I’ve been thinking more about why it feels like we keep talking past each other on this stuff. I think there’s more to it, but here are a few thoughts.

For one thing, I think we’re focusing on different things. Many times you’ve pointed out that China sometimes behaves aggressively and otherwise badly, while acknowledging that of course other countries behave aggressively and otherwise badly, too (as you said: “again, I am not contrasting them to any other country, including the US”). I agree that all great powers behave aggressively and otherwise badly, but what seems to me to be missing is any sense of proportion. On a high level of generality, a mass murderer and a tax cheat are the same—both criminals. But to stop the analysis there would result in a misleading understanding. Which is why I’m not persuaded by the “China hoses boats/America bombs boats/Both countries are aggressive” framework. In all things, the differences can be as important as the similarities (see Randy’s Law).

But I think there’s a conceptual error in your framing more serious than an unwillingness to meaningfully compare. The more serious error I see is a failure to consider the way the behavior of one great power affects the behavior of another (a species of “A thing observed is a thing disturbed,” in this case more specifically understood as the Security Dilemma, in which one great power’s intended defensive measures are interpreted by another great power as offensive, resulting in the other great power implementing its own defensive measures, which the first great power then interprets as offensive, etc).

For example, you refer to the Scarborough Shoal dispute as an example of Chinese law-breaking and aggressiveness. And maybe it is. But the only explanation you offer for Chinese behavior is that China is “clearly playing a long game, their goal is clearly to establish China as a major force on the world stage.”

(I will tell you candidly that I distrust too much use of “clearly,” especially in a statement that would work as a topic sentence but is instead presented as a Q.E.D. conclusion.)

What makes me skeptical is that there’s not really a “why” in your explanation. It’s more an assumption, a statement of what you see China wanting but devoid of any reference to the external world. I believe this is an analytical error, both in this specific instance and also generally.

My specific concern is that any analysis of Chinese behavior in the South China Sea is misleadingly incomplete if it doesn’t include at least some mention of the military bases and forces the US maintains in, the arms the US supplies to, and/or the joint training exercises the US carries out in and around Guam, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan (you can throw in or not throw in ANZUS and Australia and New Zealand as you like, but you get the idea).

I imagine you would argue that all this American military activity in the South China Sea, East China Sea, and adjacent areas is defensive First Island Chain stuff, intended to uphold international maritime law and protect US allies from Chinese aggression. I would disagree with such a conclusion, but I wouldn’t find it ipso facto crazy—the Security Dilemma is a real thing. What I do think is crazy is for a US citizen—whose government invented the Monroe Doctrine, the same government that was so upset by Soviet military activity in Cuba that it responded with an act of war that almost went nuclear—to conclude that what China is doing in China’s neighborhood must all be the product of a long game to be a force on the world stage, and that none of it could be a defensive reaction to what the Chinese see as malign, aggressive intrusion into their areas of vital interest by a superpower that constantly, incessantly, explicitly advertises its goal as global dominance.

(Amusingly, the US government is currently freaking out about alleged Russian and Chinese spy posts on Cuba, declaring the situation a “national emergency” and an “unusual and extraordinary threat.” It seems the spy base is actually a school, but whatever, the point is that our tribe of talking monkeys seems not to like it when another tribe of talking monkeys intrudes into what our tribe sees as our territory. Is it so hard to image that other tribes of talking monkeys feel the same in reverse?)

Note that it’s not just me pointing out that foreign actions don’t conjure themselves in a vacuum. It’s the CIA, too. See for example the concept of Blowback. See also the hilarious concept of “self-radicalized” terrorists. You know, some mellow, chilled-out guy just watching the game one Sunday afternoon and bam, abracadabra, he radicalizes himself and becomes a terrorist, it has nothing to do with anything anyone else has done and certainly nothing to do with his own professed reasons for his actions.

My more general concern is that the analytical distortion I’m describing above is an example of the Fundamental Attribution Error, in which my in-group’s behavior is explained by circumstances (“We have to spend $1.5 trillion a year on the military because Russia is intent on conquering western Europe/China wants to be a major force on the world stage”), while the out-group’s behavior is explained by their character or nature (“Russia and China are inherently aggressive”).

One of the most insidious attractions of the Fundamental Attribution Error is how it absolves the person engaging in it from responsibility for outcomes. For example, western rulers benefit from their various versions of the “Putin’s Unprovoked War of Aggression” narrative (the Economist is unable to refer to the Ukraine war without that verbatim formulation, at this point it’s almost a tic), whether the focus is on Peter the Great and Russian imperial history, a desire to reconstitute the Soviet Union, or the genetic Russian lust for lebensraum. If you think about it, “Putin was going to do this sooner or later no matter what because he is the New New Hitler and/or because of the inherent Russian character for aggression” narrative frees western rulers of all responsibility for the disaster while also personifying the evil in question in a single villainous person. NATO metastasis? Irrelevant! The evil Putin was always going to do this no matter what.

Maybe just a happily coincidental get-out-of-jail-free card for our glorious, blameless rulers. But cui bono, while not an outright rule, is still a useful guideline.

In this regard, see also, “They hate us for our freedoms.” That is, “Nine-Eleven had nothing to do with US behavior in the Middle East! It’s all just jealous, irrational hatred, about which we can do nothing because what, give up our freedoms?” This one is special because it doesn’t just absolve America of any responsibility, it relies on the implied notion that we’re not only blameless, but indeed virtuous, and that the other is not just evil, but evil specifically in hating us for our virtue.

When you hear enough of these “It’s not our fault, there’s nothing we could have done differently” explanations from our rulers, it becomes difficult to avoid seeing a pattern. And for similar reasons, I think it’s good practice to be skeptical about any explanation that absolves us, whether as individuals or as members of an in-group, of responsibility for a bad outcome. Maybe in fact we bear no responsibility. But we should consider the possibility that we start with the emotional need to feel blameless, and reverse engineer an explanation from there.

[Update—this is a quote from an interview with neocon Robert Kagan in Responsible Statecraft. Extraordinary for any establishment American to talk this way—especially about Pearl Harbor, one of the most dogmatic of American narratives—but double especially extraordinary that it’s Kagan, a longtime cheerleader for America’s Freedom Bombings:

“I never denied that blowback was a reality. In fact, my writing shows that when the United States is out there acting in the world, Americans tend to not even be aware of the effect of American power on other nations. And so they're constantly shocked whenever the use of American power leads to a response. The best example is Japan and Pearl Harbor. Many Americans acted like it was out of the blue when Japan attacked us when, in fact, the U.S. pursued policies that were likely to lead to a Japanese attack. The same was true of 9/11 in the sense that it was at least in part a response to the American presence in the Middle East.”]

Again, there’s a lot more to say about all this, but from my standpoint your analysis suffers from too high a level of generality (“China is aggressive, nothing more to be examined or compared”); from the Fundamental Attribution Error (“We do things for reasons, they do things because of their character”); and perhaps from a bit of tribalism, in that I can’t imagine any of China’s billion or so people would share your take. Which doesn’t make them right or you wrong, but is worth considering if we’re trying to get a handle on whatever biases, angles, and assumptions might be distorting our perception.

For more, see Cognitive Empathy, but if that sounds too soft, just think of it as Sun Tzu’s Know Your Enemy.

