Markets do not come close to fully pricing the costs of war, so how can they serve as the sole barometer of whether a war was a good idea? As for the timeline heuristic, I am not even sure how to engage with it, because it is completely arbitrary. Either it can be trivially gamed by choosing favorable cutoff points, or it creates a false sense of precision that is really just luck.
More broadly, I think you are modeling foreign policy like a speculative trade: if markets rally quickly, then the bet was justified. But high-risk gambles do not become responsible merely because they might pay off. Invading Iran carried meaningful risks:
- turning a country of roughly 100 million people with weapons-grade uranium into a failed state
- knocking out enough oil supply to trigger a global recession and stagflation
- pushing parts of the regime to sprint for a nuclear weapon
- dragging the United States into a multidecade quagmire with boots on the ground to secure the Strait of Hormuz.
I reject any framework that ignores tail risk. Prudent judgment has to account for catastrophic downside scenarios and ask whether imposing those risks on billions of unwilling people was ever justified.
And to make this concrete, the people in charge of this war seem to have been operating on a version of underpants-gnome theory for foreign policy:
1. Kill a couple of regime leaders.
2. ???
3. Iranian society overthrows the regime and replaces it with a government congenial to U.S. and Israeli interests.
No one in the administration with real power seems to have seriously considered what would happen if the regime did not promptly collapse, or how it would respond when faced with an existential threat. Closing the Strait of Hormuz was the obvious response, yet they apparently did not treat it as a realistic possibility.
Everyone, including the Iranians, understands what happens to the global economy if the strait is not reopened within weeks. That is why Iran is attacking its neighbors’ energy infrastructure. So what is Trump supposed to do now: launch a massive ground invasion of a country with 100 million people, continue aimless aerial bombing, or pull a TACO? These are not 11-dimensional chess masters. They seem to think war is a video game where you win by killing the final boss. But the boss is dead, the game did not end, and now they are spinning their wheels, looking for an exit while trying to save face.
Your conclusion that the stock market correction, after liberation day, proves that protectionism is stupid is flawed. The tariffs were never about protecting USA industry, despite what was claimed. The way the tariff rates were calculated was ridiculous, and investors were rightly appalled at the gross incompetence shown.
Constantine converted in 312. The fall of the Western empire wasn’t until 476 and consisted of an invasion of barbarians after a big civil war. And the West started to take off again by the year 1000. Plus, we have a control in the Eastern empire, which maintained a high Christian civilization until the 1400s.
I like this. Your short-termism sounds plausible, as does your metric. At the same time, my kind wife (who dislikes your essay) points out that you entirely ignore morality. My take is that short-term consequentialism is a useful metric, but so is morality, because actually we have no f-ing idea what the long-term effects of a major international action might be, and morality at least provides guidance, aside from whether it happens to correctly predict the future.
I agree with this, quite strongly in fact, with just one caveat which is economic policy which almost always _should_ to be judged on more complex and often delayed second order effects, largely irrespective of the immediate effect.
Eg one could increase the minimum wage and this could have the immediate effect of raising wages at the bottom of the distribution with minimal other apparent costs such as loss of jobs, but two years later we can clearly see evidence that this actually cost lots of jobs and lowered total income at the bottom of the distribution.
Markets do not come close to fully pricing the costs of war, so how can they serve as the sole barometer of whether a war was a good idea? As for the timeline heuristic, I am not even sure how to engage with it, because it is completely arbitrary. Either it can be trivially gamed by choosing favorable cutoff points, or it creates a false sense of precision that is really just luck.
More broadly, I think you are modeling foreign policy like a speculative trade: if markets rally quickly, then the bet was justified. But high-risk gambles do not become responsible merely because they might pay off. Invading Iran carried meaningful risks:
- turning a country of roughly 100 million people with weapons-grade uranium into a failed state
- knocking out enough oil supply to trigger a global recession and stagflation
- pushing parts of the regime to sprint for a nuclear weapon
- dragging the United States into a multidecade quagmire with boots on the ground to secure the Strait of Hormuz.
I reject any framework that ignores tail risk. Prudent judgment has to account for catastrophic downside scenarios and ask whether imposing those risks on billions of unwilling people was ever justified.
And to make this concrete, the people in charge of this war seem to have been operating on a version of underpants-gnome theory for foreign policy:
1. Kill a couple of regime leaders.
2. ???
3. Iranian society overthrows the regime and replaces it with a government congenial to U.S. and Israeli interests.
No one in the administration with real power seems to have seriously considered what would happen if the regime did not promptly collapse, or how it would respond when faced with an existential threat. Closing the Strait of Hormuz was the obvious response, yet they apparently did not treat it as a realistic possibility.
Everyone, including the Iranians, understands what happens to the global economy if the strait is not reopened within weeks. That is why Iran is attacking its neighbors’ energy infrastructure. So what is Trump supposed to do now: launch a massive ground invasion of a country with 100 million people, continue aimless aerial bombing, or pull a TACO? These are not 11-dimensional chess masters. They seem to think war is a video game where you win by killing the final boss. But the boss is dead, the game did not end, and now they are spinning their wheels, looking for an exit while trying to save face.
Your conclusion that the stock market correction, after liberation day, proves that protectionism is stupid is flawed. The tariffs were never about protecting USA industry, despite what was claimed. The way the tariff rates were calculated was ridiculous, and investors were rightly appalled at the gross incompetence shown.
Constantine converted in 312. The fall of the Western empire wasn’t until 476 and consisted of an invasion of barbarians after a big civil war. And the West started to take off again by the year 1000. Plus, we have a control in the Eastern empire, which maintained a high Christian civilization until the 1400s.
As a Euro-Asianist and Islam hater I would put a large premium on Iran's freedom and also the side benefit of a number destroyed Arab economies.
I like this. Your short-termism sounds plausible, as does your metric. At the same time, my kind wife (who dislikes your essay) points out that you entirely ignore morality. My take is that short-term consequentialism is a useful metric, but so is morality, because actually we have no f-ing idea what the long-term effects of a major international action might be, and morality at least provides guidance, aside from whether it happens to correctly predict the future.
I agree with this, quite strongly in fact, with just one caveat which is economic policy which almost always _should_ to be judged on more complex and often delayed second order effects, largely irrespective of the immediate effect.
Eg one could increase the minimum wage and this could have the immediate effect of raising wages at the bottom of the distribution with minimal other apparent costs such as loss of jobs, but two years later we can clearly see evidence that this actually cost lots of jobs and lowered total income at the bottom of the distribution.