THE PEACE of the world is being broken by dunderheads. At every turn economies are being wrecked and lives ended by wars of choice and policy blunders. Strikingly often, these actions were ordered up by rulers and regimes blind not just to common sense and decency, but to their own people's long-term interests.
Think of Vladimir Putin's war to erase Ukraine as a sovereign state: a trumped-up conflict that Russian generals promised would end in a few days, now in its fifth, blood-drenched year. Contemplate the horrors of Gaza, and the cruel bet made by leaders of Hamas on October 7th 2023. Their gambit was that co-ordinated acts of savagery would provoke a wounded Israel into overreaching. In their fanaticism, Hamas leaders and militants did not care that Palestinians would pay the heaviest price. In response, Binyamin Netanyahu's government has pursued a surely doomed war aim: the complete pacification of Gaza and its people through siege and the pitiless application of armed force. To date, Gaza is not at peace, and Israel's global standing has collapsed.
The catalogue of errors continues with Iran's Islamic regime. However the war in the Gulf ends, surviving members of that grim theocracy have learned that assembling almost all elements needed for a nuclear bomb, without building a device to deter an attack, was not the foolproof strategy they supposed.
Then comes President Donald Trump. His threats to grab Greenland, and his alienation of frustrating-but-useful allies from the Americas to Asia and Europe, have already earned him an entry in the annals of self-harm. Now he has launched a war in the Gulf. If sceptics are correct, and America and Israel fail to bomb and blockade a more biddable Iran into existence, but instead leave an angry Iran controlling the Strait of Hormuz while provoking an every-country-for-itself arms race in the Middle East, Mr Trump's self-inflicted mistakes will need a chapter to themselves.
The wickedness of the world is not news. Its current capacity for foolishness is a shock. After 80 years without a direct, all-out conflict between great powers, a dismaying number of leaders seem to be spoiling for a fight, national interests be damned. Seeking a long view, this columnist turned to a historian specialising in bad government, the late Barbara Tuchman. Published in 1984, her book "The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam" considers self-destructive decisions from ancient times to the Nixon era.
Some catastrophes can be blamed on an individual. For instance the 16th-century Aztec emperor Montezuma, ruler of fierce armies and a city of 300,000 people, passively succumbed to a few hundred Spanish soldiers, even after his advisers and family members realised the invaders were sweaty, gold-hungry, human invaders, and not avenging gods as Montezuma feared.
In contrast, 18th-century Britain's rulers share collective blame for losing the American colonies. In Tuchman's telling, George III and his ministers "made rebels" of Americans, with relations deteriorating over many years. The causes: British snobbery, arrogance and ignorance of new-world realities. This was seen as folly at the time, with British opposition politicians noting that America was worth far more to its mother country than any taxes that could conceivably be collected there, while war with America would be ruinous. Alas, the gouty earls and dukes who ran Britain were scornful, comparing colonial subjects to children who "ought to be dutiful". The Earl of Sandwich, a better inventor of snack-foods than he was a statesman, assured the House of Lords that Americans would not fight, being "raw undisciplined cowardly men".
Historians can learn little from foolish individual rulers, Tuchman suggests. Their mistakes are too numerous and too influenced by their personalities and beliefs to be useful subjects for study. Her interest is in self-harming acts performed by a ruling class or group, and that "persist beyond any one political lifetime". Single chumps can do a lot of damage, but for really world-changing catastrophes, "persistence in error" is key. The uselessness of many 18th-century British governments was "a folly of the system". America's Vietnam war ensnared three successive presidents.
Tuchman is on to something. Jumping to the present day, it matters greatly whether the political views of Mr Putin, Mr Netanyahu and Iran's new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, are larger than they are, and so might outlast their departure from office. Then there is Mr Trump. If his quirks are his alone, then his influence should fade after his presidency. Against that, his follies are enabled by a much larger group of elected Republicans and voters. Are his mistakes systemic? Here, Tuchman is not comforting when she notes one more category of misgovernment: the incompetence often seen when an empire is sliding into decadence.
Et tu, Kash Patel? America's founding fathers brooded about the decline of the Roman republic into a corrupt and brutal empire. They feared such tyrannical emperors as Caligula, who renamed temples in his honour, had golden statues of himself erected, and revelled in humiliating Rome's former elites, including the cowardly senators who handed him supreme powers. Many ordinary Romans loved Caligula as a showman who built marble monuments, organised military parades and relished attending gladiatorial contests, the gorier the better. To show his contempt for the ruling classes, Caligula threatened to make his horse a consul.
Mr Trump, a fan of golden statues, marble monuments and cage-fighting, has yet to appoint a horse to his cabinet. He has, however, appointed unqualified sycophants to positions of high rank, where they vie to show their loyalty while squabbling over trivial perks of office. Americans can only hope that their follies are personal to the Trump era, and can be reversed by an election or two. Enabling decadence would be a far harder error to fix. ■