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Tuesday, March 31, 2026
USA Africa Dialogue Series - In Trump's case, this could well be his Waterloo
The pious babble about war aims coming from Trump and Netanyahu notwithstanding, this much is clear : The twelve day war which came to an end after Netanyahu appealed to Trump to please declare a ceasefire because Tel Aviv was taking a pounding, a pounding which was scarcely being reported by the mostly pro-Israel Western Media, in what appeared then - and even now when Tel Aviv is being pounded much more than happened the last time is also not being fully reported, and only significantly being under-reported perhaps because of a conspiracy of silence, this much is clear: After the Twelve Day War Netanyahu and his crew were very worried about Iran still being in possession of a formidable arsenal comprising a still unquantifiable stockpile of lethal missiles with the potential of doing great harm to the towns and cities of what they believe to be God's chosen people, currently inhabiting what they believe to be God's piece of holy real estate which was either conditionally or unconditionally promised to them as an eternal inheritance.
So, the aim of this war is to weaken Iran and to ensure that by the end of the war Iran will no longer be in possession of enough lethal hypersonic missiles with which to threaten the Jewish State.
Of course Netanyahu & Co.'s greatest fear is that there might come a time when the Arabs, the Turks, the Iranians etc might all get together and unite against the one that they eventually view as the enemy that they have in common….
If the Economist's Operation Blind Fury ( 21st March,2026) and Svenska Dagbladet's editorial today, "The Trump administration has led the United States into the quicksand of a war of attrition; the more it treads, the deeper it sinks , if these two news items are anything to go by, based on such premises we may safely arrive at this sane kind of conclusion:
It sometimes gets to the point when someone bites off more than he can chew
In the case of the wannabe greatest President, this could well be his Waterloo
Such a conclusion is not prematurely further supported by some of these news updates:
Press TV :
https://www.google.com/search?q=Press+TV
Financial Context :
https://www.youtube.com/@Financial.Context
Meidas Touch :
https://www.youtube.com/@MeidasTouch/videos
Capital Over Time:
https://www.youtube.com/@Capitalovertime
WW3 GLOBAL WATCH :
https://www.youtube.com/@WW3GlobalWatch/videos
Silvana Machado Crochê :
https://www.youtube.com/@silvanamachadocroch%C3%AA1/videos
George Galloway:
https://www.youtube.com/@GeorgeGallowayOfficial/videos
Daily Alert:
https://dailyalert.org/archive/
In preparing to take on China - to lock horns with Mighty China in the South China Sea - over Taiwan, either this year, the Year of the Fire Horse, or in the following year, the Year of the Fire Goat, King Kong, the mago mago Commander-in-Chief Trump, Wannabe Emperor and greatest military strategist since time began may have already written the most definitive modern American commentary on Sun Tzu's or The Art of War in order to better strategize - in tune with know thine enemy. It would seem that Patton style, his current military adventures in the Middle East are but some kind of strategic foreplay - to get his marines more battle-hardened before American Military Greatness is finally put to the test, far far away from home, somewhere in the South China Sea which if we know His Imperial Highness President Donald J Trump with the kind of awe and respect and fear by which he would ideally love to be known, then we should know that just as he has nationalised what was formally the Gulf of Mexico which is now renamed the Gulf of America, and most recently he has been proposing that once - God forbid - conquest, subjugation, occupation has been achieved and the grand larceny of Iranian oil and the criminal looting of their uranium has been accomplished as the spoils of war , then the Strait of Hormuz which is in the Persian Gulf should be renamed "The Strait of Trump", in his honour and to his glory.
Until the South China Sea is named after him - if ever, he should please continue to feel free to day dream ( delusions of grandeur) and to philosophise about war and wars, as much as he likes, after all , the proof of the dream-pudding should surely be in the tasting of or in some unforeseen ignominious defeat that could cause him to withdraw with his tail between his legs, this Parthian shot following him:
Strike another match, go start anew
And it's all over now, Baby Blue
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Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Power Exit: Aso Rock solar, the 6,000MW promise, and the crisis of Nigeria’s two republic
Powerful
On Tue, Mar 31, 2026, 7:33 PM John Onyeukwu <john.onyeukwu@gmail.com> wrote:
--Powering exit: Aso Rock solar, the 6,000MW promise, and the crisis of Nigeria's two republics--Aso Rock goes solar, and days later the Minister apologizes, revealing the state's struggle to deliver the power it demands from citizens.
