By Joseph Mazur

All wars claim reasons to fight. Too often, they are diversionary plots concealing hidden gains, plunder, accessions, or acquisitions. Yet, not all reasons for war are smart, nor are all stupid.  

– Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz, On War^{[1], [2]}

Decades from now, when today’s wars have ended, historians will write about the secrets we did not know. Now, the public is told one thing, then another, as governments give deceptive reasons to start those wars under the guise of national security and misleading government intelligence. Here, Joseph Mazur, Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Emerson College’s Marlboro Institute for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies, asks: Are there justified reasons for going to war, or are they a smokescreen for greed and oil pillage?

We are entering a strange time for this world; strange again, for time cycles through violence and peace, corruption and morality, treachery and reliability. We, the people, especially those of us who remember past wars and times of world difficulties. Everything has changed, yet nothing has changed. Oil is still the liquid gold that dictates the price of war and peace, the rice and potatoes of survival in a world of growing population without moral answers of how to survive the aggressiveness of dictators who command control of commodities and territory by advantage of strange habits that have worked in the past but are now messing with the globe rather than just with the weak.

Our wars now are not like what they were a century ago, when tens of millions of people died from indiscriminate bombings. We still have too many wars and too many deaths (one is more than enough), but the death numbers are nowhere near what our fathers and grandfathers went through. Twentieth-century war deaths totaled more than 100 million. In my advanced but young century, bombs have been strategically aimed at the warriors and, yes, all too often – accidentally or not – at civilian infrastructure. Our new problem is the population that has quadrupled since the end of World War II. That quadrupling, along with advances in the Geneva Conventions, has altered war strategies, not so much by causing more destruction, but by creating a significant difficulty for strategic aims and staggering possibilities for diplomacy. Diplomacy has always been tough and discouraging, but, as I have always said, starting a war should be the last resort after a genuine, exhausting, diplomatic failure to compromise positions that benefit all sides.

Wars Keep Coming

In moments of introspection, contemplating good and bad reasons for a leader’s decision to go to war, I learned enough to change my reasoning about war. I ask myself: Are there ever good ones? On September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, and three days later, when Britain and France declared war on Germany, the war in Europe took almost 26 months before it went global when the US entered the war. I’ve been thinking about reasons entangled in the wonders of why wars start, when diplomacy fails from a lack of patience. Thinking more deeply, I had to wonder why so many countries sided with the Axis: I understood Italy, but why Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and even Finland? Had Germany won that war, it would have made every one of those Axis States puppets of the Third Reich. Leaders of those five countries must have known the Führer was an insane, angry colonialist whose goal was to take over all of Europe in retaliation for Germany’s loss in WWI.

When we think of wars, we usually think of those two massively crushing world wars and other twentieth-century conflicts. We think of the Spanish Civil War, Korea, Vietnam, and, cloudily, Bosnia. Ancient wars remain almost fictional confrontations with no connection to us other than seeming exotic or barbaric. Yet, they were as real as any, brutal with spears, swords, crossbows, or cannons, and without combat medics before 1863, when the Red Cross was founded. Those wars of any kind lasting more than a day caused deaths, injuries, and traumas, and lifetimes of emotional distress.

Ignoring the fictitious wars of Greek culture – namely Homer’s capacity to tell us so much through poetic rhythms of iambic pentameter – gave us enough information about ancient warfare to understand war in general. The Persian Empire under Cyrus the Great, two and a half millennia ago, two hundred years before Alexander the Great, swept through the mostly barren lands from Damascus to India. Great empires then formed and were sustained by extended wars. History tells us that wars go as far back as the first known battle (4000 BCE and 3500 BCE) that spread from the Hamoukar, a proto-urban ancient city in what is now northeastern Syria near the Iraq border, which was invaded and colonized by the Uruks, people of the early stages of evolving cities in southern Mesopotamia, in what is now southeastern Iraq. War weapons in early proto-cuneiform writing (pictograms) were slingshots that could hurl hundreds of stones, according to a 2005 archeological dig under the auspices of the University of Chicago. “This was ‘Shock and Awe’ in the Fourth Millennium B.C.,” according to Clemens Reichel, Associate Professor of Mesopotamian Archaeology at the University of Toronto.  