Accurate diagnosis of a problem is always important, but never more so than with regard to the risks of war in the nuclear age. Which is something I worry about more than I’d like to, and which is why I get frustrated when I think people are offering a distorted diagnosis that seemingly justifies a disastrously wrong treatment—a treatment that even as I write this I see worsening the patient’s condition and creating ever more risk of much worse to come.

Anyway that’s some of how I see it, and of course I could be wrong, too.

When I was 23, my mother died following a two-and-a-half-year battle with cancer. She had just turned 51. Less than a year later, my girlfriend’s (now my wife Laura) younger brother Ian, a freshman in college, was diagnosed with a cancer so horribly aggressive that Ian’s battle ended after only eight months. And ten years after my mother’s death, my father died of a heart attack (my first experience with sudden loss, rather than the protracted variety. They’re different but neither has much to recommend it).

I mention all this to convey that the following thoughts are based on some degree of experience.

My parents never told me anything about grief. My father’s older brother had died at fourteen when my father was ten, and though my mother eventually filled me in on some of the details, my father talked with me about that monumental loss only once, acknowledging that he had worshipped his big brother and even decades later didn’t like to discuss it. He was much more willing to tell me about my paternal grandfather, who had died before I was born and who I always wished I could have known.1 But whatever else he might have been willing to share about how much he missed his brother and father, my father never had anything to say about grief itself. Nor did my mother. Having predeceased her parents, her sister, her husband, and her children, it might be that my mother had no firsthand experience of her own to draw on. This might explain the anomalous absence of any mention of grief, because in all other respects she was a marvelous guide to what I should expect to encounter farther along the trail of life.

All of which meant I was unprepared for my first bout with grief following my mother’s death. I had no context, no advice, no warning. My first knowledge of grief was the experience of being ravaged by it. In retrospect, I realize this made the experience even harder.2

Because there are two things about grief:

First, it’s about the worst pain a human can experience. It’s so bad it’s unmooring, unfathomable. The latter literally so, in that it’s bottomless, immeasurable. When you’re in the grip of grief, it feels like it will never end.

Second, it’s a universal of life. As horrible as it is, it’s also utterly normal.

Think about how important it is to set expectations about pain. A good doctor will warn you, “When I reset that broken nose, it’s going to be so explosively painful you’ll think you’re going into shock! But don’t worry, that’s normal and ultimately part of healing.”3

Doesn’t make the pain any less. But at least you know it’s nothing to be alarmed about.

It’s not quite the same thing, but years ago I spent five days at a firearms training course. This was the beginning course; there were three more of increasing intensity I still wish I’d gotten to. In the fourth course, part of the training included a Simunition gunfight in which you drop a half-gallon balloon filled with water died crimson. That is a lot of red liquid splattered on the ground around you. The trainers don’t want you seeing that quantity of real blood for the first time in a real gunfight. They want you to know in advance that you can lose that much blood and still fight on.

My daughter Emma grew up with only her maternal grandparents still alive, so she had an earlier than usual sense that none of us lasts forever. And one day when she was a young teenager, we wound up talking not just about death, but about what it’s like to lose someone you love.

I told her the truth: it’s bad, as hard a thing as we humans have to grapple with on this ride of life. I told her the first year is the worst, when without warning grief can blast into you like a tsunami and pin you to the dark bottom of the ocean, leaving you crying harder and longer than you thought it was possible to cry, so long and hard the only thing that seems to quell it is exhaustion and emptiness. I told her the first year of celebrations is rough—birthdays, holidays, anything that person used to be organically, unquestionably part of. I told her there would be a lot of unsettling dreams, where the person you lost is back with you but something is always wrong. I told her after the first year it gets easier, and that it seems to take about five years before your mind finishes reconstituting itself, reconciled to the reality that the person you loved so much really is gone.

I told her all of this is normal, and that I wanted her to know these things because one day, when it would be her turn to grieve, it wouldn’t hurt any less but it wouldn’t be quite as shocking and bewildering as it was the first time for me. I told her that if I was the one she was grieving for, I hoped she would say to herself, “Oh man, this sucks exactly like Dad told me it would!” I told her that in those moments, I hoped she’d feel I was with her.

We laughed and cried a lot during that conversation. We’ve had a fair number over the years I’ll never forget, but that was among the best. And I hope one day it’ll be among the most valuable.

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a long time but have put it off—probably for the same reasons people don’t talk about grief generally. It’s a sad subject, even a fearful one. My subsequent bouts have been easier, because the earlier losses happened when I was younger; because back then I didn’t know what to expect (didn’t know there was anything to expect); and because losing your parents and a future brother-in-law who was already like a brother is generally harder than losing a teacher or friend.

But if you think about it, reticence about this topic is strange. Unless you never love anyone, sooner or later you’re going to grieve. And even if you die so young that you’re the first to go, the people you love will grieve for you. A little preparation can make a big difference. For anyone grieving now or who will in this future, I hope this post will be part of that difference.

UPDATE: A friend sent me this short video on grief, which is laugh-out-loud funny, mostly because it’s all so true.

3

I actually had this experience, but the doctor in question failed to provide the warning, and yes, that made it even worse. He did give me a little valium beforehand, but learn from my mistake: when the doctor is going to give you valium and first asks if you get drunk easily, don’t be an idiot like I was and say, “I sure do, Doc, I’m God’s own lightweight!” Instead, the proper response is, “I don’t know because no matter how much I drink I’ve never managed to get even mildly drunk.” That way you at least have a chance of getting an effective dose, rather than the gerbil-appropriate one I received.

Obviously no one knows how the war will end, and there are plenty of plausible scenarios where it won’t end until its regional nature has gone global, with more damage to the global economy, widespread food shortages, and the use of nuclear weapons. And even if Israel and America stopped the madness today, what they’ve already done is like an undersea earthquake, the resulting tsunami of which is on its way and impossible to stop.

All that said, I think there’s one possible path by which the war could end with not too much more than the current amount of death, grief, agony, and waste its architects have already unleashed. It’s a narrow path, but I wouldn’t call it far-fetched, and though it’s hopeful, I don’t think it’s purely the product of hope.

The hope lies in two elements: first, Trump’s apparent belief that reality is whatever he says it is (and his supporters’ inclination to share that belief). Second, in the restraint and rationality of the Iranian government. Both elements are required, because no matter how many times Trump declares victory, whether he gets to leave is, as it was in A Bronx Tale, entirely up to how and even whether Iran lets him.

I think it’s fair to say that in his previous life as a real estate developer, Trump developed a taste for bullshit. “We finished construction three days ago with 100 luxury units available and only seven of them are left!” “The opening is gonna be unreal, every A-list celebrity has been trying to get an invite!” In real estate this is generally just harmless business puffery, the kind of gum-flapping that the carnival barker behind it hopes will bring about a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Of course, bullshit can take you farther in real estate than it can in a war, and even in the best of times Trump seems not to realize this. But this isn’t the best of times, and more and more it seems that Trump’s ability to distinguish bullshit from reality—probably never that great in the first place—seems to be disintegrating as he nears his 80th birthday.

Ordinarily, having a president who can’t distinguish between his own bullshit and external reality is not a good thing, and indeed is part of what caused the current utterly insane war in the first place. But ironically, Trump’s disintegrating brain is critical to any hope of mitigating the current catastrophe. A president less capable of massive self-delusion would be more likely to continue to escalate, Friedman Unit by Friedman Unit—which is what, as the Pentagon Papers showed, Johnson and Nixon did in Vietnam, and what Bush 2, Obama, and first-term Trump did in Afghanistan, where they all knew the war was lost but kept it going so they could hand it off to the next Oval Office occupant.

