#clausewitz

[miraclehoneysoup250]

i know my edit skills is dogshit

[macwantspeace]

A long read here. Clausewitz “On War” 1830. Johnson mired 1964. trump steered by Netanyahu 2026. Ego and politics.

“History’s traps don’t care how world leaders walk into them. Once they’re inside, all that matters is how things rather predictably will go.”

Jay Kuo

The Trap Always Closes

Donald Trump, Lyndon Johnson, and wars we can’t win

History’s traps don’t care how world leaders walk into them. Once they’re inside, all that matters is how things rather predictably will go.

Donald Trump now finds himself in a trap that has ensnared other presidents, most similarly Lyndon Johnson. And recent events in the war in Iran, now in its third week, illuminate how steely that trap can be.

On Wednesday night, Israel struck the South Pars gas field—the world’s largest natural gas reserve, shared between Iran and Qatar. Experts have long warned a move such as this would trigger a predictable chain reaction: Iran retaliated with missile strikes on Qatar’s Ras Laffan LNG terminal, causing extensive damage, and is threatening further strikes across Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Global energy markets lurched. Oil spiked above $118 a barrel. Gulf allies that had quietly tolerated the war are now furious.

Trump took to Truth Social to insist the U.S. “knew nothing about this particular attack,” seemingly distancing himself from our erstwhile ally. He described Israel as having “violently lashed out” and attacked South Pars “out of anger.” But both U.S. and Israeli officials subsequently confirmed that Trump had known about and approved the strike.

That same day, a new front in the political war at home opened. Trump’s former counterterrorism chief, Joe Kent, sat down with fellow right-wing extremist Tucker Carlson for an interview. In it, Kent confirmed that Trump knew Iran posed no imminent threat, key advisers had been shut out, and Israel drove the decision to launch the war.

Three weeks into “Operation Epic Fury,” the war has already escaped Trump’s imagined boundaries. To understand how we got here—and why an easy exit looks increasingly unlikely— it helps to revisit the story of a Prussian general, Carl von Clausewitz, who warned about this two centuries ago. And then to go a step beyond him, into territory he couldn’t have anticipated.

[memoriesofthingspast]

🌊🎠✨

[periaptgames]

"New Year's Eve is the continuation of Christmas by other means" - Santa Clausewitz

[nonevahed]

[cedyat]

[quotes-by-dilanka]

The decisive point of the battlefield is the point which is always to be aimed at before all and as far as possible with the mass of the forces.

—Carl Von Clausewitz

[blackswaneuroparedux]

War is a ritual, a deadly ritual, not the result of aggressive self-assertion, but of self-transcending identification. Without loyalty to tribe, church, flag or ideal, there would be no wars.

- Arthur Koestler

I’m not sure I completely agree with Koestler because there’s also something innate within us that is twisted for selfish power and dominance (our original sin), but he has a point. Few would argue that the rituals used to wage war change with the times, but students of Clausewitz are skeptical about supposed changes in what we believe to be war’s enduring nature. According to the Prussian, war’s nature does not change - only its character. The way we use these words today can seem to render such a distinction meaningless, but careful attention to semantics can reveal real problems in how we think about war, society, and the future.

The nature of war describes its unchanging essence: that is, those things that differentiate war (as a type of phenomenon) from other things. War’s nature is violent, interactive, and fundamentally political. Absent any of these elements, what you’re talking about is not war but something else.

The character of war describes the changing way that war as a phenomenon manifests in the real world. As war is a political act that takes place in and among societies, its specific character will be shaped by the politics and culture of those societies - by what Clausewitz called the “spirit of the age.”

War’s conduct is undoubtedly influenced by technology, law, ethics, culture, methods of social, political, and military organisation, and other factors that change across time and place.