If the world was controlled by a secret group of people who plan and plot behind the scenes how events unfold, it would be too easy. All we’d have to do is find out who these people are and get rid of them. Unfortunately, it is not that simple.
The Iran war is a good example that this is not the case, despite what some would want us to believe. The fact that the U.S. initiated this war without a clear achievable goal, without a plan for contingencies or an exit strategy, only adds to the conjecture. Some even argue that this is actually the point—not an actual objective, but chaos.
However, given the global effects of this war and its significance, there might not be a single motive. Which, in turn, begs the question:
“What does all this mean? Why did it happen? What made those people burn houses and slay their fellow men? What were the causes of these events? What force made men act so? These are the instinctive, plain, and most legitimate questions humanity asks itself when it encounters the monuments and tradition of that period.”
Those are Tolstoy’s words in the second epilogue of his masterpiece War and Peace. Throughout the novel, Tolstoy shows the myriad of decisions and events that contribute to these circumstances and how they affect individuals and society at large. In the second epilogue, he makes that theory explicit.
Since we rejected God and His decree over the world, we have failed to sufficiently account for the force that moves peoples and nations to act, Tolstoy posits. Speaking of Napoleon, he states:
“He had the power, and so what he ordered was done. This reply is quite satisfactory if we believe that the power was given to him by God. But as soon as we do not admit that, it becomes essential to determine what this power of one man over others is.”
Tolstoy argues for historical necessity. There is no single will that moves events, but rather the confluence of thousands of small decisions taken by countless people, some known and some unknown, as well as colliding circumstances.
It would be futile, Tolstoy would argue, to attribute the war on Iran to Trump’s haughtiness, Netanyahu’s ambition, or Iranian stubbornness. It would be equally insufficient to attribute it only to oil, dollar dominance, or a planned multipolar transition—though all of these factors count.
Tolstoy was not alone in this approach. Marx, Durkheim, and Foucault would have agreed with some of his arguments. Nor was he arguing that individuals are not relevant. He was asking a more essential question: what drives millions of individuals, from the general to the foot soldier, to act in accord?
“In each action we examine, we see a certain measure of freedom and a certain measure of necessity,” he writes. “The degree of our conception of freedom or inevitability depends in this respect on the greater or lesser lapse of time between the performance of the action and our judgment of it.”
When we are in close proximity to the events happening, we see more clearly the individual decision and its freedom—perceived or real. Trump can stop the war, as he initiated it. But as time passes, we might begin to discern all the elements that at first were confusing and that seem to inexorably precipitate it. Maybe Trump did not have much of a choice; there were other forces pushing for it too—for example, Israel.
However, we can also recognize previous patterns that help contextualize the current event. If we consider the Russian foreign minister’s words that the U.S. is after energy dominance, then this war fits into a wider pattern. Similarly, if we consider Netanyahu’s words that Israel is fighting a war of survival—or expansion.
Part of this wider pattern emerges if we understand the U.S. as an empire, which previous examples have shown to have a cyclical nature. Even if we are to accept that history is progressive in a linear manner, we would have to recognize that social entities, such as empires, have a lifespan. The U.S., when viewed in the light of other empires, seems to have passed its apex.
The idea of history as a progressive, linear process is itself a particular framing. The Hindus maintain that we are in the midst of the fourth and last Yuga cycle, the Kali Yuga. Some say that we are at the end of this cycle. For them, the characteristics of the Kali Yuga are constant strife and the loss of virtue. To them, our world shows exactly that. After that, a new Yuga cycle begins.
Abrahamic religions share an understanding—though with notable theological differences—about eschatology. The world is moving towards a certain succession of events—the coming of the Antichrist and the savior—which will precede the end of times.
One might judge any of those conceptions of history as wrong or fantastical, but they have a real bearing on the current conflict. Netanyahu—whom some Jews believe to be the last prime minister of Israel before the coming of the Messiah—has just declared that Israel has to become “feared and revered.”
