![]() Instead, he and his team will go to great lengths to persuade the public to go along. Congress abdicated its constitutional role to declare war a long time ago, which gives presidents a pretty free hand, but no president is likely to order the large-scale use of force (as opposed to drones or small-scale raids) if he believes the public is dead set against it. In a democracy, leaders bent on war also must convince the public that rolling the “iron dice” of war, to quote German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg in 1914, is necessary and wise. Bush and the neocons (as well as Bolton) foolishly believed the Iraq War would be easy, short, and pay for itself. ![]() Saddam Hussein didn’t think anyone would resist the seizure of Kuwait, and George W. morale and convince Washington to give it a free hand in East Asia. Japan knew it couldn’t win a long war against the United States, and the attack on Pearl Harbor was a desperate gamble that Tokyo hoped would shatter U.S. Before World War I, Germany’s leaders thought the Schlieffen Plan would allow them to defeat France and Russia in a couple of months, and Hitler had similar hopes for the blitzkrieg and organized the entire Nazi war machine on the assumption that the war would be brief. Plenty of wars turn out that way, of course, but the leaders who begin them do so because they fool themselves into thinking the war will be quick, cheap, and successful. The first thing to remember is that leaders don’t start wars that they believe will be long, costly, and might end in their own defeat. ![]() How nervous should we be, and how might we tell if Trump is really serious about war or not? ![]() Writing in the New York Times Magazine this past Sunday, Robert Worth portrays Defense Secretary James Mattis as the sole voice of reason in Trump’s new “war cabinet” and highlights the risks of conflict with Iran, North Korea, and maybe a few other countries. Is the United States on the road to war? The number of people who think so seems to be growing, especially after President Donald Trump fired several of the grown-ups who were reportedly tempering his worst instincts and proceeded to elevate hawks such as CIA Director Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, the former U.S. ![]()
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