It was not the first war. But my point is that war has always been with us and is likely to always be with us, unless there is some possible way to end all wars in the future. We know very little about 3rd^–century BCE wars, but thanks to cuneiform and the Phoenician alphabet, we can search back to the earliest wars to see that clashes take blood and guts, yet bring anger that boils the blood that keeps us alive.  

Those ancient wars we know about, thanks to early historians who wrote analytical accounts of the conflicts, began with the three Punic Wars that spanned 118 years, and were fought for odd purposes, odd for us. The Romans were simply conquerors with an interest in land and resources, with hopes and understanding that military extravagance and advancement could deter armies that would plan battles against the Roman Republic. In the Second Punic War (218–201 BCE), Rome had not yet established an emperor but was governed by consuls in the Senate commanding army targets under the purpose of gaining territory to establish greatness distinguished by strategic power. Trade was fine and hardly tampered with, but it was ideological quarrels that were bizarrely mixed in expansion and the arrogance of ownership. It was not a masculine swagger that started the war simultaneously with several theaters scattered over southern Europe and northern Africa, but rather a necessity to thwart the oncoming attacks of Hannibal’s armies.

The Roman Empire lasted 500 years before collapsing; from Rome to Constantinople, it became the Byzantine Empire, which endured until the Ottomans conquered the Empire in 1453. That’s a vast life for any Empire, over a whole millennium. Now, it is gone, as with all the other empires of the past. Countries grow, sometimes by population, sometimes by smart leadership, but always with change for better or worse.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, many wars lingered, but none as severe as Central Europe’s Thirty Years’ War (1618 – 1648). The graph above shows the death toll, and the map below shows the vastness of the war campaign that historians claim to be the most destructive conflict in European history, causing an estimated 4.5 to 8 million combatants and civilians to die, either from battles, famine, or disease. Then, in the next century, came the Seven Years’ War (1756 – 1763). It was a relatively short war, but a global war between powerful European countries that spread from North America to the Indian subcontinent, causing an estimated half a million deaths.

Then Came Napoleon

The nineteenth century started with the Napoleonic Wars, conflicts involving 26 countries and duchies that followed just a few years after the French Revolutionary Wars aimed at dominating the whole European continent, including Russia.^[3] Why? Historians tell us that those wars started for political reasons: French domination over continental Europe. Much of Europe did not recover after Napoleon defeated the Prussians and dissolved the Holy Roman Empire that lasted almost 700 years. It is not possible to estimate the military and civilian deaths from that campaign, but, by a wild guess, the count is between 3.3 and 6.5 million.^[4] Comparing the Napoleonic Wars with the two World Wars of the following century, when the estimated death tolls of each of those wars ranged between 50 and 75 million, we find that the Napoleonic Wars do not compare. As we consider the reasons, we see that weapons of the 19th century were mostly muskets, sabers, bayonets, and cannons. The next century’s war weapons were more sophisticated small arms, assault rifles, submachine guns, heavy artillery, armored vehicles, bombs, and planes capable of dropping bombs.

Skip a century that we all know about, a century of wars that directly or indirectly took the lives of over a hundred million people. We have a new century with problems more dangerous than we think, problems that should not be ignored. The population, artificial intelligence, climate change, falling economies, excessive tariffs, military invasions, crashing global rules and laws, bureaucratic truth-altering, and a new world order with no country policing it bring forward an overwhelming humanitarian crisis that may or may not have a strong enough solution to save the planet from full destruction. Is there any positiveness connected to that problem?