Russian thinker Alexandre Dugin interprets this in the Jewish tradition as inverting the archetype of the Messiah Ben Yosef, a suffering messiah who sacrifices himself, for Ben David, the triumphant messiah who establishes the kingdom of God on earth.
Many of the evangelical Christians who support Israel and pray for Trump share that story. Those who align with dispensationalist end-times theology believe a Third Temple must be built where the Al-Aqsa Mosque stands to fulfill prophecy. This event is viewed as a necessary precursor to the return of Jesus.
It’s difficult to dismiss the influence of this on the war when a group of evangelical pastors, led by Paula White-Cain, White House faith advisor, and other members of the Faith Office, have prayed for Trump and the U.S. to succeed in this war. Pete Hegseth, the self-designated Secretary of War, has also made explicit remarks about the religious nature of this war, and the U.S. military has framed it as “all part of God’s divine plan.”
Some of these Christian nationalists also defend the “great replacement theory,” which claims that globalist actors are intentionally diluting the cultural and political status of white populations through shifts in demographics and immigration policy. They see this and other wars as a way of reestablishing Western—white—dominance.
Peter Thiel and other technologists also espouse part of these theories, although with significant variations. They defend what is known as accelerationism: the pushing forward of capitalism, technological change, and social disruption in order to unchain technology and usher in a new era. Not coincidentally, Thiel has been speaking of the Antichrist.
This perspective would fit the Iran war as a necessary step in a planned transition towards a multipolar, surveillance- and CBDC-denominated world—a world to which we seem inexorably led by Western and non-Western elites. European leaders, the bastion of social welfare, liberalism, and secularism, are also pressing to accelerate its implementation.
It would be incorrect to restrict this view to the West alone, as most developed nations, including China and Russia, function within a similar social pattern of state structure, financial economy through banks, and surveillance. We seem to have accepted that this is the only possible form of social life, all in the name of continual material progress. But what are we progressing toward, and to what end?
That question seems difficult to answer—but perhaps necessary if we want to find some sense in so much war and destruction driven by control over energy and resources, nationalism and ethno-nationalism, surveillance, and technology.
Perhaps there is none.
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I would argue the primary motivator is fear and there are no bigger cowards, quivering masses of paranoia and jumping at shadows and every little noise and “the whole world is out to get us” mentality, than a certain two countries.
It’s also a pride issue – those who have material wealth view those who don’t as wanting their wealth, so build ramparts, castles, fortifications, moats, and plot and scheme to destroy all others to protect the wealth. Not realizing, of course, that those without the wealth are vastly richer, just not in the way the materially wealthy can even see.
Nature is full of violence. If you assume we are part of that then wars, “sensible” or not, are not surprising at all.
And all that violence does eventually yield change as certain species such as our own come to dominate over others. The real question is whether ours can evolve fast enough to save us from ourselves. Maybe we too have outlived our ecological niche and are moving in the other direction. Certainly the retro portion of our ilk–Trump, Netanyahu–are not helping.
Nature is full of cooperation, too. Every multi-celled creature depends on it.
Perhaps realists like Hans Morgenthau were right when it comes down to basic human behavior; that all humans crave power, and want to have power for its own sake, and that everything that we do and do not do is governed by people trying to achieve power in any way that they can, and often in ways that we might not be consciously aware of. I think it all stems from the fact that we are descendants of the great apes, which are very territorial and hierarchical creatures, and their hierarchies are often brutally enforced by violence. It would be both naive and optimistic to think that this has not played a role in the evolution of human behavior as a species. While everybody likes to point to the bonobo as an example of the path humanity can take, the bonobo diverged from the chimpanzee after the speciation of humans from their common great ape ancestor with the chimpanzee. I think a lot of our own aggressive and hierarchical tendencies are similarly hard-coded into our brains by evolution.