By John Onyeukwu | Policy & Reform Column, Business a.m. | Monday March 30, 2026
https://businessamlive.com/power-exitaso-rock-solar-6000mw-promise-and-two-republics/
In February 2026, the Nigerian Presidency confirmed that the Aso Rock Presidential Villa had transitioned off the national grid, and would finally exit in March 2026, adopting a solar-powered electricity system. The justification was familiar to most Nigerians: rising energy costs and unreliable supply. Last week, on Tuesday, March 24, 2026, the Minister of Power, Adebayo Adelabu, publicly apologized to Nigerians for a recent deterioration in electricity service, assuring citizens that the situation would stabilize within two weeks and projecting that national generation would reach 6,000 megawatts (MW) within the year.
Taken together, these developments offer more than administrative updates. They expose a deeper tension within Nigeria's political economy of infrastructure: a state that increasingly adapts to failure rather than resolves it, and a citizenry that has long since learned to do the same.
At the center of this moment lies a fundamental question: what does it mean for governance when the government itself opts out of the system it is responsible for delivering?
The migration of Aso Rock to solar power is, on its own terms, defensible. Across Nigeria, firms, households, and institutions have adopted similar solutions, driven by the economics of diesel generation, the volatility of grid supply, and the falling cost of solar technology. In that sense, the Presidency's decision under President Bola Ahmed Tinubu reflects rational adaptation. Yet governance is not only about rationality; it is also about symbolism, incentives, and institutional signaling.
Aso Rock is not merely another consumer of electricity. It is the operational core of executive authority. When such an institution exits the grid, it communicates a message that extends beyond cost efficiency. It suggests an internal acknowledgment of systemic unreliability and, more consequentially, a willingness to function independently of the public infrastructure that underpins national life. In doing so, it risks transforming what should be a shared system into a residual one.
This development must be understood within a broader historical pattern. Nigerian elites: political, bureaucratic, and corporate, have long insulated themselves from the failures of public infrastructure. Generators, private security, foreign education, and medical tourism have created an ecosystem of elite self-sufficiency. What is different in this instance is the formalization of that exit at the level of the state itself. The Presidency's move signals not just individual adaptation, but institutional withdrawal.
Such withdrawal has implications for reform incentives. Where decision-makers are directly exposed to the deficiencies of public systems, there is a built-in pressure to fix them. Where they are insulated, that pressure weakens. Over time, this produces a divergence between the lived experience of citizens and the operational reality of governance.
The public apology by the Minister of Power, Adebayo Adelabu, on March 24 must be situated within this context. Apologies in Nigeria's electricity sector have become part of a recurring governance script, typically following system collapses, gas supply disruptions, or transmission constraints. They are often accompanied by short-term targets designed to signal responsiveness and restore confidence. Adelabu's commitment to stabilize supply and push generation toward 6,000 MW within the year reflects both the urgency of the moment and the persistence of a cycle in which immediate responses often outpace structural reform.
Nigeria's electricity data provides a sobering backdrop. While installed generation capacity is estimated at approximately 13,000 MW, actual output has persistently lagged, fluctuating between 3,500 MW and 5,500 MW. Occasional peaks above 5,800 MW have been recorded, but these have proven difficult to sustain due to structural constraints across the value chain. Gas supply limitations, transmission bottlenecks, and a financially distressed distribution segment continue to undermine system stability.
Against this reality, the 6,000 MW target is both meaningful and limited. It represents a potential short-term improvement, yet it falls far short of the scale required for economic transformation. For a country of over 200 million people, such levels of generation remain inadequate for industrial growth, job creation, and sustained productivity. The deeper issue is not the plausibility of the target, but the governance logic it reflects.
The Nigerian electricity sector has long been characterized by a cycle of crisis, response, temporary stabilization, and relapse. This cycle persists because underlying structural issues remain unresolved. Tariff regimes are politically sensitive and often economically inconsistent. Market liquidity is constrained by a web of debts and payment shortfalls. Regulatory authority is frequently contested or undermined. In such an environment, technical fixes and incremental targets cannot substitute for systemic reform.