So whereas most presidents continue to escalate lost wars for years, even decades, to avoid having to acknowledge defeat, there’s probably a better chance that Trump will short-circuit the Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance cycle by jumping straight from Denial to Acceptance. Only a chance, of course, but given the costs and the stakes, a chance is better than nothing.

As I write this, it seems Trump has announced an address to the nation for 9:00 pm east coast time today, April 1 (also known as April Fool’s Day). Maybe this will be his chance to claim that he’s dropped more bombs, sunk more ships, blown up more infrastructure, killed more theocracy death cult regime Death-to-America mullahs, and taught these sick Nazi butcher deranged scumbags a lesson they’ll never forget. Sure, the Strait of Hormuz will now be an Iranian tollbooth, but America doesn’t need it and besides at some point it’ll self-open anyway. And this time Trump will have double completely and totally obliterated the nuclear weapons program the White House website still claims Trump completely and totally obliterated as of June 25, 2025—the one anyone who says he didn’t completely and totally obliterate is fake newsing. It’ll be Mission Accomplished all over again, though even for Trump and his supporters, the delusion will be hard to maintain.

WARNING, GRAPHIC: Video above is of a regime death cult military commander

Or maybe all the bragging about destroying this and that in Iran, reminiscent of the Body Count in Vietnam, is just Trump blurting out whatever is on his mind in any given moment. If he has even a tenuous connection with reality, at this point he must be feeling desperate. And it’s clear that one of his fundamental drives is to have people looking at him, thinking about him, talking about him, and keeping people uncertain about his intentions and what action he’ll announce if you Tune In At 9:00 is a great way to be sure you have people’s constant attention. Or maybe “We’re on the verge of stopping this lunacy” is another feint, intended to distract from some upcoming further act of insane violence. That’s the thing about Trump. If he doesn’t know what he’s going to do himself, no one else can know either.

(Note that Netanyahu might also be preparing to declare victory, facts be damned.)

Of course, even if Trump does boast that he ended yet another war (even if he started it, reminiscent of “No, it’s true, I read it somewhere. Okay, I wrote it down first”), the next step is up to Iran. Despite the war crimes and atrocities America has committed, I expect the Iranian government might give a de facto decent interval to encourage Trump to withdraw US forces and let him start campaigning again for a Nobel Peace Prize. But at that point, Israel, its defensive capabilities exhausted, will be wide open to Iran’s missiles and drones. And after the barbarism Israel has visited upon Iran, even the most rational and restrained Iranian leadership has got to be pissed.

At this point Iran could probably hit Israel hard enough to end it as a functioning nation-state. Before being snuffed out, Israel would doubtless exercise the Samson Option and hit Iran with nuclear weapons. Of course, if Iran really were an apocalyptic death cult—the “regime,” as we’re trained to think of it—its leadership wouldn’t care. But the truth is that contrary to the nonstop deluge of western propaganda, the Iranian government has behaved for decades with notable rationality and restraint. They agreed via the JCPOA to foreswear nuclear weapons. When Trump ripped it up, they tried to negotiate something new. When Netanyahu and Trump bombed them in the middle of those negotiations, they barely hit back and tried negotiating again. At which point Netanyahu and Trump bombed them yet again. And ever since Israel and America launched this war, it’s been Israel and America escalating it. Iran by contrast has been playing tit-for-tat.

Ironic, then that Trump has declared “No deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” He was right of course, though mistaken about who would be offering the surrender in question. Because no matter how much escalation precedes it (and if I had to bet, I’d bet Trump will indeed escalate before finally giving up), in the end, short of resort to nuclear strikes, Trump will have to declare victory and end his “lovely stay” in Iran— leaving the Iranian government (sorry, “regime”) still in charge, newly in control of the Strait of Hormuz, possessing a vast conventional missile and drone deterrence force, and newly determined to join Israel as a nuclear power. How else to describe this other than as Unconditional Surrender by another name?

And it will hardly be the first time. Though the US government didn't call it that, there was an unconditional US surrender in Vietnam (“Peace With Honor”); in Afghanistan (“Operation Freedom's Sentinal”); and in Iraq (“Mission Accomplished/Operation New Dawn”). Recognition of reality has followed metastatic self-inflicted catastrophe before. If we’re extremely lucky, it could happen this time, too. Strange that such a thing is now the world’s best and only hope. But the alternatives are almost too horrific to contemplate.

(Note this question is related to but different from, “Why is America the greatest country in the world?” which is at best neurotic jackoffery.)

The reflex response—the story that gets implanted in our brains when we’re children—is typically some version of Liberty. Individuality. Opportunity.

But the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are always bound to be distorted by ego, in-group favoritism, and the fundamental attribution error. For a variety of reasons, it’s hard for us to see ourselves clearly, and certainly there’s always a gap between the way we see ourselves and the way others do (and vice versa). As Orwell said: “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”

So the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are always inherently suspect—precisely because the need to self-flatter is always in the mix. Which makes the new stories our rulers have been telling the more remarkable. These stories aren’t about liberty, or individuality, or opportunity, or lights unto nations or cities on hills or anything remotely like any of that. What makes America special in these stories boils down to one fundamental thing.

Killing.

Here’s Secretary of Defense (who prefers Secretary of War) Pete Hegseth, advising media on what it should cover:

“How many stories have been written about how hard it is to, I don't know, fly a plane for 36 hours? Has MSNBC done that story? Has Fox? Have we done the story how hard that is?”

[Editor’s note: government and media should never be a “we”]

“You're undermining the success of incredible B-2 pilots and incredible F-35 pilots and incredible refuelers and incredible air defenders who accomplished their mission.”

“How about we talk about how special America is, that only we have these capabilities?”

Here’s Alex Karp, CEO of Panantir, a huge military and intelligence contractor:

“What makes America special right now is our lethal capacities. Our ability to fight war.”

It wasn’t always like this. Setting aside the substance of America’s first invasion of Iraq, here’s the story President Bush 1 told before a joint session of Congress about the end of the war:

“I’m sure that many of you saw on the television the unforgettable scene of four terrified Iraqi soldiers surrendering. They emerged from their bunker broken, tears streaming from their eyes, fearing the worst. And then there was an American soldier. Remember what he said? He said: ‘It's okay. You're all right now. You're all right now.’ That scene says a lot about America, a lot about who we are. Americans are a caring people. We are a good people, a generous people. Let us always be caring and good and generous in all we do.”

Of course the speech itself was about a war and how beneficent America was for waging it. Plenty of self-flattery, even Niebuhrian* self-deception, to be sure. America has always pretended to cherish peace while in fact loving war.

But as self-justifying as American hypocrisy has always been, it has also signaled something positive, as Arnaud Bertrand recently pointed out: “Hypocrisy—the gap between ideal and reality—is the proof that the ideal still has a hold on you, that you can still be called back to it.”

That sort of hypocrisy now seems mostly to have evaporated, revealing the Thanatopic substrate.

Even the names of the military operations have changed. Not long ago, we had Enduring Freedom, Iraqi Freedom, Freedom’s Sentinal, Prosperity’s Guardian...now it’s Midnight Hammer and Urgent Fury, the first sounding like a porn movie and the second a straight-to-streaming action flick.