Throughout history, human societies and nations have always been dominated by those who are drawn to power and are effective at wielding it and keeping it from others. I differ from neorealists like Mearshimer, and am closer to classical realists like Morgenthau in the sense that when leaders do this, they are not necessarily rational in thinking about what will benefit their nations in terms of international power, but most leaders think of their own personal power and ambitions first and foremost, and any logical calculus they might make on behalf of their nation is a distant second.
I am not at all sanguine about my opinions of the above, so much as a realization that this sort of thing is the way that it has always been. I hope that while it might be a bitter pill to swallow, we can use this to understand just how much our minds have been shaped by primate behavioural patterns of lethal-raiding and power-seeking and a possible way to short-circuit it with what we have to work with.
Seems like Nature of some more than others!
People start wars for multiple reasons. In this case —
1. The seizure of Iranian assets and the imposition of the Peacock Throne did not take. Western oil companies and intelligence agencies were thwarted.
2. After Carter invited the Shah to the US for cancer treatments, the Iranians raided the US embassy and took hostages. Huge blow to US prestige.
3. Failure of the “hostage rescue” mission. Huge blow to US military prestige.
4. US/Israeli plan to wreck “seven countries in seven years.” Seemingly successful in Iraq, Libya, Syria. Only Iran remains. Mission creep demands a final victory.
5. Distraction from shocking economic decline & corruption in the west.
6. Distraction from the Epstein scandal.
7. Existence of the “UniParty”. Whether it’s Dem or Repug, Tory or Labour, they are all beholden to the Zionist lobby, and they all want war.
8. Mainstream media entirely subservient to said lobby, creating agnotology in the west.
Plenty of reasons! Here’s another one, from Vietnam days:
9. War is good business. Invest your son.
How Trump’s Plot to Grab Iran’s Nuclear Fuel Would Actually Work
Experts say that an American ground operation targeting nuclear sites in Iran would be incredibly complicated, put troops’ lives at great risk—and might still fail.
https://www.wired.com/story/us-iran-war-nuclear-extraction-ground-operation/
Why so many headlines that signal these terrible schemes are plausible
The delusion, “…it will be different this time.” permeates history.
Thank you, excellent comment. The grotesque incompetence and venal corruption in Western political Elites has been largely under the radar (valiant efforts of NC one of the exceptions).
When all the “Mistakes” go in the same direction, are they really “Mistakes”?
Qui Bono…
I was going down a wikipedia rabbit hole earlier today and stumbled upon an article on the Age of Aquarius, which I recall being big in popular culture before the turn of the century. One paragraph, in particular, stood out. From wikipedia:
Which leads us back to the opening of this article, and I’m sure it’s a sentiment almost every reader of this site shares. We are ruled by a greedy, depraved ruling class. Some might say it’s the system that requires our elites to act this way but the system is made in their image. If you have to do despicable things in order to get to the top then it follows that those at the top have done despicable things. Seeing our elites’ reaction to the holocaust in Gaza should have made this obvious to all of us but we still don’t want to believe that we are ruled by monsters. It’s easier to think they are like us. We are deceived because we want to be deceived.
The Epstein files made me re-evaluate many things. The Podesta emails. Pizzagate. Wienergate. I have come to the terrifying conclusion that the darkest, most unhinged conspiracy theories were correct. We’re not likely to get an investigation, much less a confession, but if it quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, swims like a duck and flies like a duck, sooner or later we have to conclude that it’s a duck.
There are hundreds of thousands of missing children in the world. What do we think happened to them? It’s nice to think that they’re living off-record under an adopted name, or something, but we prefer not to think about what is most likely. Everyone who investigates the connection between adrenochrome harvesting and human trafficking somehow ends up dead. That is in itself evidence.
