The Wrong Century for Understanding War |
Four weeks into a war, we are already being told what it means.
This, in itself, should give us pause.
In a recent analysis in the New York Times, Yonatan Touval (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/29/opinion/israel-us-war-iran-literature.html) argues that the unfolding US-Israeli conflict with Iran reveals a profound failure of understanding. Our leaders, he suggests, possess extraordinary technological capabilities but lack the human insight necessary to grasp the deeper forces that shape war—memory, pride, humiliation, sacred narrative. They can see everything, he writes, but understand nothing.
It is an elegant argument. It is also premature—and, more importantly, anachronistic.
To diagnose failure four weeks into a complex military campaign is not analysis; it is projection. Wars—especially those involving multiple actors, asymmetrical capabilities, and global economic consequences—do not reveal their meaning on a compressed timeline. Early phases are often the least intelligible, not the most. What appears as miscalculation may, in time, reveal itself as strategic positioning. What looks like escalation may be containment by other means. To impose narrative closure at this stage is to mistake immediacy for insight.
But the deeper issue lies not in timing, but in framework.
Touval interprets the war through a familiar intellectual lens. He invokes Carl von Clausewitz, reminding us that war is not algebra but a human phenomenon shaped by passion and uncertainty. He turns to William Shakespeare and Leo Tolstoy to illustrate the enduring blindness of leaders who mistake........