A simple test of the degree to which the current stories seem uninterested in hypocritical fig leafs: can you imagine a “Death, Fire, and Fury Will Reign Upon Them” Trump, or a “Death and Destruction From the Sky all Day Long” Hegseth, or a “Scare Our Enemies and on Occasion Kill Them” Karp , telling a story—accurate or inaccurate is beside the point—about being caring, or good, or generous as characteristics that make America special?

Whatever the truth of the self-flattering stories we tell ourselves, they’re always reflections of what we want to believe, what we want to be the truth. It used to be that what we wanted to be the truth were characteristics that almost anyone would agree are positive, regardless of what people or cultures or countries these characteristics might be found in. Today, it seems what we want to be the truth is death, and dominance, and cruelty.

Of course, as the parasitical military-intelligence-security-industrial complex gets ever more grotesquely greedy and bloated, and as life gets harder and harder for ordinary Americans, our rulers will need greater degrees of repression to maintain domestic order. It might be that why they want to see themselves as wielders of the absolute unanswerable power to mete out death on a whim is because they want us to see them that way, too.

******************

*Perhaps the most significant moral characteristic of a nation is its hypocrisy. We have noted that self-deception and hypocrisy is an unvarying element in the moral life of all human beings. It is the tribute which morality pays to immorality, or rather the device by which the lesser self gains the consent of the larger self to indulge in impulses and ventures which the rational self can approve only when they are disguised. One can never be quite certain whether the disguise is meant only for the eye of the external observer or whether, as may be usually the case, it deceives the self. Naturally this defect in individuals becomes more apparent in the less moral life of nations.

—Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society

If they can do this—if they can turn Iran into a giant version of Libya, Syria, and increasingly Lebanon, if they can sufficiently repress the Iranian ability to respond to attacks with missiles and drones (not likely; for example, it never worked with the Houthis in Yemen), I expect Trump will say something like, “We have ended an evil regime and its ability to threaten the world with nuclear weapons, and we gave the Iranian people a chance to determine their own destiny. You're welcome and now we’re done.”

The sorts of refugee flows something like this will cause are presumably intended to be Europe’s problem. And on the plus side, if Iran maintains any ability to hit back, there will money to be made in permanent periodic bombing sorties. There will be blowback, of course, in the form of terrorism, but there’s a lot of money to be made in the ever-expanding fight-fire-with-fire-so-the-flames-never-go-out security racket, too.

If however, Israel’s ability to shoot down missiles is more degraded than Iran’s ability to fire them, and Trump goes home, Israel—a country with an unknown number of nuclear weapons and missiles and with a policy called The Samson Option—will be in a desperate situation.

But whatever.

Leave aside how infamously evil something like is. Leave aside what it means to wantonly kill and immiserate untold numbers of people in pursuit of your alleged geopolitical goals. Leave aside that “Iran’s Nuclear Facilities Obliterated” is still on the White House website, having been posted there on June 25, 2025.

Leave aside that the Iranian president our rulers just murdered had long since decreed a fatwa against Iran having nuclear weapons; leave aside that Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, by which their government agreed not to develop nuclear weapons; leave aside that Iran was also a signatory to a separate agreement with America, the JCPOA, by which Iran further agreed to foreswear nuclear weapons; leave aside that by all accounts Iran was complying with all its obligations when Trump ripped up the JCPOA in 2018.

Leave all that aside. Go ahead and assume the Iranian “regime” is evil incarnate. Repressive. And desirous of nuclear weapons.

First, I assure you, any government watching the current American government is desirous of nuclear weapons. France is building more. Poland says it likely will. Realizing that American “protection” is not only nonexistent, but in fact an acute danger, Saudi Arabia will likely reconsider, too. Etc. Whatever the Iranian government’s nuclear hopes, they’re going to be a fraction of the proliferation this latest insanity has now fomented.

Yes, leave all that aside, too, and just ask yourself this:

If our rulers can get along famously with the repressive theocracy in Saudi Arabia; if they manage to coexist with the repressive, nuclear- and missile-armed government of North Korea and Kim Jung Un himself is not an “imminent threat;” if they cannot only coexist with, but support and install, a former al Qaeda and ISIS leader as the new president of Syria, then what is it about Iran that justifies reducing an ancient civilization, a country of 93 million people, to an apocalyptic Hobbesian state of all against all, a 646,000 square-mile real-world version of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road?

There is no way to calculate the cost of this hideous thing—in death, in human misery, in money, in lost opportunities. And the risks are equally unthinkable. You can’t keep stressing a system the way ruling western clowns and lunatics have been stressing the world without eventually miscalculating in a way that gets beyond anyone’s ability to control. Think WW1 and the Cuban Missile crisis combined.

How is any of this better than the JCPOA Trump tore up? We’re safer now, as our rulers keep assuring us? The world is more stable? War is peace?

* * * * *

Postscript…

If you want a sense of where I’m coming from in my opinions about this latest US-instigated war, the following is an excerpt from my Facebook response to a guy criticizing me for not giving adequate weight to the “complex feelings” of “Iranians both inside and outside the country who have suffered terribly under this regime,” a failing that revealed my “devotion to a particular ideological bent”:

“The bombing we both deplore murdered a school full of children and is grossly unjust but”

Someone murdered 165 schoolchildren “but”?

Wait, no, seriously… “but”?

And an unimaginable horror, an atrocity, is merely… “grossly unjust”?

Do you hear yourself?

“but to fail to understand the complex feelings many Iranians have—when they are telling you directly in their own words—reveals not so much a great understanding of human nature as a devotion to a particular ideological bent.”

Whoever these people are whose complex feelings you say are a “but” to the murder of 165 children, I wonder how those children would feel, if they hadn’t been blown into bloody scraps of brain and meat and bone, most before they were even teenagers. Well, I suppose you could still ask their mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters, and maybe the burned and blinded and brain-damaged and crippled and maimed and traumatized classmates who survived, about their complex feelings.

It could be that the overwhelming weight I assign to the horror of this totally unnecessary and insane way of allegedly helping people is all just a mistaken outgrowth of my “supposed great understanding of human nature.” That’s possible. Besides, feelings. “Complex” ones.

But don’t you think all this “but” stuff is just a reinvention of the wheel? Couldn’t we simply use the tried and true “Can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs”? “Freedom isn’t free”? “War is hell”? That sort of thing. There are so many readymade ways to say “but” in these circumstances.

As for the particular ideological bent I’m devoted to: If I haven’t already been clear enough, I’m not terribly interested in people who want my government to use my tax dollars to blow up their countries, no matter how complex their feelings.

I know this must all sound terribly unsophisticated to you, and probably callous, too. The complexities!

But have you watched videos of this apocalypse? Seen the photos that accompany articles with headlines like “Tehran an ‘apocalypse’ of hospitals in flames and children buried beneath rubble”?

“Children buried beneath rubble.” There’s a “but” that comes after that?

Spending even a word on this “Yeah, but the regime” talking point, no matter how sophisticated, well-educated, and insightful it might make you feel (actually, especially if it makes you feel that way) is morally repugnant. Beyond which, you’re amplifying regime (the US regime) propaganda and making yourself complicit in this absolute infamy.

Yeah, yeah, I know I’m not treating you with the respect you feel you deserve. I engage with a lot of callous people on social media and sometimes it wears me down. And the worst are the ones who tell themselves their callousness is in fact sophistication—and worse even that that, tell themselves it’s compassion.

Israel, a nuclear-armed theocracy, can’t stop Iranian missiles alone (they’re getting hammered even with help). This dynamic our rulers have created is unbelievably dangerous. And for what?