And all discussion about the role of eschatology misses the role of perhaps the most consequential cult in this, not because of the number of its members, but in terms of their influence. I refer to the luciferians, who infest the halls of western power. You may know them as Skull and Bones, Bohemian Grove, or by another name, but they’re basically all spin offs of freemasonry, which starts off as a monotheistic Deist brotherhood for new initiates but unveils itself as a satanic pedo cult in pursuit of power and immortality as they rise in its ranks. Reports of child sacrifice are too plenty to ignore.
These organisations trace themselves back to Hiram Abiff, the architect of Solomon’s Temple, which was of course a place of sacrifice, and have temples of their own. They too want to rebuild the temple to usher in their own god. For many of them, the Bushes for example, Evangelicism is a less-crazy front for their real beliefs. Trump doesn’t even pretend.
And, no, I don’t think that getting rid of this ancient, satanic death cult will be easy.
“…in the Aquarian age by a world ruled by secretive, power-hungry elites…” i remember the song, then came disco!
For most of its history, the U.S. has been the sole major power on two isolated continents. Short of nuclear war there hasn’t been a real threat to our national existence since (I would argue) the War of 1812, or (maybe) the Civil War. Nor is there some great geopolitical fact that determines our foreign policy for decades or centuries. This means that what the U.S. does in the world is not usually the result of some grand strategy, but mainly of the goofy notions of whoever has political power at the moment. And those can be (literally) all over the map.
Not so sure about 1812.
British elites had given up on the idea of reconquest (as they pretty much had done even before the end of the Independence War). Britain was instead engaged in the Napoleonic Wars which were seen as a fight for national survival. The only major army (to paraphrase Wellesley) was heavily engaged in Spain / Portugal and the last thing the empire sought was a two front war.
Even the attack on Washington was a small scale raid by a relatively tiny force with no intention or ability to occupy the US. The 1812 War was though an existential threat for Canada as a component of the British Empire. Some historians claim that the war was a US war of aggression to take Canada. That threat ( if the claim is true ) was thwarted.
Of course, as with all wars both sides made other claims such as the immorality of the British seizing US sailors. Just as today, I am sure the US government of the time was only focused on morality and nothing else, LOL. Not that Britain was / is any better either.
You forgot one very important element: the real losers in the War of 1812, like the Seven Years War before it — known in North America as the “French and Indian War” — were the First Nations.
Thank you for your thoughtful post! The religious aspects do seem to be very relevant in this conflict, which some call the Ramadan War. For example, the Israelis claim there were at least two Iranian missile attacks targeting religious sites in Jerusalem, including the Al-Aqsa Mosque, on March 12 and March 16.
https://www.news18.com/explainers/why-iranian-strike-on-israels-western-wall-could-shatter-stability-across-islamic-world-ws-kl-9959005.html
https://israel365news.com/416868/holy-sites-in-jerusalem-targeted-by-iranian-cluster-munitions-israel-condemns-attack/
Yet a police statement in the second article seems to contradict this claim:
“Police reported that “fragments of missiles and interceptor debris, some of significant size,” were found across multiple sites, including the Temple Mount complex and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.”
The headline of a Hindustan Times article also questions this narrative of Iran targeting religious sites, and provides this alternate explanation, again sourced from an Israeli police statement:
“The incident unfolded after a shrapnel from ballistic missiles fired by Iran and debris from the Israeli interceptors that shot them down fell around Jerusalem’s Old City on Monday, AFP cited Israeli police as saying.”
https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/al-aqsa-mosque-hit-in-iran-strikes-israel-shares-image-as-missile-shrapnel-falls-in-jerusalem-101773692703610.html
But this didn’t stop Bloomberg from promoting and escalating the Israeli narrative, at least judging by the headline–since the article is behind a paywall: “Why Iran’s Jerusalem Strikes Risk Sparking a Broader Religious Conflict”.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-24/why-iran-strikes-near-al-aqsa-jerusalem-holy-sites-risk-wider-conflict
But why would Iran target one of the three holiest sites of Islam? And why would they strike civilian targets when they seem to have been careful to avoid such targets– even while the US DoD admitted that 90% of the 9,000 US strikes have been on civilian targets?