It is within this landscape that the campaign commitments of Bola Ahmed Tinubu acquire renewed significance. During the 2023 election cycle, Tinubu articulated a clear pledge to deliver 24/7 electricity to Nigerians, framing it as both an achievable goal and a benchmark for political accountability. He went further to suggest that failure to meet this standard should carry electoral consequences.
This statement elevated electricity from a policy issue to a test of governance credibility. It established a measurable expectation and, in doing so, created a reference point against which performance can be assessed. The passage from campaign rhetoric to governing reality, under Tinubu's administration and through the Ministry of Power led by Adebayo Adelabu, has exposed the complexities embedded within the sector. Structural deficiencies, institutional inertia, and entrenched interests have constrained the pace of change.
The tension between promise and performance is not unique to Nigeria, but its implications are particularly acute in a context where infrastructure deficits directly shape economic opportunity and quality of life. When ambitious commitments yield incremental outcomes, the risk is not merely disappointment; it is the gradual normalization of lowered expectations. Over time, this erodes the accountability mechanisms that underpin democratic governance.
Citizens, for their part, have responded to these constraints with remarkable adaptability. The proliferation of generators, inverters, and solar systems has created a parallel energy economy that operates alongside the national grid. Estimates suggest that tens of millions of small-scale generators are in use across the country, supplying power to homes and businesses at significantly higher costs than grid electricity. Solar adoption, while still emerging, has accelerated in recent years, driven by declining technology costs and increasing grid unreliability.
This adaptive behavior reflects what Albert Hirschman described as "exit," the decision to withdraw from a failing system rather than attempt to reform it through "voice." In Nigeria, exit has become both a coping mechanism and a structural feature of the economy. Yet it is inherently unequal. Those with resources can secure alternative supply; those without remain exposed to the deficiencies of the grid.
The Aso Rock solar transition mirrors this citizen behavior, but with a critical distinction. For citizens, exit is a necessity. For the state, it risks becoming a form of abdication. When the government adopts the same coping strategies as its citizens without simultaneously addressing systemic failures, it reinforces a dual-track reality in which public infrastructure becomes secondary.
To fully understand this dynamic, one must return to the work of Peter Ekeh. In his influential theory of the "two publics," Ekeh argued that postcolonial African societies operate within two distinct spheres: a civic public associated with the state and often perceived as amoral, and a primordial public rooted in communal and private networks, governed by stronger moral obligations.
Nigeria's electricity sector illustrates this duality with striking clarity. The national grid represents the civic public: formally structured, collectively owned, but widely distrusted and underperforming. Private energy solutions, by contrast, belong to the primordial or quasi-private sphere: personally financed, closely managed, and relatively reliable within their constraints.
What is unfolding now is a migration not only of citizens but of the state itself toward the primordial sphere. By investing in self-contained energy solutions for its core operations, the government is effectively aligning its behavior with that of private actors. This blurring of roles undermines the distinction between public responsibility and private adaptation.
The consequence is a weakening of what might be termed "shared exposure." Effective governance often depends on the alignment of elite and citizen experiences. When leaders rely on the same systems as the population, failures are immediately visible and politically costly. When they do not, the urgency of reform diminishes.
The broader policy challenge for the administration of Bola Ahmed Tinubu, and for the power sector leadership under Adebayo Adelabu, is therefore not simply to increase generation capacity, but to restore confidence in the viability of shared infrastructure. This requires a shift from episodic interventions to sustained structural reform. It involves confronting politically difficult questions around tariffs, subsidies, and market design, while strengthening regulatory institutions and ensuring transparency in sector governance.
Equally important is the need to re-anchor accountability in measurable outcomes. The 24/7 electricity promise provides a useful benchmark, not because it is immediately attainable, but because it defines the direction of travel. Progress must be evaluated not only in terms of incremental gains, but in relation to this broader objective.
The events of March 2026 ultimately point to a critical juncture in Nigeria's governance trajectory. They reveal a state that is capable of adaptation, but whose adaptive strategies risk entrenching the very problems they seek to circumvent. They highlight a citizenry that is resilient, but whose resilience may inadvertently sustain systemic underperformance. And they underscore the enduring relevance of Ekeh's insight: that the divide between the civic and primordial publics remains a defining feature of Nigeria's political economy.