And even aside from the murder/suicide “Samson Option,” if Trump tries to walk away from the insanity he's unleashed, expect Israel to do increasingly desperate things, including false flags, to try to draw others in to fight against Iran.

Listening to the ever-shifting administration attempts to articulate a rationale for why this insanity is preferable to the nuclear treaty Trump unilaterally tore up in 2018, I’m reminded of Firefly’s Jayne. I couldn’t find the video, but:

“Hell, I’ll kill a man in a fair fight...or if I think he’s gonna start a fair fight, or if he bothers me, or if there’s a woman, or if I’m gettin’ paid—mostly only when I’m gettin’ paid…”

(Even if you love this war, you have to admit, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud” was better propaganda.)

But I’m not saying there’s nothing to the notion that we should all be worried Iran might be getting nuclear weapons! After all, they’ve been weeks away from it for decades.

On the plus side, the regime change element does seem to be succeeding…in Bahrain. Think of it as a terrific bank shot (h/t John Weeks).

* * * * * *

It’s the same triumphalism in the early days every time. Afghanistan—Taliban deposed! Iraq—Saddam captured! Libya—Qaddafi dead! Syria—Assad fled! America is like an organism that responds to a vicarious pleasure stimulus but has no capacity for memory, so can’t learn what follows.

* * * * * *

It’s astonishing how many people really, earnestly believe the government continually bombs other countries because it wants to help foreign peoples. And more—that the bombings really do help, that the people being bombed are grateful. Now they can be free of this repressive regime, courtesy of American freedom bombs!

Could it be more obvious that our rulers—to quote George Carlin—don’t give a fuck about you? They don’t care about ordinary Americans at all, and yet they’re supposed to care deeply about ordinary foreigners?

There must be something in our nature that renders us so susceptible. So ready to absorb and regurgitate the most obvious absurdities as long as they can help rationalize the horrific violence I guess a lot of people secretly long for and cherish when it’s their tribe doing it.

But think about it. Even if you hated your government, would you want a foreign army to bomb your country?

That’s what our rulers want us to believe about ordinary Iranians. They long to be bombed by a foreign army. And you know, if one of the freedom bombs happens to land on a school, and blow scores of little children into bloody scraps of brains and bone and meat, hey, we understand, don’t worry about it, after all we hate the regime, collateral damage, war is messy, freedom isn’t free, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, all good, thank you again for bombing us.

Most of what you need to know about people in other countries and from other cultures you can figure out by asking, “If I were this person in an analogous situation, what would I want?” We humans have far more in common than we have differences.

So think of how many Americans hated the Bush/Cheney regime and even believed it stole the 2000 election. Did that mean they wished a foreign army would bomb America? Did they welcome 9/11? The opposite: Bush’s approval ratings went to 90% after the attack.

Yes, there are inevitably a few locals in every such situation who perceive they will benefit if a foreign army bombs their country. They’re always spotlighted by war lovers and propagandists as though they’re a meaningful gauge of ordinary sentiment.

The thing is, if you’d want your country to get bombed by a foreign army, you are not remotely typical. And your neighbors would rightly see you as a traitor.

But even aside from all that, it’s wild how people talk about this fantasy of “But they want to be bombed, they’re grateful, now they can have the freedom our freedom bombs bring” as though it would be relevant even if it were true. Look at it as an organizing principle, where does it take you? A few people in a country with a population of 93 million want their country bombed, so I guess the US government is obliged to bomb it? Or at least it would be unethical not to. And if anything goes wrong, it was the Iranians’ fault for wanting to get bombed in the first place. Weren’t they asking for it?

If Bob asked you to murder his cousin Jimmy because it would make Bob better off, would you even contemplate it? Is it your responsibility to help people by meting out violence? Then why is it the responsibility of your government to “help” people—even if those people want it, which other than a few irrelevant charlatans and malcontents, they don’t—with bombs?

Anytime a politician proposes an infrastructure or social uplift program at home, a chorus of establishment voices bleats in unison: “But how are we going to pay for it?”

But bombs to help foreigners? No problem, freedom isn’t free but freedom bombs sure are, you’re welcome!

I think it’s Matthew 25:35-40 where Jesus says:

For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.

But that sounds like a lot of work. Really, it’s much easier to help people just by bombing them.

Well, as Anaïs Nin said, “We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are.” So much of life is just a giant Rorschach Test.

* * * * * *

War and military spending have become the foundational organizing principles of our politics, economy, and culture. It won’t get better—in fact, it will continue to get worse—until more ordinary people realize what a racket it is.

Or until our rulers spin the war roulette wheel one time too many and it finally comes up nuclear. Nothing to worry about, though. Nuclear bombs are freedom bombs too.

In a sense, what Trump seems to be planning for Iran is really just a bigger version of what successive US administrations do every day, Trump being only the most recent. Obama bombed seven countries during his eight years in office, never involving Congress and indeed claiming that his war in Libya didn’t constitute “hostilities” and therefore wasn’t subject to the War Powers Act. Biden managed to bomb three countries in as many days. Bush 2 and Clinton liked bombing, too. On any given day, America’s government is conducting “counterterrorism operations” in something like 85 countries.

(None of this includes covert operations like Timber Sycamore in Syria or the US government’s sanctions regime, which kills even more people than its bombings.)

In 2025, Trump attacked Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Somalia, without involving Congress or making any kind of coherent case for war (mostly no case at all) to the public. In fact, Trump bombed Somalia over 100 times in 2025, and remains on pace in 2026—bombings I’d bet most Americans don’t even know about.

If none of those other wars—including the June 2025 war on Iran—count as “wars” for purposes of Article I, Section 8, and none required Congressional involvement or public support, why would Trump feel any constraints about another, albeit bigger attack?

By contrast, in 2003, Bush 2 understood that he needed some kind of Congressional buy-in to launch an invasion and occupation involving 150,000 American troops, intended to replace a government and install and prop up a new one. In other words, America’s second war in Iraq “felt” qualitatively different from all the routine bombings the American public has become habituated to (this was true too for Bush 1’s invasion of Iraq, which involved something like a half million American troops).

To put it another way: Bush 2’s war in Iraq was depraved and destructive but the goal involved building something. But if the goal itself is destruction…well, that’s just what successive US administrations do pretty much every day without ever paying any political or other apparent price.

Granted, what Trump seems to be planning for his second attack on Iran will be his biggest gamble yet. Iran is the second largest country in the Middle East after Saudi Arabia, borders seven countries, has 92 million people of multiple ethnicities, and sits alongside the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the world’s oil flows. The Iranian government* showed extraordinary—and probably tactically mistaken—restraint during the June 2024 attacks. It has now learned that restraint leads only to more threats and more and bigger attacks. It’s therefore likely to respond differently this time.

But if you were lucky in your previous gambles…and started to get addicted to the rush of push-button destruction…and virtually no one in Congress ever tried to do anything meaningful to stop you…and for whatever reason you were committed to always doing the bidding of the Israeli government and its supporters…and you detected no real political costs to your behavior…and you wanted to distract from various political problems such as all things Epstein (for which you might also release some “news” about UFOs, a favorite government distraction technique)…why wouldn’t you attack Iran again?

Congress’s power to declare war is practically dead at this point, affecting presidential behavior to about the same extent it would if it didn’t even exist. In threatening his largest and largely unexplained unilateral war yet, Trump could be said to be choking the last life out of Article I, Section 8. But it took successive administrations, and successive generations of cowards and frauds in Congress, to reduce the Constitution to this state.