Here is the non-paywalled archive version of that article: https://archive.is/VxLEp
See the section “Why is the Temple Mount a Flashpoint?”
Sir: Bless you and thank you for this humane, well-informed, and thoughtful commentary. Sincerely, Stephen Moran
40-odd years ago my criminal law professor introduced the Defense of Insanity: “When you talk to God that’s good, you’re praying. When God starts talking to you, you’re crazy!”
Religious superstition has always been manipulated by elites to justify their greed. It has ever been thus, as the parable of the first murderer Cain and his victim and brother Abel reminds us. Genesis 4:1–18; Holy Quran 5:27-31
These pious murderers have given themselves dispensation to merrily break every commandment on the tablets in service of their voracious lust for personal gratification. So much for their phony religious war.
The Israelis have closed Al Aqsa and the July Sepulchre to worship, even by the priests without congregation. This is unprecedented.
Tinfoil hats think the Israelis plan to blow them up, as the next step to retaking the Old City and perhaps rebuilding the Temple….
In the excellent French movie, The Farewell Affair (L’Affaire Farewell), it was shown how USSR used sexual blackmail to obtain virtually every American secret, including the nuclear codes. Between the Lake Michigan FBI report released in the January Epstein Files (rape and infanticide), the more recent Epstein Files report of him assaulting a 13 year old, and the Millions of files they refuse to release, it seems screamingly obvious that Trump is blackmailed by whoever controlled Epstein. He’s ordered to start a war with Iran and simultaneously destroy the global economy, setting the stage for mass hunger. CBDC and its mandatory Digital ID will be their solution. This war is setting the stage for their evil Great Reset and probably the David Webb coined, Great Taking.
The great taking by David Rogers Webb
https://dokumen.pub/the-great-taking-by-david-rogers-webb-2020220202-1022688407.html
David Webb argues that revisions to UCC Article 8, adopted by all 50 states since 1994, have fundamentally shifted ownership rights of stocks and bonds.
From Ownership to Contract: Investors no longer directly own their securities; they own a “security entitlement”—a contractual claim against their broker.
The “Securities Intermediary”: Your securities are held in “street name” by a broker, who holds them with a custodian (e.g., DTC), who often holds them with a major clearing bank.
“The Great Taking”: Webb asserts that in a financial crisis, these intermediaries can pledge customer securities as collateral for their own financing. In a bankruptcy, the creditors of the intermediary (the “Too Big to Fail” banks) have legal priority over the customers, meaning individual investors become unsecured creditors and could lose their assets.
Curro Jiminez, thank you for your reflections. Tolstoy, in War and Peace, has Kutozov crying and confident that he delivered to the beast a mortal wound at Borodino. Kutozov, then, through his vast military experience seemed in this novel to encompass all of Tolstoy’s thinking on the causes and effects of the great movements of men and women we call war.
Transposed to today, he had his finger on the eschatological impulse of some, the material interests of others, and the social needs for which armies stand in. But he was writing about history. I am an admirer of Tolstoy’s historical thinking in that novel, but he had originally intended to write something more current, and some motivation kept pushing him back in time until he came to his ancestor’s war. In today’s terms, politically, his is close to the school of ‘biased pluralism’, of competing interests, and the confluence of chances.
For the lessons to be drawn today from Tolstoy’s work, for my part I would advocate the chapters in which Prince Bolkonski experiences near-death on the field; the one in which Napoleon appears, small, and surrounded by sycophants; and where Prince Bezhukov hears the story of his fellow prisoner.
68% of the universe is made up of dark repulsive energy.
From the physicist materialist pov, that’s the tangential representation of evil.
The forces of good (the remaining 32%) are in the minority.
Hence, the domination, for the most part, of destructive and repulsive schemes or events.