The 21^st Century came in with a bang, a huge bang

Terrorists hit their jackpot of sabotage when 9/11 murdered 2,977 civilians on American soil. In the United States, it led to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).

With our 21st-century problems, we have new wars that have severely changed how wars are fought. As one example, the United States mistakenly started a war with Iran. Three of the strongest militaries have started wars they cannot control. Russia has its Ukraine; Israel has its Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran; and the United States has its Iran.

All wars are political, with unreasonable reasons. Some are unwarranted, some baseless, some absurd, some illogical, some stupid, and some outright wacky. This war that the United States and Israel started fits all the reasons above, but worse, the ignorance of history and intelligence creates a war in chaos that cannot end soon.

Robert A. Pape, Professor of Political Science and Director of the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats, wrote in Foreign Affairs, “Instead of trying to defeat a stronger adversary head-on, the weaker side multiplies arenas of risk—drawing additional states, economic sectors, and domestic publics into the remit of the conflict. Iran cannot defeat the United States or Israel in a conventional military contest. It does not need to. Its objective is to gain greater political leverage.”^[5]

—Senator Van Hollen, interviewed by
MS NOW Ana Cabrera Reports  

In this alarming century, governments still have choices: peace or war. The smartest basic ideas and rules for going to war were published almost two hundred years ago. A year after the Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz died, in 1832, his book, On War, was published. “No one starts a war—or rather,” he wrote, “no one in his senses ought to do so—without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it.”^{[6], [7]} That book was written two hundred years ago, a startling book that tells the central idea of how wars should be handled when we send recruits into battlefields from which many will not survive.

The Weinberger and Powell Doctrines, As Guidelines for American Military Foreign Policy 

In a 1984 speech delivered at the National Press Club titled “The Uses of Military Power,” Caspar W. Weinberger, Secretary of Defense under President Reagan, listed six tests to be passed for America to enter military battles. He began by asserting, “Once it is clear our troops are required because our vital interests are at stake, then we must have the firm national resolve to commit every ounce of strength necessary to win the fight to achieve our objectives.… Just as clearly, there are other situations where United States combat forces should not be used.”

Weinberger’s six tests of potential United States wars:

1. Entering a war must have reasons vital to the national interests of the United States or its allies.
2. Commit the forces or resources necessary to achieve objectives.
3. It must have clearly defined political and military objectives.
4. The objectives, size, and forces committed should be continuously reassessed and adjusted.
5. Before committing combat forces abroad, reasonable assurance must have the support of Congress and the American people.
6. Commitments of US forces to combat should be a last resort.

Colin Powell, when chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, added to Weinberger’s test that lists a clear exit strategy, international support, and conceding political objectives.

–Caspar Weinberger, “The Uses of Military Power,”
delivered before the National Press Club, 1984

Here we are, in what should be a century of truthful intelligence, with a president who launched a war on an angeringly resilient country without even considering the Weinberg or Powell Doctrines and without exhausting diplomacy or an exit strategy.

Weaponry Markets

As the centuries unfolded, weapons advanced through a collective weapons industry supported by powerful influences that provided tools of war. From stones shot from slingshots to arrows, to spears, to swords, to guns, to cannons, to bombs, and now to drones and lasers, weapons have gotten far more lethal. At the turn of the twentieth century, planes were first used for reconnaissance, then for dropping chemical weapons of mass destruction on battlefields.

Then came another world war that brought a total collapse of economies, ethics, law, and justice was a one-of-a-kind necessary war. Necessary, because a leader of one country was a madman able to cultivate a hardly new weapon, but one that went far too far. Soon after the Third Reich was established, a plan was implemented to build a military with rank-and-file cohorts and followers who would obey amoral systems of combat. The plan was to make monkeys out of humans, monkeys that would follow the behavior of others, who would carry out orders that were inhumanly torturous and no longer illegal under Germany’s laws, but certainly illegal under international warfare agreements.

