bless him, replies, “Well, let’s really pick it up before that, because I think it’s important… It really starts in 1953, when the US and British intelligence services overthrew the constitutionally elected prime minister” of Iran and installed the Shah, who “oppressed the people tremendously, particularly through SAVAK, the secret police. So when the Iranian revolution happens, we may be surprised [but] the Iranian people are not surprised. And when they suddenly say ‘Death to America,’ most Americans will say, ‘What’s your problem? Why are you angry at us?’ ”

McChrystal’s narrative continues: In 1980, Iraq invaded Iran, starting an eight-year long “brutal bloodletting” (during which the US supported Iraq with intelligence and other resources). And in 2002, McChrystal notes, George W. Bush designated Iran and Iraq as the two Middle Eastern members of the “axis of evil”—something that didn’t exactly incline Iran to roll out the welcome wagon when Bush invaded Iraq the next year and American troops were suddenly occupying Iran’s next door neighbor. Hence the Iran-backed Shia militias in Iraq that, in French’s telling, are where the story begins.

There are lots of details that McChrystal skips that would have bolstered his narrative—like the fact that, only a few months before that Bush “axis of evil” speech, in the wake of 9/11, Iran had collaborated with the US to pave the way for the American invasion of Afghanistan. (Fun fact: Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian military commander who in 2020 was assassinated by Trump via missile strike, was in 2001 on the ground in Afghanistan, using his connections in the country to help smooth the arrival of American troops.) Still, McChrystal fleshes the history out enough so that his basic point is clear. As he puts it: “If we don’t understand that journey to this point, we don’t understand the attitudes that are going to drive decisions people make.”

But French, in a subtle but important sense, persists in not getting the point. He says, “I’m so glad we have dived into this from the Iranian perspective, because I think understanding the Iranian perspective really helps us maybe understand how the rest of this war might go. What kind of staying power, for example, the Iranians might have.” Elaborating, he says that “the level of commitment that exists within the regime is just something that’s theological.” Sometimes it’s even “apocalyptic,” he adds. He then relays an anecdote he heard in Iraq about how fanatical some of those Iran-backed militiamen were.

For all I know, McChrystal would agree with this emphasis on theology and apocalypticism, but it wasn’t implied by anything he’d just said, and in fact it seems closer to the opposite of his upshot. McChrystal seemed to be saying, among other things, that if you understand Iran’s history, you shouldn’t be surprised by Iranian wariness of, mistrust of, and hostility toward the US. These things don’t need some kind of special explanation grounded in Islamic theology or fundamentalist apocalypticism or Persian philosophy or anything else.

French’s depiction of the Iranian regime as intensely religious in its motivation is a time-honored trope of neoconservatives and other hard-core Iran hawks. Hence the boilerplate references—in the writing of Bret Stephens in the New York Times, Walter Russell Meade in the Wall Street Journal, David Frum in the Atlantic, and so on—to “the mullahs” who run Iran. So long as these writers can keep us thinking of Iran’s leadership as zealously religious, they’ll have an easier time convincing us that we shouldn’t let Iran do things every other country is allowed to do—like enrich uranium to a low level for (verifiably) civilian use or have an arsenal of ballistic missiles with conventional warheads.

The threat that McChrystal’s world view poses to Iran hawks was illustrated this week on another New York Times podcast—Ross Douthat’s Interesting Times. Douthat’s guest was Mark Dubowitz, CEO of The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a deeply pro-Israel and anti-Iran think tank. After Douthat suggested that the US-Israeli strategy of “decapitation” via the serial assassination of Iranian officials naturally leads Iran to escalate, Dubowitz countered, “Well, my point is that they have been escalating against us and against Israel and against their neighbors for decades… They continue to go up the escalation curve as they’re prepared to take more and more risk against us.”

In other words: The side of the story that a broader, McChrystalite perspective includes doesn’t actually exist; since the dawn of time, Iranian “escalation” has been intrinsically driven, unaffected by exogenous variables. Dubowitz makes no mention of the time in 2024 that Israel, out of the blue, lethally bombed an Iranian consulate in Syria, or the time, in 2025, when Israel, out of the blue, staged a massive air assault on Iran, or the time a month ago when Israel and America, out of the blue, staged another such assault, this time, for good measure, killing Iran’s leader and several family members. So, needless to say, Dubowitz also fails to mention that the only three times in history Iran has started firing ballistic missiles at Israel—the missiles that Dubowitz and Stephens and Meade and Frum says Iran’s “mullahs” shouldn’t be allowed to have—were in response to those three unequivocal provocations.

If Dubowitz were to acknowledge such facts, he might have to entertain the possibility that there’s some truth to the claim that Iran’s ballistic missiles are meant to serve a defensive function—as a deterrent to Israeli attack. And if Dubowitz headed down that path, who knows where he might wind up? He might even start entertaining the possibility that, whatever the intrinsic motivations of such Iranian “proxies” as Hamas and Hezbollah, they, too, from Iran’s point of view, are meant to serve a deterrent function. (It was only after Israel degraded both to the point of near-impotence that it started launching military assaults on Iran—so apparently they had indeed been serving that function.)