The solar panels at Aso Rock ensure that the lights remain on within the Presidency. The more pressing question is whether the same assurance can be extended to the nation at large. The answer will depend not on short-term targets or technological fixes, but on the willingness of the state to re-engage with the civic public it has, for too long, allowed to falter.
John Onyeukwu
http://www.policy.hu/onyeukwu/http://about.me/onyeukwu
"Let us move forward to fight poverty, to establish equity, and assure peace for the next generation."
-- James D. Wolfensohn
This message contains information which may be confidential and privileged. Unless you are the addressee (or authorized to receive for the addressee), you may not use, copy or disclose to anyone the message or any information contained in the message. If you have received the message in error, please advise the sender by reply e-mail, and delete or destroy the message. Thank you.
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USA Africa Dialogue Series - Power Exit: Aso Rock solar, the 6,000MW promise, and the crisis of Nigeria’s two republic
Powering exit: Aso Rock solar, the 6,000MW promise, and the crisis of Nigeria's two republics
Aso Rock goes solar, and days later the Minister apologizes, revealing the state's struggle to deliver the power it demands from citizens.
By John Onyeukwu | Policy & Reform Column, Business a.m. | Monday March 30, 2026
https://businessamlive.com/power-exitaso-rock-solar-6000mw-promise-and-two-republics/
In February 2026, the Nigerian Presidency confirmed that the Aso Rock Presidential Villa had transitioned off the national grid, and would finally exit in March 2026, adopting a solar-powered electricity system. The justification was familiar to most Nigerians: rising energy costs and unreliable supply. Last week, on Tuesday, March 24, 2026, the Minister of Power, Adebayo Adelabu, publicly apologized to Nigerians for a recent deterioration in electricity service, assuring citizens that the situation would stabilize within two weeks and projecting that national generation would reach 6,000 megawatts (MW) within the year.
Taken together, these developments offer more than administrative updates. They expose a deeper tension within Nigeria's political economy of infrastructure: a state that increasingly adapts to failure rather than resolves it, and a citizenry that has long since learned to do the same.
At the center of this moment lies a fundamental question: what does it mean for governance when the government itself opts out of the system it is responsible for delivering?
The migration of Aso Rock to solar power is, on its own terms, defensible. Across Nigeria, firms, households, and institutions have adopted similar solutions, driven by the economics of diesel generation, the volatility of grid supply, and the falling cost of solar technology. In that sense, the Presidency's decision under President Bola Ahmed Tinubu reflects rational adaptation. Yet governance is not only about rationality; it is also about symbolism, incentives, and institutional signaling.
Aso Rock is not merely another consumer of electricity. It is the operational core of executive authority. When such an institution exits the grid, it communicates a message that extends beyond cost efficiency. It suggests an internal acknowledgment of systemic unreliability and, more consequentially, a willingness to function independently of the public infrastructure that underpins national life. In doing so, it risks transforming what should be a shared system into a residual one.
This development must be understood within a broader historical pattern. Nigerian elites: political, bureaucratic, and corporate, have long insulated themselves from the failures of public infrastructure. Generators, private security, foreign education, and medical tourism have created an ecosystem of elite self-sufficiency. What is different in this instance is the formalization of that exit at the level of the state itself. The Presidency's move signals not just individual adaptation, but institutional withdrawal.
Such withdrawal has implications for reform incentives. Where decision-makers are directly exposed to the deficiencies of public systems, there is a built-in pressure to fix them. Where they are insulated, that pressure weakens. Over time, this produces a divergence between the lived experience of citizens and the operational reality of governance.
The public apology by the Minister of Power, Adebayo Adelabu, on March 24 must be situated within this context. Apologies in Nigeria's electricity sector have become part of a recurring governance script, typically following system collapses, gas supply disruptions, or transmission constraints. They are often accompanied by short-term targets designed to signal responsiveness and restore confidence. Adelabu's commitment to stabilize supply and push generation toward 6,000 MW within the year reflects both the urgency of the moment and the persistence of a cycle in which immediate responses often outpace structural reform.
