“Old men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die.”¹
—George Bernard Shaw
Once again, the drums of war sound in Washington.
This time, the horizon is Iran.
The language surrounding the moment is familiar: deterrence, security, strategic interests, the preservation of order. Yet something about the moment feels strangely old, almost ritualistic. The arguments echo those of earlier generations, the rhetoric carefully polished, the stakes described in moral terms.
And yet the citizens whose sons would ultimately fight such wars often seem far less certain.
This tension between the language of war and the reality beneath it is not new. In fact, it is as old as recorded history.
When I was in my twenties, an older family member read a book on American history and made a remark that struck me as cynical.
“America needs a war every twenty years.”
At the time, I dismissed it outright. Surely wars were fought for reasons—sometimes noble, sometimes misguided, but grounded in moral causes larger than simple appetite. I still believed history moved, however slowly, toward greater wisdom.
Forty years later, after a lifetime spent reading military history and the literature that surrounds it—from the ancients to Shakespeare—I am no longer so confident.
The young tend to believe wars begin with moral purpose. The older reader of history begins to suspect something darker. Beneath the banners of liberty, civilization, democracy, and security lies something far older and far less flattering: the persistent reality of human appetite—power, wealth, and domination.
The Greek historian Thucydides understood this more than two thousand years ago. Writing about the Peloponnesian War, he concluded that nations fight not primarily for the reasons they publicly proclaim but for three underlying motives: “fear, honor, and interest.” Strip away the ceremonial language, and those motives often collapse into a single reality—power and the resources that sustain it.
History is filled with examples.
The American Revolution, remembered as a struggle for liberty, was also deeply rooted in disputes over taxation, trade restrictions, and economic control of colonial markets. The First World War erupted within a Europe driven by industrial competition, imperial rivalry, and unstable economic alliances. Even the Second World War—perhaps the most morally defensible conflict of the modern era—emerged partly from the economic devastation of the Great Depression and the territorial ambitions that followed.
The ancients knew this pattern well.
Rome, whose military genius and administrative discipline shaped the Western imagination, did not conquer the Mediterranean purely out of civic virtue. Tribute, resources, prestige, and security pulled the republic outward until expansion became an instinct it could no longer restrain.
Empires rarely stop expanding voluntarily.
Rome’s catastrophic defeat in the Teutoburg Forest in A.D. 9—where three legions were annihilated by Germanic tribes—revealed the limits of imperial ambition. Yet even humiliation did not extinguish Rome’s appetite for dominance.
The Roman historian Tacitus later summarized the darker truth of empire in one unforgettable line: “To plunder, slaughter, and steal they give the lying name of empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.”
Shakespeare understood the same instinct centuries later. His kings speak constantly of honor and destiny, yet the audience senses something else beneath the rhetoric: ambition dressed in ceremony. In Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare warns that if the structure of authority collapses, chaos follows: “Take but degree away, untune that string, and hark what discord follows.”
War, in Shakespeare’s world—as in ours—is rarely about justice alone. It is about human nature colliding with power.
The modern world has hardly escaped the pattern.
The Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944 can reasonably be described as a moral necessity against Nazi tyranny. Yet the victory also produced a geopolitical settlement in which half of Europe fell under Soviet domination for nearly half a century. Even the clearest moral wars leave morally complicated legacies.
And now, once again, the question arises—this time in relation to Iran.
The rhetoric speaks of strategic necessity. But beneath the arguments, older realities linger: oil, regional influence, military advantage, prestige. The debate feels less like a new chapter in history than another page in a very old book.
Carl von Clausewitz famously observed in his book "On War" that war is “the continuation of politics by other means.” Soldiers who have lived through war often discover something more unsettling: war is also the continuation of human nature by other means.
Veterans rarely speak for long about ideology. The slogans fade quickly in the presence of suffering. What remains instead is loyalty—to the men beside them, to the fragile brotherhood forged in danger. The rhetoric dissolves; the human reality remains.
Winston Churchill once remarked that history is filled with wars that everyone knew were unnecessary, but no one could prevent.
Which leads to a stronger and more uncomfortable possibility.
The problem of war may not lie primarily in economics, diplomacy, or military technology. It may lie deeper in the human heart itself.
The biblical narrative offers precisely this diagnosis. Humanity is not simply rational or cooperative; it is fallen, prone to rivalry, pride, and domination. The first act of violence in Scripture occurs not between nations but between brothers.
The Christian answer to power, therefore, runs in the opposite direction.
In his letter to the Philippians, the Apostle Paul describes Christ as one who “emptied himself,” renouncing domination and embracing sacrifice instead. It is a radical inversion of the logic that normally governs human history.
Without that inversion—without humility restraining ambition—the cycle continues.
Nations rise. Empires expand. Wars are justified. Wars are fought.
The slogans change. The motives rarely do.
And so another conflict gathers on the horizon.
Iran may become another chapter in the long chronicle of war.
Or perhaps, in time, it will simply become another footnote in an ancient story—one that humanity has been telling since the beginning, and whose ending has not yet been written.