And this, in turn, could lead Dubowitz to what for him would be a kind of hell on Earth: a vantage point from which both Israel and Iran are seen as countries that feel deeply insecure and do things out of defensive motivation that look offensive to the other side. In this view of the Israel-Iran relationship, there is a basically symmetrical cognitive empathy deficit, and its malign effects intensify via a positive feedback cycle, and to the extent that either side is to blame, both sides are. And if there’s one thing the Mark Dubowitzes of the world hate, it’s moral symmetry.

President Trump seems to have accepted the one-sided narrative that America’s many influential Iran hawks have promulgated. At least, that would help explain why he abandoned the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran in his first term—why he wasn’t satisfied with Iran just agreeing not to build a nuclear bomb and submitting to a strict system of monitoring and inspections that guaranteed compliance, but demanded that it go further and do various things that we demand of no other nation. That would also help explain why he chose to attack Iran a month ago rather than persist in negotiations that could have gotten him a deal at least as good as the Obama deal and almost certainly better.

Trump isn’t the only US president who deserves blame here. If President Biden had wanted a restoration of the nuclear deal that Trump jettisoned, he almost certainly could have had that early in his term. But he, like Trump, demanded more. The Iranians, as Biden official Rob Malley explained to me on the NonZero podcast, didn’t buy the idea that they should be the ones to make new concessions even though America was the country that had reneged on the deal in the first place. It wouldn’t have taken a superhuman exercise of cognitive empathy on Biden’s part to anticipate such a reaction. In any event, by the time he reconciled himself to the Iranian view and softened his demands, politics within Iran had shifted toward a harder line. So no deal was done.

My claim, above, that more robust and widely deployed cognitive empathy could transform US foreign policy, and help us avoid lots of wars, is not the kind of claim that can be convincingly corroborated in the course of a single issue of a newsletter. In fact, it’s a challenging claim to corroborate even in longer form.

One reason is that cognitive empathy deficit can impede prospects for peace in so many different ways. Another is that the chains of causality leading to wars can be long and complex, and there’s rarely a single critical juncture where doing a better job of perspective taking would definitely and demonstrably have made the difference.

Still, it’s possible to identify junctures where cognitive empathy could have plausibly made the difference. I’ll close with a quick look at several such junctures in one very long long chain of causality: the chain that culminated in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022. At various steps along the way, more cognitive empathy by various actors—Russia, Ukraine, the US—might have made a difference. I’ll confine my examples to ones involving the US.

1. NATO’s vow in 2008, at the behest of George W. Bush, to eventually admit Ukraine as a member. Here the problem wasn’t, strictly speaking, a lack of cognitive empathy. US Ambassador to Moscow Bill Burns had plenty of that; he saw how threatening Moscow would find the prospect of NATO membership for Ukraine. He even predicted that a commitment to such membership could lead Russia to cause trouble in Crimea and the Donbass, which indeed happened. The problem, rather, was that Burns’s repeated attempts to convey this perspective to the White House—he even wrote a memo titled “Nyet means Nyet!”—were unavailing. So Bush strongarmed reluctant European leaders into making the commitment to Ukrainian membership. And this commitment thereafter colored Moscow’s views of developments in Ukraine. For example:

2. The Maidan Revolution of 2014. In retrospect, President Obama might have realized that, if the US conspicuously and vocally supported a protest movement that aimed to depose a Russia-friendly Ukrainian president—and especially if that goal was realized violently, as it was—Vladimir Putin might start feeling insecure about the long-term lease that entitled Russia to maintain a key naval base in Crimea. And, since most Crimeans actually preferred the prospect of Russian rule to the reality of Ukrainian rule, Putin might snatch Crimea almost effortlessly. Which he did, heightening the tensions that eventually led to war.

3. The original decision in the 1990s to expand NATO. As with the 2008 vow to admit Ukraine to NATO, the problem here wasn’t a lack of cognitive empathy per se. Plenty of Russia experts warned that NATO expansion was a bad idea. George Kennan, the most famous of those experts (known, somewhat misleadingly, as the architect of the Cold War doctrine of containment), said: “I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake… This expansion would make the founding fathers of this country turn over in their graves…. Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are—but this is just wrong.”

Bill Clinton was surely aware of this view. But for whatever constellation of reasons—perhaps including such considerations as donations from arms makers and Polish-American votes in the Midwest—he chose not to act on it.

This points to a challenge: Even when national leaders manage to see the national interest clearly, with full illumination from cognitive empathy, they need to resist any temptation to sacrifice that interest to their own political interest. And that kind of virtue, as I suggested last week, doesn’t seem to be in abundant supply.

Data via YouGov.

Banners and graphics by Clark McGillis.