Moral principles were abandoned, yet humans unwittingly carried them through living but idle neurons somewhere in the brain, perhaps in the anterior cingulate cortex or the parietal or insular cortex.^[8] With the end of that ugly war, after the establishment of the United Nations with its mission to prevent future wars, new Geneva Conventions, and the 2002 establishment of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, invading countries consequently stopped calling their battles wars. States at that time were involved in wars, searching for loopholes in illegal combat behavior to obey Geneva Convention rules. It was also a time when geopolitical policies were chaotic and scrambled, with no agreed-upon charters on world order.

Is it, or is it not, a war?

–US Vice President, J.D. Vance

The “it” in his message refers to the US war with Iran. Undoubtedly, he is ignoring Russia’s war with Ukraine and Israel’s war with Yemen. Of course, Vance would not call the “it” a war. Major modern wars are not declared. Wars are not legal, except when one side claims self-defense. That’s because all states have the right to defend their territory. “Declare your invasion as an internal armed conflict, give it a name to avoid calling it a war, and you might avoid all the ICC incriminations for any horrors you might do — Desert Storm, Infinite Justice, Enduring Freedom, Special Military Operation, or Iron Swords will do. Think about it: America has not declared war for the last 78 years; it never formally declared the Korean, Vietnam, Iraq, and Gulf wars as wars. It’s always safer to claim self-defense and give it a name to avoid all UN Charter legal obligations.”^[9] When a war is declared, the International Criminal Court (ICC) steps in to prosecute members of the military who are suspected to have committed international crimes. So now most Western countries avoid declaring war.

There are few–if any–years of world peace history. From the turn of the 17th century till today, the death toll from wars is close to and at a cost in today’s money value more than $14 trillion.^[10] So, we must wonder what $14 trillion could have done for the good of the world. A government’s job is to protect the state, stabilize healthcare, maintain infrastructure, food safety, and ensure a basic quality of life.^[11] The worldwide cost of maintaining that job for one year is less than $1 trillion. The cost of the 42 high-intensity conflicts for 2025 is estimated at $2.9 trillion.^[12] Okay, so it may be naïve of me to think that a significant cut in global military expenditure could transform societies to significant understandings that war has no benefits for any side of a conflict. However, think of the global GDP that is approximately $124 trillion.^[13] Global healthcare costs $12 trillion. Ending world poverty would take approximately $100 billion per year, just 1 percent of military spending.^[14] Extending quality health care for the world would take $300 billion per year.^[15] For another $370 billion (3.7 percent of military spending), Americans in poverty could be given $10,000 per year for a better life. What is wrong with this country, the richest in the world?

Wars can be profitable machines. When weapons are made and distributed, wars are on wish lists as proving grounds, markets, and parade displays to show the public deterrence. When the US Army awards Lockheed Martin a $1.2 billion contract for short-range ballistic missiles, as it did in September, the channels of influence to use those missiles rise with the competition of rivals such as Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Raytheon, and members of Congress whose votes and campaign donations build across 35 States. Money for new or more weapons flows through a revolving door of war-making reasons. Oil is one.  

Reasons don’t always follow understandings or motivations.

When I was much younger, my children often wanted me to read The Adventures of Tintin to them aloud. It was a comic series about hidden issues and villains that took the clever reporter and his faithful dog, Snowy, on adventures around the world. The characters include Captain Haddock, Professor Calculus, the detectives Thomson and Thompson, and occasionally the opera diva Bianca Castafiore, who would bungle their way through grippingly fantastical plots. Later in my not-so-young days, I would read those comics to my grandchildren.

The fifteenth volume of the series, Land of Black Gold (1950), tells the story of a young Tintin who goes undercover in a militant group that would start a war and sabotage oil supplies in the Kingdom of Khemed, a mythical Middle Eastern country.

