The Futility of War: Why We Keep Fighting a Battle We Already Know We’ve Lost

There’s a particular kind of insanity in doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. You’ve probably heard that definition applied to Einstein, though historians can’t quite confirm he said it. What they can confirm — with overwhelming, blood-soaked evidence — is that humanity has been applying this logic to war for roughly ten thousand years.

We know what war does. We’ve written libraries about it. We’ve made Oscar-winning films about it. We’ve built monuments to the dead, passed international laws against the worst of it, and sat in rooms at The Hague pointing fingers at war criminals. We know. And then, with startling regularity, we do it again.

This isn’t an anti-war screed. It’s something more uncomfortable: an honest examination of why, despite everything we know, armed conflict remains one of humanity’s most persistent behaviors — and what that says about us.

The Seductive Logic of War

Let’s start with something that rarely makes it into the conversation: war has a logic. It isn’t random. People don’t start wars because they woke up on the wrong side of history. Wars begin because, at some level, someone believes they will work.

That belief is not always irrational. Historically, there are wars that accomplished something tangible. The Allied victory in World War II ended the Nazi genocide. The American Civil War, for all its horror, ended chattel slavery in the United States. These outcomes were real, and dismissing them would be dishonest.

But here’s what we tend to do with those examples: we use them as permanent justifications for a method that, in the vast majority of cases, delivers something far messier and far less conclusive than the textbook outcome. We remember the wars that ‘worked’ and quietly shelve the ones that didn’t — which is most of them.

The Survivorship Bias of Military Victory

Survivorship bias is the cognitive tendency to focus on the cases that made it through a selection process while ignoring those that didn’t. In aviation, for example, there’s the famous WWII story of engineers who wanted to reinforce the most bullet-riddled parts of returning planes — until a statistician pointed out that they should reinforce the parts with no bullet holes, because planes hit there didn’t return at all.

We apply the same distorted logic to war. The wars that ‘worked’ — that are neat and conclusive and ended with a signed surrender on a battleship — are the ones we study, celebrate, and invoke. The wars that dragged on for decades, produced nothing but rubble and generational trauma, and were eventually abandoned without resolution? Those are the asterisks.

The Vietnam War. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The American invasion of Iraq. The endless cycles of Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Lebanese Civil War. None of these produced anything resembling the outcome that justified the initial decision to fight. But they produced casualties in the hundreds of thousands, refugee crises, destabilized regions, and PTSD that three generations haven’t finished processing.

What War Costs — and Who Actually Pays

The economic case against war is, by now, overwhelming. The Iraq War cost the United States somewhere between two and three trillion dollars, depending on who’s counting and whether they’re including long-term veterans’ care. Afghanistan added another two trillion. For what? Pick your answer carefully, because historians are still fighting about it, which is itself something of a tell.

But economic cost, as staggering as it is, is not the real cost. The real cost is the one that doesn’t appear in congressional budget reports.

The Civilian Price Tag

In World War I, roughly 85 to 90 percent of the dead were soldiers. By the time we got to the wars of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, that ratio had essentially reversed: in many modern conflicts, 90 percent of casualties are civilians. War has become, in its modern form, largely a mechanism for killing people who weren’t fighting.

Think about that for a moment. The technology of warfare has advanced enormously. We have precision-guided munitions. We have satellite targeting. We have drones operated from air-conditioned rooms thousands of miles away. And yet, somehow, we keep hitting hospitals, markets, schools, and wedding receptions.

This isn’t always incompetence. Sometimes it’s a feature, not a bug. Collective punishment — the targeting of civilian populations to break the will of an enemy — has a long and dishonorable history in modern warfare. It didn’t work in London during the Blitz. It didn’t work in North Vietnam. It doesn’t work, not in the sense of achieving durable political change, but it keeps getting tried.

The Long Shadow of Trauma

Beyond the physical casualties, war leaves a psychological wound that no armistice can close. The clinical literature on post-traumatic stress disorder — formerly called ‘shell shock’ in World War I and ‘combat fatigue’ in World War II, as if renaming it would make it less devastating — is unambiguous. Combat exposure produces lasting neurological changes. Rates of suicide among veterans in the United States consistently exceed those of the general population.

But soldier trauma, as serious as it is, is only part of the picture. The populations on whom wars are fought — the cities bombed, the villages razed, the families displaced — carry psychological wounds across generations. Research on intergenerational trauma has shown that the effects of severe trauma can be transmitted to children and even grandchildren through both psychological modeling and, increasingly, epigenetic mechanisms. The Lebanese, to cite one intimate example, are still navigating the psychological wreckage of a civil war that ended in 1990. Syria will be doing the same for decades to come.