Nigeria's electricity data provides a sobering backdrop. While installed generation capacity is estimated at approximately 13,000 MW, actual output has persistently lagged, fluctuating between 3,500 MW and 5,500 MW. Occasional peaks above 5,800 MW have been recorded, but these have proven difficult to sustain due to structural constraints across the value chain. Gas supply limitations, transmission bottlenecks, and a financially distressed distribution segment continue to undermine system stability.
Against this reality, the 6,000 MW target is both meaningful and limited. It represents a potential short-term improvement, yet it falls far short of the scale required for economic transformation. For a country of over 200 million people, such levels of generation remain inadequate for industrial growth, job creation, and sustained productivity. The deeper issue is not the plausibility of the target, but the governance logic it reflects.
The Nigerian electricity sector has long been characterized by a cycle of crisis, response, temporary stabilization, and relapse. This cycle persists because underlying structural issues remain unresolved. Tariff regimes are politically sensitive and often economically inconsistent. Market liquidity is constrained by a web of debts and payment shortfalls. Regulatory authority is frequently contested or undermined. In such an environment, technical fixes and incremental targets cannot substitute for systemic reform.
It is within this landscape that the campaign commitments of Bola Ahmed Tinubu acquire renewed significance. During the 2023 election cycle, Tinubu articulated a clear pledge to deliver 24/7 electricity to Nigerians, framing it as both an achievable goal and a benchmark for political accountability. He went further to suggest that failure to meet this standard should carry electoral consequences.
This statement elevated electricity from a policy issue to a test of governance credibility. It established a measurable expectation and, in doing so, created a reference point against which performance can be assessed. The passage from campaign rhetoric to governing reality, under Tinubu's administration and through the Ministry of Power led by Adebayo Adelabu, has exposed the complexities embedded within the sector. Structural deficiencies, institutional inertia, and entrenched interests have constrained the pace of change.
The tension between promise and performance is not unique to Nigeria, but its implications are particularly acute in a context where infrastructure deficits directly shape economic opportunity and quality of life. When ambitious commitments yield incremental outcomes, the risk is not merely disappointment; it is the gradual normalization of lowered expectations. Over time, this erodes the accountability mechanisms that underpin democratic governance.
Citizens, for their part, have responded to these constraints with remarkable adaptability. The proliferation of generators, inverters, and solar systems has created a parallel energy economy that operates alongside the national grid. Estimates suggest that tens of millions of small-scale generators are in use across the country, supplying power to homes and businesses at significantly higher costs than grid electricity. Solar adoption, while still emerging, has accelerated in recent years, driven by declining technology costs and increasing grid unreliability.
This adaptive behavior reflects what Albert Hirschman described as "exit," the decision to withdraw from a failing system rather than attempt to reform it through "voice." In Nigeria, exit has become both a coping mechanism and a structural feature of the economy. Yet it is inherently unequal. Those with resources can secure alternative supply; those without remain exposed to the deficiencies of the grid.
The Aso Rock solar transition mirrors this citizen behavior, but with a critical distinction. For citizens, exit is a necessity. For the state, it risks becoming a form of abdication. When the government adopts the same coping strategies as its citizens without simultaneously addressing systemic failures, it reinforces a dual-track reality in which public infrastructure becomes secondary.
To fully understand this dynamic, one must return to the work of Peter Ekeh. In his influential theory of the "two publics," Ekeh argued that postcolonial African societies operate within two distinct spheres: a civic public associated with the state and often perceived as amoral, and a primordial public rooted in communal and private networks, governed by stronger moral obligations.
Nigeria's electricity sector illustrates this duality with striking clarity. The national grid represents the civic public: formally structured, collectively owned, but widely distrusted and underperforming. Private energy solutions, by contrast, belong to the primordial or quasi-private sphere: personally financed, closely managed, and relatively reliable within their constraints.
What is unfolding now is a migration not only of citizens but of the state itself toward the primordial sphere. By investing in self-contained energy solutions for its core operations, the government is effectively aligning its behavior with that of private actors. This blurring of roles undermines the distinction between public responsibility and private adaptation.
The consequence is a weakening of what might be termed "shared exposure." Effective governance often depends on the alignment of elite and citizen experiences. When leaders rely on the same systems as the population, failures are immediately visible and politically costly. When they do not, the urgency of reform diminishes.