Hergé, the writer of that series, published as far back as the end of World War II, understood that the world was changing and that oil is black gold, a liquid fossil fuel that has driven foreign policies toward wars. Oil from the Middle East, and sometimes elsewhere, continues to drive world policies toward war and prices from bubble gum to cars.  

One fictional character in The Land of Black Gold, Abdullah, was based on a real 4-year-old king, King Faisal II of Iraq, who acceded to the throne in 1939. Abdullah first appeared in 1949 in the second version of Tintin in the Land of Black Gold. At age 6, he appears as the son of Mohammed Ben Kalish Ezab, the Emir of Khemed, a fictional state on the Arabian Peninsula.^[16]

If you think Mr. Trump’s reasoning for starting a war with Iran is to save the protesters in that country or to eliminate its nuclear ambitions, think again. Donald Trump surely does not care about the lives of protesters. For someone who never cared about the future unless it was about himself, the possibility that Iran could make a nuclear bomb and a delivery device would not be likely to be a reason. Those announced objectives are merely symbolic. Let’s not kid ourselves; Trump would not be alive by the time Iran could succeed in its ambitions to go nuclear. In June, he wrote on Truth Social: “At some point in the not-too-distant future, we will be taking Kharg Island, and other oil infrastructure points, and assume total control of their Oil and Gas Markets, much like we have with Venezuela, which is working out brilliantly for both Venezuela and the United States of America.”^[17] That island holds approximately 90 percent of Iran’s crude oil exports. What should we think that war is about?

US Energy Information Administration (EIA). 2026.^[18]

The hidden reason was the acquisition of black gold. There are many reasons for masking the truth. Trump started that war hoping to win it with regime change that would benefit him with massive corruption of oil exchanges and a few thrown in hotels and golf courses. If you doubt that, wait and see what is happening in Venezuela and eventually Cuba. Greenland is not far behind. Watch out, Guyana! You may be next.  

Over the past 81 years since the end of WWII, there has been a decidedly strong grip on combat behavior around the world. The International Criminal Court (ICC) is now in place as a deterrent for breaking the rules of international humanitarian law, particularly the law of armed conflict. The Geneva Conventions focused on the protection of civilians. Unfortunately, the rules and laws of such conventions do not apply to military behaviors within a specific country. Countries can abuse their own citizens by rescinding their own civil rights laws. Consider the Third Reich as an example.

A gift from Iran “worth a tremendous amount of money.” What could it be?

 – Erica L. Green, White House reporter for The New York Times^[19]

Oil prices are not as wild as they could be or should be because of the war with Iran, because governments and private enterprises are releasing oil stockpiles. However, those stockpiles are now getting so low that, at some point, they will have to be refilled. Did anyone in the Trump administration think about what could happen to Saudi Arabia’s oil shipments to far-off countries? Saudi Arabia, the second-largest oil producer, produces 10 million barrels a day. Did anyone think about shipping out of one worrisome strait east of the Saudi Arabian Peninsula and another on the west side?

– Guntan Mukunda, Yale School of Management

No. We are not surprised. It is a consistent characteristic of a failure in everything the Trump administration does. My question is this: Does Iran have an October or November surprise for us, a surprise that cuts shipments of oil to a level that chokes oil markets to such an extreme that could harm not just Ukraine, but all of Europe when it freezes this coming cold winter without Tintin and Snowy playing a role in imaginary interventions? With no allies after America alienated them, and with bad outsourced negotiators to bring the war to an end, the only plan to end the war would be exactly what Trump has been hoping for: negotiations that will depend on how much oil or money could be made on the side.

