The Third Week: What War With Iran Reveals About the Republic
Thucydides, writing of the Peloponnesian War’s descent from calculated strategy into ungoverned catastrophe, observed that the most dangerous moment in any great conflict is not its beginning — when resolve is fresh and purpose is clear — but its third or fourth chapter, when the original logic has been obscured by the weight of events, and the leaders who made the fateful decisions must now justify them against outcomes they did not fully anticipate. Athens had its generals. We have ours.