The Nationalism Problem

If you want to understand why wars happen with such depressing regularity, you need to understand nationalism — not the textbook definition, but the lived, visceral experience of it.

Nationalism is, at its core, the belief that your group — defined by language, ethnicity, religion, or some combination thereof — has a special claim on territory, sovereignty, or dignity. It is remarkably effective at motivating people to do things they would otherwise find unthinkable. Young men who would never dream of shooting a stranger will line up to shoot an enemy, once that enemy has been sufficiently categorized as not-us.

The psychologist Jonathan Haidt has written extensively about the role of group identity in moral reasoning, and what he finds is both fascinating and disturbing: when group identity is threatened, people’s capacity for impartial moral reasoning diminishes sharply. They become tribal. They begin to interpret the same action as justified when their side does it and monstrous when the other side does.

This isn’t a weakness unique to uneducated people or populations with particular political leanings. It affects virtually everyone. It’s the water in which we all swim.

The Dehumanization Machinery

Every war requires, as a precondition, a sustained effort to dehumanize the enemy. You cannot get ordinary people to kill other ordinary people without first making the enemy into something other — something threatening, something sub-human, something that has forfeited its claim on moral consideration.

This dehumanization isn’t incidental to war; it’s essential infrastructure. Propaganda posters, political speeches, news coverage, and cultural narratives all do this work with varying degrees of subtlety. And once the machinery is running, it is extraordinarily difficult to shut off. The dehumanization doesn’t stop when the peace treaty is signed — it echoes through decades of mutual suspicion, discrimination, and festering resentment that set the stage for the next conflict.

The Post-War Illusion

Here is perhaps the most persistent myth in the entire discourse around war: that wars end.

They don’t, not really. What ends is the organized military combat phase — the part with the artillery and the airstrikes and the front lines. What comes after — the displacement, the economic collapse, the political vacuum, the revenge killings, the emergence of new armed factions, the generation of children growing up with absent fathers and bombed schools — that doesn’t get a surrender ceremony. It just slowly becomes the next chapter of a story that never quite concludes.

The Middle East is a living case study in post-war illusion. The Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, drawn by British and French diplomats who had limited knowledge of and even more limited concern for the populations they were redrawing borders around, created a set of artificial states that have spent the century since struggling with the contradictions baked into their foundations. The wars we see today in the region are not separate conflicts; they are expressions of an ongoing process of instability set in motion by decisions made over a century ago.

World War I was supposed to be the war to end all wars. It ended in 1918. World War II began in 1939. Make of that what you will.

Is There Hope?

Yes, and it’s important to be honest about that too, because despair is not a useful response to complexity.

The good news — and it is real news, supported by data — is that organized, interstate warfare has become significantly less common since 1945. Steven Pinker’s work in The Better Angels of Our Nature makes the empirical case that, measured in terms of the percentage of the population killed in war, we live in one of the least violent periods in human history. That’s a meaningful fact, and we shouldn’t dismiss it.

International institutions, economic interdependence, nuclear deterrence, and the slow spread of democratic governance have all contributed to making large-scale state-on-state warfare less likely than it was a century ago. These aren’t perfect mechanisms, and they can clearly fail — but they represent real progress.

The challenge is that they can also be dismantled. Institutions erode. Economic ties can be cut. Democratic norms can be undermined. Nuclear weapons remain with us, and the number of states possessing or seeking them continues to grow. Progress is real, but it is not irreversible.

What remains, then, is the most basic of human tasks: staying honest about what war actually is, what it actually costs, and what it actually achieves — so that when the next politician or general or revolutionary promises that this war, unlike all the others, will finally solve the problem, we can ask the question that survivorship bias and nationalism and trauma have always made so difficult to ask: Are you sure? Because we have been here before. And we know how it tends to end.

LET’S GET CRITICAL

There’s a version of the argument you just read that is easy to agree with. War is bad. Trauma is real. Civilians suffer. Nationalism is dangerous. Institutions matter. All of that is true, and all of it is important. But let’s not congratulate ourselves too quickly for nodding along, because there are several things the article either skated past or didn’t say at all — and some of them complicate the picture considerably.

First, let’s talk about the claim that war rarely achieves its objectives. This is true enough as a general statement, but it risks becoming a kind of intellectual comfort food — a position that lets us feel wise without engaging with the hard cases. Because sometimes the alternative to war is not negotiation and flowers; it is genocide. The failure to intervene militarily in Rwanda in 1994 resulted in the deaths of approximately 800,000 people in 100 days. The international community’s repeated hesitation over Bosnia in the early 1990s allowed ethnic cleansing to proceed on European soil for years. These aren’t hypotheticals or edge cases — they are documented historical catastrophes that happened in large part because the international community was committed to the principle of non-intervention.