*Yes, I know we’re supposed to call it a regime but I try not parrot western propaganda. See also, Russia’s “Unprovoked” War on Ukraine.

Just as you don’t need to be a John Rain-level operator to make yourself safer in the world by using basic tools like putting yourself in the shoes of the opposition, you don’t need to be Edward Snowden to use a calling and messaging app like Signal. And Guy Kawasaki and Madisun Nuismer have written a wonderfully engaging and approachable guide to how.

The book’s title is right on point. Spies, politicians, and our tech overlords would have us believe that “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.” A lunacy Glenn Greenwald likes to expose by asking, “Oh, really? That’s great, let me just put this dictaphone on the table while we’re talking so I can record everything you say, and you can give me all your passwords, and by the way, how about if we set up some video cameras in your bathroom and bedroom?”

Even the people who want you to believe you don’t need privacy--Scott McNealy, Eric Schmidt, Mark Zuckerberg, to name a few--live in walled mansions and buy up adjacent properties. Privacy for me but not for thee.

The assault on privacy is a technology/government tag team. Once upon a time, we the people knew a lot about the government while the government knew little of individual people. That script has now been flipped--via secrecy metastasis, the people know less and less about the government, while via increasingly sophisticated surveillance technology, the government knows more and more about you and me. This perverse asymmetry--private citizens have no privacy, but public officials do?--is incompatible with freedom and democracy, or even with fundamental human nature.

As Snowden himself said, riffing on Thomas Jefferson’s view of the role of the Constitution: “Let us speak no more of faith in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of cryptography.” Unfortunately, the Bill of Rights is a static defense, while technology is ever evolving. Fortunately, what technology can threaten, technology can also protect. Signal is a welcome part of that protection--as is this book.

Of course you would! So then why do so many people respond to contrary views on the war in Ukraine by Duckspeaking the functional equivalent: “You are parroting Kremlin talking points!”

I’m not only referring to your average person, either. Listen to this debate by Norwegian political scientist Glenn Diesen and a guy from a podcast called Silicon Curtain. I couldn’t find the guy’s name, but he speaks with a posh British accent and was able to marshall a few facts—and yet in the first 15 minutes alone, he found a way to say three times that Diesen’s arguments align with the dreaded Kremlin Talking Points.

Let’s pause before going further to appreciate the impressive irony at work here. Because of course, “You are parroting Kremlin talking points!” is a classic NATO talking point. It has all the earmarks and everything!

But that’s just funny. What matters is less the irony, and more the dumb-as-a-rock notion that we should evaluate views entirely or even primarily based on whatever third-party views they might track with.

I’ve tried discussing this on social media. People don’t get it. When I observe that Kremlin Talking Points is itself a NATO talking point, the response is typically some version of “NATO talking points are better.” Yes, they really do say that. People get so occluded by the presence of this fallacious, distorted approach to reality that the only question they might be capable of is which talking points feel more appealing.

Spoiler alert—the more appealing ones will be coming from your own side.

After all, what’s more likely—and more common? That a person’s views are influenced by the views of her own in-group, her own tribe, her own government, by the domestic propaganda that’s pumped out ceaselessly into the domestic ecosystem?

Or by the views of a foreign government?

The first is easy to understand. Mostly it’s a matter of tribalism, group-think, exposure, osmosis. But the second requires some pretty way-out theories to explain, generally having to do with other manifestations of Duckspeak such as Useful Idiot and Unwitting Asset and Getting Paid in Rubles.

But really, how likely is any of that compared to plain old, garden-variety tribalism, group-think, exposure, osmosis?

Wanting to discuss these matters in ways that are more likely to produce a favorable heat-to-light ratio, I generally don’t accuse other people of parroting NATO talking points or CIA talking points or whatever—even though many times what I hear being produced by ordinary people’s larynxes is verbatim what’s spouted by Jens Stoltenberg Or Mark Rutte or whoever. What good would come from pointing this out? Instead I try to get people to consider the actual origins of this war, to consider its costs and risks along with whatever they think are its benefits, and if I can’t do that, what difference does it make how they form their opinions or where those opinions come from? Would it change their minds if I observed aloud that every time they reflexively attach the adjective “unprovoked” to “Putin’s war of aggression,” for example, that this phrase is indistinguishable from what NATO bureaucrats and US warmongers bloviate every day (the Economist is the best at this. I don’t think they’re capable of referring to the war without blurting out “unprovoked” along with it)? Or would it just irritate them, because even the most propaganda-soaked people alive are certain they’ve arrived at their opinions via a rigorous, independent, free-thinking and fair-minded analysis of all the relevant data?

So here’s a better idea. Assume good faith—in your conduct, if not in your private thoughts. Engage people on a level more sophisticated than “You are useful idiot for Putin/NATO/whoever.” Focus more on what than on who. This requires some actual thought, but once you get the hang of it, you’ll see that it’s far more satisfying than mindless accusations and other forms of Duckspeak, just as reading a book is more satisfying than sucking on a pacifier.

Related:

You can tell that Ukraine’s “supporters” recognize the war is lost by how their narrative is shifting. It’s increasingly “The west forced Ukraine to fight with one arm tied behind its back,” “America didn’t deliver the right weapons fast enough,” and straight-up verbatim “Ukraine was stabbed in the back” (SITB—it’s not just for Nazis anymore!).

There won’t be one war cheerleader in a thousand who honestly grapples with how insane and unnecessary this NATO-provoked war always was. It’ll only be about who to blame for the predictable and widely predicted inevitable outcome.

Plus ça change. See also Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan…the war was always a good idea, always just and necessary, always someone else’s fault, always it was actually winnable until the thing and the reason and the blah blah blah, coulda woulda shoulda but the next war will for sure be better.

I know, I know, I’m just parroting Kremlin Talking Points. And so it goes.

BTW, here’s Duckspeak in Chapter 5 of Orwell’s 1984. Does it sound familiar?

“For the rest it was just a noise, a quack-quack-quacking. And yet, though you could not actually hear what the man was saying, you could not be in any doubt about its general nature. He might be denouncing Goldstein and demanding sterner measures against thought-criminals and saboteurs, he might be fulminating against the atrocities of the Eurasian army, he might be praising Big Brother or the heroes on the Malabar front—it made no difference. Whatever it was, you could be certain that every word of it was pure orthodoxy, pure Ingsoc. As he watched the eyeless face with the jaw moving rapidly up and down, Winston had a curious feeling that this was not a real human being but some kind of dummy. It was not the man’s brain that was speaking, it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck.”

George Carlin famously observed of our rulers (“owners,” as he called them), “They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t care about you. At all. At all. At all.”

Carlin’s observation is both axiomatic and essential for understanding events. Powerful people have no interest in the welfare of powerless people. Powerful people don’t want to empower anyone else; they want more power for themselves because, as Orwell said, “The object of power is power.”

Once you realize this—once you realize that neither Biden nor Trump, Pelosi or McConnell, Bezos or Musk, gives a damn about you except perhaps to use you as a resource—the effect of propaganda is blunted and you can see geopolitics more clearly. Specifically, you can more accurately understand what will happen because you can better understand what the people in charge want to happen.