The title of this piece, “The War on Iran Cannot Be Explained by Material Interests Alone” led me to believe that you would take us beyond the idea that oil (I do not buy the idea that uranium matters all that much), is an insufficient explanation. And yet you do not mention oil at all, beyond a passing reference to the idea of “energy dominance”! Here is my attempt at an explanation:
The US’s power in the world economy was built on the role that the dollar came to play throughout the planet, following WWII. The dollar, backed by US military might and having no real rival, arrived at a point at which it became the world’s reserve currency, supercharged by the establishment of the petrodollar in the 1970’s. For a while there, this ensured the steady flow of large amounts of the world’s wealth into US hands – our seemingly bottomless bond market and our inflated stock market principally. This was America’s Golden Goose and it created the standard of living advantage that most Americans instead ascribe to our, well, superiority.
It is still not completely clear to me if the US strategists stumbled onto this system or planned it, though actions in the 1970’s certainly do seem well thought out, in a bond villainous sort of way.
But today?
As the system was already cracking under the impossible weight of so much debt, we began to eat the Goose instead of pampering it. One misstep after another (foreign asset confiscation, “unproductive” war spending, etc.) undermined the sanctity of the dollar as a safe reserve and growing consciousness of the “dollar as weapon” began to grow among its victims.
The current crop of leaders in the US seem to have very little understanding of this and are blindly trying to wrestle control of as much world oil production as possible. In the 70’s we were content to control all the oil trade and not all the oil itself. The dollar somehow no longer controls this trade so completely and the reaction is to control the oil itself (even if that means making it scarcer.)
Or they do have enough understanding to know the jig is all but up and it’s time to smash everything in the hopes that what survives will want to trade in dollars.
I learned about a lot of this from this very blog and I know the above is overly simplistic. And I know I have left Israel completely out of this. I am eager to rise above a material view of things, but am not willing to let go of the material realm altogether.
You could explore this further in Michael Hudson’s Super Imperialism or even his The Destiny of Civilization the first part of which covers much the same ground in an abbreviated form.
Further into the latter text you might begin to appreciate Rosa Luxembourg’s wisdom when she asserted, “Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.”
The US has clearly chosen barbarism.
Might part of the problem result from the general populations propensity to abnegate its political responsibilities and ”follow the leaders ” ?
Going to war is a decision and like all decisions whether you want to get married or buy a car, the decision process is similar. Each step you take, by definition of the process, will limit your freedom. It is important, however, to understand your motives. In the car example, whether you’re fixated on status, reliability, or safety, it will affect the outcome. In war, what are Trump’s motives? And you need to ask how free is Trump to make that decision?
In a recent interview Alastair Crooke pointed out that Iraq sells its oil but the money is deposited in a US bank and Iraq needs to make a request for the money. This arrangement must have appealed to Trump. No doubt, Trump too often allowed his Zionist supporters to offer their advice. He also, as the bully in chief, preferred intel that described Iran as weak. By the time he decided to go to war, Trump had allowed himself to be trapped so that not going to war was a near impossible option.
Lastly, Trump’s prejudice means, in Trump-speak, Iran is a bull-shit country. Whether it’s the Japanese real estate collapse in the 1980s or the GFC in 2008, the US and Japan are real countries; powerful and important. Trump is not capable of imagining that Iran could impact the global economy as it’s now doing. If closing Hormuz crossed his mind, it never registered as even possible, let alone sustainable.
Anybody who reads the speeches of Lincoln during the Civil War and Trump’s speeches and posts today can realize a free vs trapped mind.
The human psyche is not capable of wielding much power. What we are seeing repeatedly is the abuse of power. Give an individual even the puniest amount of authority and watch how they abuse it. Look at the members of the billionaires’ alliance, and see how stupefied they become with their own majesty.
1) conspiracies as reality in determining politics
If you start to dig you will always find conspiracies shaping the major historic events.