The broader policy challenge for the administration of Bola Ahmed Tinubu, and for the power sector leadership under Adebayo Adelabu, is therefore not simply to increase generation capacity, but to restore confidence in the viability of shared infrastructure. This requires a shift from episodic interventions to sustained structural reform. It involves confronting politically difficult questions around tariffs, subsidies, and market design, while strengthening regulatory institutions and ensuring transparency in sector governance.
Equally important is the need to re-anchor accountability in measurable outcomes. The 24/7 electricity promise provides a useful benchmark, not because it is immediately attainable, but because it defines the direction of travel. Progress must be evaluated not only in terms of incremental gains, but in relation to this broader objective.
The events of March 2026 ultimately point to a critical juncture in Nigeria's governance trajectory. They reveal a state that is capable of adaptation, but whose adaptive strategies risk entrenching the very problems they seek to circumvent. They highlight a citizenry that is resilient, but whose resilience may inadvertently sustain systemic underperformance. And they underscore the enduring relevance of Ekeh's insight: that the divide between the civic and primordial publics remains a defining feature of Nigeria's political economy.
The solar panels at Aso Rock ensure that the lights remain on within the Presidency. The more pressing question is whether the same assurance can be extended to the nation at large. The answer will depend not on short-term targets or technological fixes, but on the willingness of the state to re-engage with the civic public it has, for too long, allowed to falter.
John Onyeukwu
http://www.policy.hu/onyeukwu/
http://www.policy.hu/onyeukwu/
http://about.me/onyeukwu
"Let us move forward to fight poverty, to establish equity, and assure peace for the next generation."
-- James D. Wolfensohn
This message contains information which may be confidential and privileged. Unless you are the addressee (or authorized to receive for the addressee), you may not use, copy or disclose to anyone the message or any information contained in the message. If you have received the message in error, please advise the sender by reply e-mail, and delete or destroy the message. Thank you.
"Let us move forward to fight poverty, to establish equity, and assure peace for the next generation."
-- James D. Wolfensohn
This message contains information which may be confidential and privileged. Unless you are the addressee (or authorized to receive for the addressee), you may not use, copy or disclose to anyone the message or any information contained in the message. If you have received the message in error, please advise the sender by reply e-mail, and delete or destroy the message. Thank you.
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
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Monday, March 30, 2026
USA Africa Dialogue Series - Kwara Communities Abandoned in Fear of Terrorism
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USA Africa Dialogue Series - Plateau Government Imposes 48-Hour Curfew After Deadly Attack Jos Massacre
Plateau Government Imposes 48-Hour Curfew After Deadly Attack Jos Massacre
https://thisdawn.com/plateau-govt-imposes-48-hour-curfew-after-deadly-jos-attack/
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https://thisdawn.com/plateau-govt-imposes-48-hour-curfew-after-deadly-jos-attack/
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Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Errors in the war with Iran
A fantastic essay.
Sun Tzu's Art of War is described as making a similar point about understanding oneself and understanding one's opponent.
On Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 3:31 PM 'Dr. Oohay' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> wrote:
Apparently, in our present geopolitical/economic international CONTEXTS The Art of War and The Art of the Deal MATCH match strategically (with a soft question mark regarding "Russia+") which, of course, in the late course of the war sided with the "West."--OohayOn Monday, March 30, 2026, 6:55 AM, Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:
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GUEST ESSAY
Is It 1914 in America?
March 29, 2026Credit...Samin AhmadzadehListen · 6:35 min
By Yonatan Touval
Mr. Touval is a foreign-policy analyst and writer based in Tel Aviv.
Four weeks into the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, one conclusion is already difficult to avoid. Our leaders preside over an extraordinary machinery of destruction, but they remain strikingly obtuse about human beings — about their pride, shame, convictions and historical memory.
The war's architects appear to have assumed that killing a nation's leaders, dominating airspace and destroying infrastructure would produce regime collapse in Tehran and strategic clarity in Washington and Jerusalem. Instead, Iran, though badly weakened, has managed to disrupt shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, drastically widen the war's economic radius and force Washington into the old, unglamorous business of soliciting allied help after entering a war confident that it would be swift and decisive.
