The Madness We Mistake for Policy

We were watching the world burn on two fronts. In Ukraine, a grinding war of attrition devours a generation, fueled by an endless torrent of advanced weaponry in proceeding. In the Middle East, a decades-old conflict erupted into a new inferno, and for a while the shadow war between Israel and Iran threatened to consume the entire region. Pundits and politicians debated strategy, dissected troop movements, and argued over which side held the moral high ground. But that was a fatal misreading of the situation. We were not witnessing a rational, if brutal, extension of politics. We were witnessing a failure of the human mind on a global scale -- a descent into a hell of our own making, driven by the same predictable biases and cynical motives that have plagued us for centuries.

To tolerate these sorts of conflicts (i.e., armed ones) any longer is to accept a form of collective madness as the norm. We must understand that these wars are not the inevitable result of ancient hatreds or intractable geopolitics. They are the predictable outcome of a disastrously flawed system of thought, a system that we must now dismantle before it annihilates us.

The primary engine of this madness is not found in war rooms, but in the faulty wiring of our own minds. Leaders and populations on all sides are caught in the same psychological traps. Chief among them is the Fundamental Attribution Error -- the cognitive bias that leads us to believe our own actions are driven by circumstance, while our enemy’s actions are proof of their inherent, malevolent character. We see Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a pure act of unprovoked evil, conveniently ignoring the decades of NATO expansion that Moscow perceived as a tightening noose. We see Iran’s support for proxy forces as naked aggression, while overlooking the history of Western intervention and encirclement that shaped its worldview. We are, in the words of one US general, "prodding the bear" and then acting shocked when it attacks.

This flawed thinking is then weaponized by leaders who understand, as the Nazi leader Hermann Goering chillingly explained from his Nuremberg cell, that “the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism.” This cynical formula is being followed to the letter in Moscow, in Jerusalem, in Tehran -- and in the Western capitals that supply the arms. Fear is the currency, and patriotism is the bludgeon.

But our psychological flaws would not be so catastrophic if they weren't so profitable. Behind the curtain of national security and moral justifications stands the great, unacknowledged beneficiary of all this suffering: the military-industrial (political lobbying) complex. As U.S. Marine Major General Smedley Butler declared a century ago, war is a racket. Today, that racket is more lucrative than ever. Every shell fired in the Donbas, every missile intercepted over Tel Aviv, rings a cash register in the executive suites of Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and BAE Systems. The hundreds of billions of dollars involved are not just a line item in a national budget; they are record-breaking revenues for corporations that feed from what can only be described as the corporate warfare welfare teat. To pretend that this immense river of money has no influence on policy -- that it doesn't create a powerful, self-perpetuating incentive for more conflict -- is a dangerous and willful naivete.

The most dangerous lie we are told is that this endless preparation for war, this flooding of conflict zones with ever more sophisticated arms, is a path to peace. It is the opposite. As historical analysis has proven time and again, arms races are not a deterrent; they are a step toward war. Each shipment of advanced weaponry makes a diplomatic solution less likely. It feeds the "positive illusion" on all sides that a decisive military victory is just around the corner, an illusion that has led to nothing but prolonged disaster and mounting body counts. We have allowed Hubris, that reckless pride from Aesop's fable, to stride onto the world stage, and as promised, War follows right behind her.

Ultimately, we must confront the moral bankruptcy of our position. We have become habituated to horror. By normalizing these conflicts, by discussing them in the sterile language of geopolitical chess, we have allowed an evil on par with slavery to become an acceptable feature of our time. We are numbed by our "insensitivity to the remote," where daily reports of dozens or hundreds killed become background noise, failing to move us in the way a single tragedy close to home would. The frameworks of "Just War," with their talk of proportionality and last resorts, have been exposed as hollow rhetoric, a thin veil for the unrestrained slaughter of civilians and the destruction of entire societies.

These wars are not problems to be managed. They are diseases to be cured. We cannot tolerate them, because they represent a catastrophic failure of everything we claim to value, to include reason, empathy, and the simple, shared desire of ordinary people to live their lives in peace. The path forward does not lie in choosing a side, but in rejecting the entire bloody enterprise. It requires that we stop seeking monsters to destroy, recognize our own role in creating them, and find the bravery required not for war, but for peace. The alternative is to continue down this path of madness, mistaking the drumbeat of war for the march of progress, until we have all perished together as fools.

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* The author was a professor for the University of Maryland University College for 20 years, for which he taught U.S. active-duty military service members online throughout Europe and Asia and on U.S. military bases in Spain, Italy, Bosnia, and Greece. He had the honor of teaching 32 iterations of the advanced course titled “Law, Morality, and War” to the troops. Thereafter, he taught for the University of New England at its Tangier, Morocco, campus for two years, where his signature course was “War and Public Health.” He was born and raised a Quaker and confesses a strong bias against war.