So when we say war is futile, we need to ask: futile compared to what? Sometimes the counterfactual is worse, and we owe it to intellectual honesty to say so.

Second, the article invokes the concept of intergenerational trauma, which is a real and important phenomenon, but it’s worth noting that the science here is still genuinely contested. Epigenetic transmission of trauma is a fascinating hypothesis with some supporting animal research, but in humans, the evidence is much more complicated and much less established than popular coverage suggests. The psychological transmission of trauma through modeling, family dynamics, and cultural narrative is well-documented. The direct biological transmission through epigenetic mechanisms is far less certain. These are different claims, and conflating them weakens both.

Third, the article cites Steven Pinker’s Better Angels thesis — the idea that violence has been declining on a per-capita basis. It’s worth noting that this thesis has attracted significant academic criticism. Nassim Nicholas Taleb and others have argued that Pinker’s analysis underweights the statistical possibility of rare but catastrophic events, and that the relative peace of the post-1945 era may say more about nuclear deterrence producing a particular kind of unstable equilibrium than about any fundamental shift in human nature or institutional quality. The next large-scale war, if it happens, could be orders of magnitude more destructive than anything in history, precisely because of the weapons available to states today. A declining frequency of war is cold comfort if the variance of outcomes includes civilization-ending events.

Fourth — and this is the one the article most conspicuously avoided — we need to talk about who profits from war. The military-industrial complex is not a conspiracy theory; it is a structural reality of modern economies. Defense contractors, weapons manufacturers, and the financial networks that support them have an institutional interest in the perpetuation of conflict that operates largely independent of any particular political ideology. When a country’s economy becomes significantly dependent on weapons production, the political incentives to maintain demand for those weapons are baked into the system. Eisenhower warned about this in 1961, and the warning has only become more relevant since.

The article’s emphasis on psychology — dehumanization, nationalism, survivorship bias — is valuable, but psychology can inadvertently become a way of personalizing what is fundamentally a structural problem. Individual soldiers don’t start wars. Individual citizens rarely choose them. Wars are typically the products of institutional incentives, resource competition, and elite decision-making that happens at considerable remove from the lived experience of the people who do the dying.

Finally, there’s a tension in the article that’s never fully resolved: if war is futile and the post-war period is just a prelude to the next conflict, what exactly are we supposed to do with that information? The ‘Is There Hope?’ section gestures at international institutions and economic interdependence, but it doesn’t reckon with the fact that these mechanisms have enormous blind spots. Economic interdependence did not prevent World War I — Europe in 1914 was the most economically integrated it had ever been. International institutions have repeatedly failed to stop atrocities.

None of this is to say the central argument is wrong. The futility of war as a first resort, as a tool of political theater, as a mechanism for solving problems that could be addressed through diplomacy or economic engagement — that case is strong. But the hard version of the question isn’t whether we should prefer peace to war in the abstract. It’s: what do you do when the alternative to war is something worse, when the institutions designed to prevent war fail, and when the people making the decision to fight have every structural incentive to do so? That’s the question that keeps the conversation uncomfortable, and staying with that discomfort is more valuable than any clean conclusion.

FANTASTIC GUEST: LEO TOLSTOY

Danny: Welcome, Mr. Tolstoy. This is genuinely surreal, having you here, given that you are, technically speaking, dead.

Tolstoy: I have been dead for over a century. Yet the wars I wrote about are still being fought. So perhaps death is more relative than either of us would like.

Danny: Fair point. You wrote two of the most important works about war ever produced — War and Peace, and then later your essays and your pacifist writings. But let’s start here: you actually fought. You served in the Caucasus and at Sevastopol. What did you see there that changed you?

Tolstoy: I saw young men die for reasons they could not articulate. I saw officers give orders that made no military sense but served their ambitions. I saw what a human body looks like when artillery has finished with it. And I saw something even more disturbing: I saw how quickly a man can stop seeing the enemy as a man. That transition — from human to target — happens so fast it should terrify everyone, but instead it is treated as necessary preparation. It is called patriotism.

Danny: That’s striking, because you were still writing romantic passages about battle at the time. In The Raid, for example, there’s something almost beautiful about the violence.

Tolstoy: I was young and I was honest only about what I saw, not yet about what it meant. That is not a defense, it is an explanation. Youth mistakes excitement for meaning. The truth came later, as truth usually does — too late for the men who died while I was still being excited.

