Ever since the publication, in 1984, of Barbara W. Tuchman’s The March of Folly, I have associated the decision to go to war with the word and concept of “folly.” In her book, Tuchman examined several cases, beginning with the Trojans’ famous decision to move the Greeks’ warrior-filled wooden horse into their city and ending with the US decision to intervene in Vietnam, to show how those who make military decisions often do so in ways that run contrary to their own and their country’s fundamental interests. For anyone who came of age during the Vietnam War era, as I did, this folly has proved to be an inescapable lesson of history, one that continues to be taught to this day: From the Gulf War of 1990–91 to the 2001 intervention in Afghanistan and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, wars inevitably result from errors of judgment.
Two new books offer us close studies of this march of folly. The first, Margaret MacMillan’s War: How Conflict Shaped Us, covers the entire span of human history; the second, Martin Sherwin’s Gambling with Armageddon, takes a microscopic slice of that timespan, the famous “thirteen days” of the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, and reveals how close we came to nuclear annihilation. Both, however, wrestle with the same
— source thenation.com | TwitterMichael T. Klare | Jul 19, 2021