Trump sees gold as his new priority. He believes his golden toilet and escalator say something about how rich he is. Political leaders know how to laud him with gold gifts. Ignoring conflict-of-interest laws, he has received a gold boxing championship belt, a gold-framed copy of his grandfather’s birth certificate, a golden samurai helmet, a gold-plated Rolex clock, a personally engraved gold bar, a gold-plated crown, and even a golden golf ball.^[20] Lately, he has come to see oil as Tintin saw it: a kind of gold, though for Tintin, a prelude to war. The more Trump owns, the richer he feels. Oil may be black, but golden gold is solid money, so he brokered gold bullion — hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth — from the mines of southern Venezuela to stockpile in HIS White House. At the September 22, 2026, U.N. General Assembly, Trump admitted his black gold achievement: “When you add the United States and Venezuela together, we have more than 60 percent of the oil in the world.” Of course, it was one of his usual exaggerations. The truth is that the agreement with Venezuela covered 65 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, not all of the 300 billion that Venezuela has underground. The US has 46 billion barrels, and the world has 1.6 trillion barrels. The math says the US and Venezuela together will have 6.31 percent of the world’s oil reserves, not 60 percent. Current production, with both countries producing about 25 billion barrels a day, brings us to about 23 percent of worldwide production. But no matter, black gold is oil gold. Yes, his attacks on Venezuela were not about drugs or democracy. They were, and are, about oil or solid gold, as Tintin would say if he were not imaginary.

With the new era of the United States and NATO no longer policing the western part of the world, now what? Will the Geneva Conventions be ignored? Will the world need peace and food for 8.3 billion people to survive safely and avoid mass hunger? As my readers know, I am an optimist who hopes for the best. We will come out of this at some future point, when the world returns to a world order that could come from the oddest countries, not necessarily America. Tintin would agree.

About the Author

Joseph Mazur is an Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Emerson College’s Marlboro Institute for Liberal Arts & Interdisciplinary Studies. He is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim, Bogliasco, and Rockefeller Foundations, and the author of eight acclaimed popular nonfiction books. His latest book is The Clock Mirage: Our Myth of Measured Time (Yale).

References

^[1] Clausewitz, Carl von, On War, Edited/translated by Michael Howard & Peter Paret, (Princeton: Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1976, rev.1984)

^[3] https://www.britannica.com/place/United-Kingdom/The-Napoleonic-Wars

^[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleonic_Wars_casualties

^[5] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/iran/why-escalation-favors-iran 

^[7] https://www.csun.edu/~hfmgt001/Clausewitz.htm

^[8] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3770908/

^[9] https://worldfinancialreview.com/what-makes-a-genocide/

^[10] https://www.warcosts.org/cost-of-war

^[11] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-much-does-the-world-spend-on-the-sustainable-development-goals/

^[12] https://www.visionofhumanity.org/rising-military-spending-in-a-fragmenting-world/

^[13] https://www.worldometers.info/gdp/gdp-by-country/?source=imf&region=worldwide&year=2026&metric=nominal

^[14] https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/11/1166397

^[15] https://www.who.int/news/item/17-07-2017-who-estimates-cost-of-reaching-global-health-targets-by-2030

^[16] Benoit Peeters, Tintin and the World of Hergé (London: Methuen Children’s Books, 1989) 

^[17] https://www.cfr.org/articles/kharg-island-irans-oil-lifeline-and-a-tempting-u-s-target

^[18] https://www.eia.gov/international/data/world/petroleum-and-other-liquids/annual-petroleum-and-other-liquids-production?pd=5&p=00000000000000000000000000000000002&u=0&f=M&v=mapbubble&a=-&i=none&vo=value&vb=173&t=C&g=00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001&l=249-ruvvvvvfvtvnvv1vrvvvvfvvvvvvfvvvou20evvvvvvvvvvnvvvs0008&s=1767225600000&e=1767225600000&ev=true

^[19] https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/03/24/world/iran-war-trump-oil/c5d734b3-a950-5e00-8f37-5890e1e6de75?smid=url-share

^[20] https://www.ms.now/news/trump-gifts-world-leaders-tariffs?cid=eml_mda_20260927&user_email=bb759ff36f2ff61999abd346c905873915c01036c5a2b4978fb83f6b22e77fde