Danny: By the time you wrote the Sevastopol Sketches, the tone had shifted dramatically. You ended the final sketch with one of the most quietly devastating lines in Russian literature.

Tolstoy: That the hero of the story is truth. Yes. I was trying to say: stop. Stop making monuments of this. Stop making it noble. The hero is not the general, not the nation, not the cause. It is what actually happened, which is that many people died in great pain for very little.

Danny: And yet War and Peace, which is partly a meditation on the madness of war, is also a novel of enormous vitality and life. Was that contradiction intentional?

Tolstoy: Life continues alongside the madness. That is the most unbearable thing. While battles are being fought, children are being born. While villages are burning, someone, somewhere, is falling in love. The novel had to hold both because reality holds both. If I had written only the horror, it would have been a pamphlet. It had to be life — full, overwhelming, contradictory life — to be true.

Danny: Let me push back on something. Your later pacifism — particularly in The Kingdom of God Is Within You — is sometimes criticized as naive. Tolstoy says turn the other cheek, don’t resist evil with force, and critics respond: what do you say to someone facing genocide? What do you say to a person whose village is being burned?

Tolstoy: I say that the question is posed correctly but drawn too narrowly. The question is always framed as: once the soldiers are already there and the village is already burning, what do you do? But the real question — the one no one wants to ask — is: how did the soldiers get there? There is an entire chain of decisions, incentives, propaganda, and institutional failures that precede every burning village. My argument was not passive acceptance of evil. It was a refusal to participate in the chain that produces the soldiers in the first place. If enough people refused, at every stage, the chain would break.

Danny: Critics would say that’s precisely the kind of argument that sounds beautiful in a study and fails in a trench.

Tolstoy: Every moral principle sounds beautiful in a study. The question is whether it is true. I was not saying it was easy. I was saying it was the only path that did not lead, eventually, back to the same place. Every war that ends in victory contains the seeds of the next war, because victory is not resolution — it is postponement. The defeated do not disappear; they remember.

Danny: That’s almost prophetic, given what followed the Treaty of Versailles.

Tolstoy: I died in 1910. I did not live to see it. But I had seen enough to know how the story goes. You humiliate a people, you impose conditions they cannot meet, you build your peace on their ruin — and then you are surprised when they are angry. You should not be surprised. You built the anger.

Danny: Let me ask you about something the article raised: the idea that war persists partly because of who profits from it. The military-industrial complex, as Eisenhower later called it. As someone who came from the Russian aristocracy and was deeply conscious of class, did you see that structural dimension clearly?

Tolstoy: I saw it. The people who decide to go to war are almost never the people who die in wars. This was as true in Napoleon’s time as it is now. The nobility decided; the peasants died. The politicians vote; the soldiers fight. The arms manufacturers profit; the widows grieve. This is not an accident or a failure of the system — it is the system functioning as designed. As long as the people who benefit from war are not the people who pay for it with their lives, there is no internal mechanism that makes war stop.

Danny: That’s a pretty bleak analysis.

Tolstoy: I was not known for cheerfulness. But bleak and false are different things.

Danny: Fair enough. You converted to a radical form of Christian anarchism later in life, which alienated you from virtually every institution — the church, the state, the intelligentsia. Did you regret the isolation?

Tolstoy: I regretted the arrogance of my youth, which was considerable. I regretted the harm I caused to my family through my contradictions — preaching simplicity while living in a manor house, preaching non-attachment while fighting bitterly with my wife over my manuscripts. I was not a consistent man. I was a man trying, very late and very badly, to align what he believed with how he lived. That is not nothing. It is also not nearly enough.

Danny: One last question. We are, as I speak to you, in a world with nuclear weapons, ongoing conflicts on multiple continents, and a resurgence of authoritarian nationalism in many countries. If you were writing now — what would you write?

Tolstoy: I would write about ordinary people making ordinary choices that add up to catastrophe. I would write about the bureaucrat who signs the form that moves the weapons. The journalist who uses the word ‘collateral’ instead of the word ‘child.’ The politician who discovers that a small war is very useful before an election. I would write about them without making them into monsters, because that is the harder and more necessary thing. The monsters are easy to condemn. The ordinary men — the ones who are not evil, just obedient, just ambitious, just afraid — they are who you need to understand.

Danny: That’s a much more disturbing project than writing about Napoleon.

Tolstoy: Napoleon was an exception. The men who enable wars are not. That is the problem.

Danny: Mr. Tolstoy, it has been genuinely extraordinary. Thank you for coming back, even temporarily.

Tolstoy: I did not have much choice. The wars kept going without me. At some point, one must say something.