It is tempting to describe this as a failure of intelligence. Technically, it is not. The spycraft kind of intelligence behind the war planning and execution is extensive. Recent reporting suggests that Israeli intelligence spent years penetrating Tehran's traffic cameras and communications networks and built what one unnamed Israeli source described to CNN as an A.I.-powered "target-production machine" capable of turning enormous volumes of visual, human and signals intelligence into precise strike coordinates. That is an extraordinary achievement of surveillance and targeting.
Yet never has so much been seen, so precisely, by so many people who understand so little of what they are seeing. A system can tell you where a man is. It cannot tell you what his death will mean for a nation. Such systems are trained on behavior, not on meaning — they can track what an adversary does but not what he fears, honors, remembers or would die for.
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This is the recurring illusion of overequipped leaders: Because they can map the battle space, they think they understand the war. But war is never merely a technical contest. It is shaped by grievance, sacred narrative, the memory of past humiliations and the desire for revenge. Those are not atmospheric complications added to an otherwise technical enterprise. They are what the war is about.
Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning.So the familiar errors appear. The war planners imagine that a regime can be decapitated into collapse, whereas external attack often does the opposite —binding a battered state more tightly to a society newly united by injury, humiliation and rage. They imagine that destroying conventional assets would settle the matter, as if legitimacy, wounded sovereignty and collective anger were secondary rather than the war's actual terrain. Planners who took their adversary's self-understanding seriously — rather than discounting it as propaganda — might have anticipated that an attack would not weaken the regime's narrative but instead fulfill it. They might also have foreseen the paradox that systematic decapitation does not produce negotiators. It removes them.
The military theorist Carl von Clausewitz long ago recognized the delusion of reducing war to a kind of algebra. War, as he understood it, is never merely calculation. It is saturated with passion, uncertainty and political purpose. The algebra has grown more sophisticated. But the delusion is just as dangerous today as it was in the 19th century.
What this war exposes, then, is a failure not only of strategy but of literacy. Literature and history, at their most serious, train precisely the faculties these leaders lack: the capacity to grant that other minds are not transparent to us, and are governed by purposes not our own. A mind tutored by history and literature knows that actors in the grip of a sacred cause tend to mean what they say — and that bombing a founding myth is more likely to consecrate it than to dissolve it.
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Cultural knowledge, of course, rarely prevents the catastrophes of war.
Athens at the height of its golden age sailed for Syracuse and lost an empire. Thucydides spent the rest of his life explaining why. The generals of 1914 were cultivated, well-read men, but those qualities did not save Europe. What has changed is not that culture once prevented blindness and no longer does. It is that culture has increasingly ceded authority to systems that mistake information for understanding and speed for judgment.
Shakespeare understood this blindness better than our strategists. "Macbeth" is not merely a play about ambition. It is about a man who catches sight of a possible future and mistakes that glimpse for a license to force events to conform to his interpretation — and then watches that interpretation devour him. Soon he ceases even to pretend that action should wait on understanding. There are things in his head, he tells his wife, that "must be acted ere they may be scanned" — done before they can be thought through.
Modern targeting systems promise the same fantasy in technological form: to collapse the interval between seeing and striking, to eliminate the pause in which judgment might still enter. Macbeth acts not after deliberation but instead of it. That is the pattern one can glimpse in this new war, and it is precisely the pattern that literary and historical imagination exists to counter.
Tolstoy traced the same pattern from the other side. In "War and Peace," he depicted Napoleon — nourished on Plutarch's "Lives" and its portraits of greatness — who marched through Borodino to Moscow and still could not fathom a people who would let their city burn rather than submit. His error was not tactical. It was imaginative: He could not credit the Russians with a logic that was not his own. That is the mistake the architects of this campaign are repeating. A leadership that has spent decades framing resistance to American and Israeli power as a religious obligation will experience military pressure not as a reason to capitulate but more probably as a reason to endure.
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The more technologically sophisticated war becomes, the more dangerous it is to place it in the hands of people untrained in irony, contingency and the darker constants of human nature. Such leaders will speak fluently of capabilities, timelines and kill chains. They will have no language for resentment, dishonor, loyalty or grief — and they will discover, too late, that wars are made of these as much as of steel and fire. That is the illiteracy of this war. The algebra of the war makers will have been flawless. But what they cannot read, they will not have reckoned with.
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