The fog of war

We’re living through a global crisis. One of those moments of mounting escalation in which everyone seems to know its importance and seems to be losing their minds.

The constant, always-on media is compounded by the constant commentary and amplification of opinions and false narratives and old photos, etc. It’s mind-numbingly hard to know what’s going on. And to know how this deescalates.

I just read that during the Cuban Missile Crisis, John F Kennedy was guided by his gut instinct to give space for his enemy to deescalate after reading Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August. Having read that book within the last year, it’s amazing how quickly a few miscalculations of arrogance caused a mounting set of escalations that plunged the world into war.

I sure hope that those in charge are trying to deescalate. The western coalition certainly seems to be playing that book. But Iran, Russia, China… ascendent powers have political reasons to prefer that the western alliance gets bogged down in a proxy war in the middle east.

But this will deeply impact so many lives. Likely everyone on the planet in some way.