(Just consider the French „l´histoire“ vs. „histoire“.)
Jeffrey Sachs made this point with Mett Kennard when speaking about project Ukraine. Argueing that it was a conspiracy and that politics in essence is nothing but conspiracies because that´s what´s happening as soon as 3 politicians meet in a room closed off from public and start to make plans. No historic events are ever coincidental. Nor are they following some superintelligent „Weltgeist“.
Historian Frank Kofksy addressed this very problem in the appendix of his „Truman and the War Scare of 1948“ (1995) where he provided a very detailed account of how the Truman administration fabricated the myth that Stalin was about to invade Europe.
It was all about saving the US heavy industry and establishing the new necessary narrative for US hegemony.
Of course this war scare was a the result of a conspiracy and nothing more. However when he comes to the term „conspiracy theory“ Kofsky writes:
„(…)Anyone with the gall or naiveté to suggest, in a work about U.S. history, politics or society, that those who enjoy great wealth or high rank act in concert to achieve their ends can expect to be accused of espousing a “conspiracy theory of history.
(…)
All of these notions are, of course, absurd on their face. People strive for wealth and power precisely because the more of either one possesses, the more readily one can have his way in every realm—professional, political, personal. Moreover, the idea that the rich and powerful shrink from uniting with others of the same station is even more laughable. If, in fact, there is one thing that characterizes those at the top of the heap, it is their readiness to organize amongst themselves to secure their desires. No other group in society even comes close in this regard.(…)“
I am not well enough read in the French political economy of the Napoleonic era to give an adequate example for conspiracies there and to look beyond Napoleon and his closest allies at those who really were controlling France and her resources, production capabilities, and industrial goals.
So just let me remind of another „French conspiracy“ instead, that of the claim of the 200 families controlling the French Central Bank and thus French wealth until the late 1930s.
What could have such families if in power by 1800 been doing to set up for instance la Grande Armée and eventually agree to it invading Russia?
Same goes for (West) Germany where in the last 150 years regardless of revolutions, world wars, divisions and unifications, it was always the richest 4 percent of the society which has been controlling (West) German economy. If you start to analyze in detail you will end up with the same dozens of family names popping up in that same time spam again and again.
So 1914, 1919, 1941, 2022 as Germany is concerned it was the same strata that deemed feasible the destruction of Russia.
Everything about that is rational, explainable, verifiable via data and records.
We should always consider that Tolstoy was writing fiction. And even if he offers excellent insight into some metaphysical truth of military affairs bleeding into actual warmaking his job as a novelist is not to write a sociological study.
To suggest that masses follow some invisible thread may be a compelling tool to give an explanation for overwhelming phenomena. That doesn´t make it true.
2) religion in the West
I don´t believe a second that religious belief either in the US or ISR government plays a normative role in decisionmaking.
Religious and Manichean conviction in history most often than not was crucial part of the ideology of the powers to be to provide cohesion. But when it came to actual political decisions, cold calculus and state interest, religion only served as legitimacy and front. As package not content.
Just like „Western“ values today. No member of the EU Commission or the Council will tell you in private that the war against Russia has anything to do with those values.
Neither do I believe that any of the religious rhetoric applied now in Washington means anything beyond serving a very particular image the US population has of its leaders. It is total hypocrisy. Or: „performative rule“.
In the US addressing „God“ is part of everyday language. It happens all the time and if you are speaking in public it is fundamental to include God. If as politician I´d state publicly that I do not believe in God and I do not go to church I could as well bury myself.
Religion eventually only provides the „why“ or „how“ but no the „what“. Rule never served religion it was always the other way around.
Or to quote the sci-fi flick MINORITY REPORT (screenplay Scott Frank) which has been mentioned here now and again:
„The oracle isn’t where the power is anyway. The power’s always been with the priests. Even if they had to invent the oracle.“
And from there one can deduce further.