No War, No Peace

 

Historically, the slogan "No War, No Peace" refers back to Leon Trotsky (1879-1940), the Bolshevik leader of the Soviet negotiating team, trying at Breat-Litovsk in early 1918 to end the war with Germany and Austria-Hungary. Refusing to accede to Imperial Germany's severe territorial demands, Trotsky simply announced on February 10, 1918, that the Russian war was over and that the Soviets would cease active fighting. Trotsky's Bolshevik boss, Vladimir Lenin, initially went along with the "No War, No Peace" approach. After Germany resumed its military advance, however, Lenin pragmatically insisted that the Russian negotiators immediately agree to sign the treaty accepting Germany's harsh terms. So much for "No War, No Peace" as a strategic policy!

It is a very imperfect analogy, of course, but "No War, No Peace" is not an altogether inadequate description of the present impasse in the misbegotten war between the U.S. and Iran. Whatever the slogan's strategic limitations, Trotsky's "No War, No Peace" was at least a  policy of sorts. On the other hand, it is hard - on any given day - to divine what U.S. policy regarding Iran actually is, or indeed what the state of the conflict actually is. Are we negotiating? If so, with whom? Are we threatening "prompt and utter destruction" (as the world War II allies famously threatened Japan at Potsdam)? If so, with whom? Are we doing both at the same time? Or something else? Who knows? How would one know? 

Like so much of what the U.S. has done (or failed to do) in this war, Trotsky's "No War, No Peace" was an ad hoc adjustment to an uncontrollable reality. In fairness to Trotsky, however, the war was not one which the Bolsheviks had started, although, of course, they had benefited enormously from its traumatic effects on Russia. The Revolution had inherited the war from the Tsarist Regime, which shared responsibility for that colossal failure of European civilization with the other belligerent Powers on both sides. In contrast, the Iran War is entirely the result of U.S. decisions, a wholly self-induced foreign-policy debacle.

According to Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan's Regime Change (Simon and Schuster, 2026), the Administration's previous attack on Iran - the June 2025 "Operation Midnight Hammer" - began with Mass offered in the Vice President's office, attended by the Secretary of State and the White House Chief of Staff, who later said it was "to pray for the people." One wonders whether any comparable prayers were offered the following February when the current war was being launched?

All of which, of course, brings us back to the original mistake, the misbegotten character of the conflict, displayed in the problematic decision-making recently described so poignantly, for example, in Haberman and Swan's same riveting account and which continues to bedevil the U.S. today. It is widely alleged that the Administration would like just to be able to quit the war somehow. One is reminded of October 1966, when Senator George Aiken of Vermont famously suggested that the United States should just unilaterally declare that it had won the Vietnam War, using this "victory" as an excuse to de-escalate American involvement in Vietnam. But unilaterally declaring "victory," would not open the Strait of Hormuz. The Iranians just don't seem to want to cooperate with American face-saving - unsurprisingly, given their long history of malevolent anti-Americanism and their past success at humiliating American presidents. Meanwhile, the war continues to take a terrible toll on the world economy, on American military resources, and on our on-site personnel (as evidenced by the recent revelations about conditions on the American aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, which themselves highlight the defective nature of American war planning). 

Perhaps, prayers really are what the situation calls for. But divine intervention to bail us out - what the ancients called a Deus ex machina -  cannot be counted on. At the end of The Odyssey (Homer's, not Nolan's modernized version), when Odysseus and his rivals seemed stuck in a pattern of further fighting that threatened almost unending civil conflict in Ithaka, Athena herself intervened. She "cried with her clarion voice and forced the whole host to stop," and Zeus reinforced her intervention with a decisive thunderbolt. Odysseus "obeyed, his heart rejoicing. They were made to swear oaths to each other, to endure for all time to come" (tr. Daniel Mandelsohn, U. of Chicago Pr., 2025, 530, 545-546).

Would a clarion call to "Stop," backed by a thunderbolt or two make a difference in this war? Actually, one might suggest that more than a few such thunderbolts have metaphorically already been hurled as warnings both before and during this conflict, to little or no avail. So, on it goes, "No War, No peace." 

Photo: Leon Trotsky and his fellow Bolshevik negotiators arriving and meeting their German counterparts at Brest-Litovsk station on January 15, 1918.