Of course I’m not suggesting that when it comes to geopolitics, matters such as national interests, institutional interests, and structural interests aren’t relevant—of course they are. And so is psychology (the difference between motives and drives). But I’ve long been struck by the relatively scant attention paid by even the most insightful historians, economists, and political scientists I listen to and read to personal interests—which, when it comes to politicians, largely means political interests. Which is really just another way of saying power interests.

But have no fear, novelists to the rescue! After all, a novelist’s stock in trade is character—people built on a foundational understanding of human drives, human motives, and human nature itself. So let’s try to examine the personal motives of the primary characters in the story of the war in Ukraine: (1) President Trump; (2) European politicians and bureaucrats; (3) President Zelensky and his inner circle; and (4) President Putin and his inner circle.

1. Trump.

Though he’s facing stiff resistance from war lovers like Lindsay Graham and lunatics like Michael McFaul, my sense is that President Trump genuinely wants to end the war in Ukraine. I say this because the war doesn’t benefit him politically and ending it would burnish his attempts to brand himself a peacemaker, and because over the last year he’s tried to end it, albeit in typically Trumpian scattershot fashion (saying he’s going to just let the combatants fight it out like children, threatening Ukraine that he’ll cut them off, threatening Russia that he’ll escalate, etc).

But any president who ends a war will inevitably be accused of losing it. This was true of the Korean War, where war lovers peddled the narrative that the stalemate resulted from Truman’s insistence on fighting a “limited war” (I know the “evidence” I’m presenting here is a movie, but you can find plenty of real evidence on the Internet and when it comes to humor in these mad times, I’m all for “Smoke ’em if ya got ’em”):

This was true too of America’s loss in its war in Vietnam, where the war lovers’ narrative was that Johnson and then Nixon forced the military to fight with “one hand tied behind its back.” In fact, as the Pentagon Papers revealed, the US government had concluded early on that the war was unwinnable—but politicians continued to lie about “light at the end of the tunnel” so they could hand off the inevitable loss label to whoever succeeded them.

The Afghanistan war was no different. As the Afghanistan Papers revealed, three successive American administrations knew this was at best another stalemate, but continued the war anyway because Bush, then Obama, then Trump, didn’t want to be blamed for being the one to lose it.

If you doubt the kind of political fallout an American politician will face for ending an unwinnable war, consider how the Economist framed the end of America’s retreat from Afghanistan, where the debacle wasn’t twenty years of a war that led from the Taliban in power to the Taliban in power, but rather President Biden’s withdrawal.

Any American president who tries to stop the slaughter in Ukraine will know headlines like Biden’s will be his. And this is of course by design.

Trump’s dilemma, therefore, is how to end the war without being blamed for losing it (as the war is already lost, this is of course not a moral dilemma, only a political one, but if you want to understand politicians, using morality as a rubric will yield inaccurate results). Trump could end the war almost immediately, by cutting off US financial aid, arms shipments, intelligence sharing, weapons targeting, and other means of supporting the Ukrainian war effort. But he understands that if he ends the war, unwinnable though it is, he’ll be blamed for losing it.

(The “Trump Lost the War” propaganda is of course already happening—follow the latest from the Wall Street Journal or the deeply disturbed Michael McFaul if you doubt me—and the propagandists deploy this sort of bullshit early and often precisely to warn any president who might dare to end a war about the political price he’ll pay if he does.)

Trump’s political dilemma makes me wonder about recent Shocked, shocked! revelations of gargantuan corruption by the Ukrainian government. Cui bono is a better guideline than a rule, but it’s interesting to consider that Trump now has a narrative he could use to insulate himself against the political fallout of ending the war: “We’ve sent this government hundreds of billions of dollars and instead of using it to fight the war (which never would have started if I had been president, blah blah blah), Zelensky and his cronies have been stealing it, and don’t tell me this guy is innocent, that’s like saying he’s a virgin living in a whorehouse. It’s time to recognize reality and focus on America First.”

I don’t expect Trump will do this—I think he’s too afraid of the political consequences. But again, it’s interesting to consider the potential political opening the latest corruption revelations create, who might be behind them, and how they might be exploited.

(I have to mention The Economist again, because their take on the corruption scandal is that revelations of massive Ukrainian government corruption are actually good because the revelations show Ukraine’s anti-corruption apparatus is working. By that logic, it would be bad if there were no Ukrainian corruption revelations—unless no Ukrainian corruption is good and Ukrainian corruption is also good, and maybe that is indeed their point because come on, it’s The Economist, Forget it, he’s rolling…)

At any rate, like all compelling characters, Trump is faced with a dilemma, his decision on which will reveal his ultimate nature. And while I hope I’m wrong, I expect his decision will be to let the war drag on even though he knows better. In fairness, that’s just what American presidents do.

2. European Politicians and Bureaucrats.

For anyone who’s been peddling the narrative that Russia invaded Ukraine because Putin: (i) is the New New Hitler; (ii) longs to reconstitute the Soviet Union; (iii) believes he is the reincarnation of Peter the Great; and (iv) plans to use Ukraine as a staging ground for the conquest of all of Europe and ultimately of New Jersey, too, a negotiated end to the war will be intolerable.

Why? Because the truth is that NATO provoked this war (everyone not relentlessly propagandized or in on the scam has always known this and indeed warned of it), and the truth is that guarantees of Ukrainian neutrality are the only way of negotiating an end to it. Yes, there will also be territorial concessions—for the loser, the terms of ending a war will always be far harsher than the terms for not fighting it. But as William Burns—Bush 2’s ambassador to Russia and Biden’s CIA director—warned Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in 2008 in an email accompanying Burns’s memo “Nyet Means Nyet:”

Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.

European leaders have diverted billions of their taxpayers’ money to a foreign government based on insistence that the only way to stop the war is for Ukraine to keep fighting it—and their insistence that if Russia wins, it will go on to conquer NATO member Poland and then the rest of Europe. When instead Russia wins the war and stops in Ukraine, the scam will be exposed and the leaders behind it further disgraced and in severe danger of being toppled. They’ll of course do all they can to blame everyone else for the inevitable outcome but blame deflection is at best a fallback plan.

Remember: these leaders are already massively unpopular, and their Churchillian cosplaying and doom-mongering is both cause and consequence of that unpopularity. To be proven so disastrously wrong about the war would almost certainly end their political careers and reputations. They can therefore be expected to continue to do all they can to keep the war going. Unlike Trump, who perceives at least some political gain from ending the war, European elites see only political cost and risk.

3. Zelensky.

Again: everyone not successfully propagandized or in on the scam has always known that NATO provoked this war. President Zelensky himself offered to discuss neutrality with Russia shortly after the invasion began, but abandoned negotiations in Istanbul when western leaders convinced him they would back the war (and probably issued some veiled threats along with the promises).

I don’t respect it, but I understand Zelensky’s calculus. Negotiate an end to the war and you’ll likely be assassinated by Ukrainian Nazis. Keep it going and you’ll be a celebrity, the west will maintain you in power (at least for as long as you’re useful), and you’ll have hundreds of billions of dollars to use for patronage and otherwise.

Zelensky’s decision to abandon neutrality negotiations before Ukraine had lost meaningful territory has resulted in a slow motion catastrophe for his country that is worse today than it was four years ago and will be even worse tomorrow. It’s almost inconceivable that he could now admit his error—he would be permanently rendered infamous, and probably murdered.

The solution for Zelensky and his inner circle, therefore, is to keep the war going until Russia has reached the Dnieper River and possibly taken Odessa, at which point Russia will likely stop taking new territory and offer to negotiate. The terms will be—as they always have been—Ukrainian neutrality, but they will also include the loss of Ukraine’s eastern, Russian-speaking oblasts. As a carrot, Russia will likely guarantee no further conquest and no interference if the EU wants to admit Ukraine, and might also offer to return some of the territories it has seized.

Zelensky will then be able to claim he never quit; none of this catastrophe was his responsibility; he was betrayed by the west and has no choice but to accept these terms to save what’s left of the Ukrainian nation. Disgrace and possible murder one way; a possible face-saving excuse on the other. For a ruler, compared to a choice like this, the lives of ordinary people barely count at all.

4. Putin.

Ukraine is Russia’s most sensitive border, used twice in the 20th century to invade Russia and resulting in losses I don’t think any outsider can really imagine. This means that no Russian government could ever accept Ukraine’s entry into a foreign military alliance and hope to survive—any more than the Kennedy administration could have hoped to survive acquiescence to Cuba’s hosting of Soviet missiles in Cuba.

I know, I know, NATO is a defensive military alliance; NATO has never attacked another country (it has, even beyond the fact that it is now waging war on Russia itself even as EU foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas says Russia should be broken up into smaller states); Putin knows all this and so NATO is just an excuse.

Let’s assume all that is true. It doesn’t change the political survival calculous of any Russian leader. Allow Ukraine to join a foreign military alliance and you’re done.

And this was true for the Cuban Missile Crisis, too. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara believed Soviet missiles in Cuba made no significant difference in the strategic calculus of MAD. But even if he’d lived (or been allowed to live), can you imagine Kennedy trying to explain that in the 1968 election? “Yeah, I let Khrushchev and Castro position Soviet nuclear missiles 90 miles off the coast of Miami. But it’s really not a big deal!”

To put it another way: no Russian government can or will allow this war to be lost. Obama himself recognized this in 2016, arguing that because the status of Ukraine was a core interest of Russia’s and not of America’s, Russia would always maintain “escalatory dominance” there.

In practice, this means two things. First, that the personification of Putin as the sole cause of the war is at best inaccurate. In fact, no Russian leader could remain in power while permitting Ukraine to join a foreign military bloc, and the political pressure on Putin is almost certainly of the “You’re being too restrained, the imperialists only understand the language of force” variety, the same as for any American politician who’s ever presided over a losing war. In other words, if you believe Putin being deposed or assassinated will lead to peace in Ukraine, you have it exactly backward.

And second, regardless of who rules Russia, if you think the war has been going badly for Ukraine while Russia is winning, you should be terrified of what Russia will begin to do if it ever feels it’s in danger of losing—up to and including the use of nuclear weapons.

To sum up: Putin and his inner circle understand that to allow Ukraine to join NATO, or to be the subject of western “security guarantees,” or to host any significant western military presence at all, would be a suicide pact, politically and perhaps otherwise. The same would be true of any conceivable Russian successor government. This means Russia will continue the war until Ukraine and NATO accept Russia’s insistence on Ukrainian neutrality.

Conclusion.

Acknowledging the foregoing gives me no pleasure. I’m not trying to describe the way things should be but am instead proceeding from the way things are. And the way things are is that we ordinary people are cursed with horrible rulers—people who started out lusting for power and then were made even made worse by it, people whose concerns have little or nothing to do with the interests of the people they rule.

But as I’ve said before:

There are only three ways this war will end: (i) the destruction of Ukraine; (ii) the destruction of the world; or (iii) a negotiated settlement that would include UN-supervised elections in Ukraine’s eastern provinces and Ukrainian neutrality. Russia will not allow Ukraine to join NATO, and though that might be upsetting, if you believe Ukrainian NATO membership is a goal worth continuing to slaughter and immiserate millions of Russians and Ukrainians over, you’re necessarily choosing one of the first two outcomes.

I understand the psychological barriers to accepting my view. It’s hard to ask Are we the baddies? Let alone to accept that at least in some respects our leaders are the baddies, or at least that understanding geopolitics as good guys and bad guys/good vs evil is childish at best. And hard too to accept that there are limits to American power—inherent limits and also practical limits as determined by weighing possible benefits vs costs and risks—and that we can’t always work our will in the world if our will is just strong enough.

If I’m correct in my analysis of the motives of the characters in the story of the war in Ukraine, negotiations will be of no more than the kabuki variety and the war will continue until Ukraine’s ability to resist has collapsed. At which point, Russia will not negotiate but rather will dictate terms. Unless, of course, our rulers have already blown up the world over the question of whether Ukraine gets to be NATO’s 33rd member state (I know, I know, it could never happen).

I know from experience I’ll be getting a lot of pushback for this post from people who think they’re supporting Ukraine (they might be supporting the interests of Ukrainian’s current leaders, but the interests of ordinary people not so much). If you’re one such, feel free to save time by cutting and pasting any of the following:

Kremlin talking points

Chamberlain, Hitler, Munich, Appeasement, (CHiMA)

Rules-based International Order

NATO is defensive alliance

Good guys vs bad guys good vs evil

Ukraine has agency and right to do

Cannot give in nuclear blackmail

No to trust Putin

Useful idiot

Apologies if I’m missing any, but I think those are at least the major ones.

Anyway. If I’m right, we can discuss all this again in a month, or three, or six, when—if our rulers haven’t blown up the world before then—millions more people will have been killed and immiserated and Ukraine’s position will be even worse than it is today. Reason is a weak force in human affairs; propaganda a powerful one. And if the Greeks were right, character isn’t really what determines the outcome of stories anyway. That’s more a matter of fate.

This conversation is with historian Aaron Good, author of the eye-opening American Exception, and former CIA officer John Kiriakou, author of the excellent CIA memoir The Reluctant Spy. I’ve appeared on both their shows before, and among the pleasures of talking to them is the lack of interruption—everyone takes time to build an idea before it gets examined and explored. True too, in fact, for Scott’s style, above.

I did a few talk-show interviews following the June 6 publication of The System—about the book, of course, but also about geopolitics, the nature of power, the state of the world…and the craft of writing fiction. Now all compiled in this single handy location, which I’ll update for any future System discussions…

Alain Burrese, Coffee with Alain

Phillip Brian, This is Phillip Brian

Wim Demeere, Wim’s Blog

Lee Fang and Leighton Woodhouse, Le Podcast

Lee Fang

Former CIA Analyst Barry Eisler on Fiction Writing, the Deep State, and Power

Barry Eisler, before becoming a best-selling novelist, worked in covert operations for the CIA. He joins Le Pod to discuss his career, the real-world inspirations for his work, and explains why fiction writing is more important than ever to understand the morally murky world of power politics and U.S. foreign policy…

Listen now

a year ago · 32 likes · 9 comments · Lee Fang

Aaron Good, American Exception

Aaron Good and John Kiriakou, American Exception

Gryftkin

Scott Horton, The Scott Horton Show

Ross Kaminski, KOA Talk Radio

https://koacolorado.iheart.com/featured/ross-kaminsky/content/2025-06-20-former-cia-ops-officer-barry-eisler-talks-new-political-thriller/

Guy Kawasaki, Remarkable People

John Kiriakou, Deep Focus

Aaron Mate, Useful Idiots

Nathan Robinson Current Affairs

Nonzero

David Watson, Movie Matters

http://www.davesaysmoviesmatter.com/barry-eisler-the-system.html

John Weeks, Libertarian Institute