On: US, Iran hit each other again as hopes for quick peace deal fade
Kirkcaldy, 2024
The morning’s intelligence brings a heavy heart but a familiar fatigue. It appears the sovereigns of the West and the East have once again abandoned the quiet commerce of the counting-house for the thunder of the battery. They speak of “negotiations” and “deals,” yet their hands are busy priming the flintlock. I have often observed that the pride of kings is a far more expensive luxury than the most decadent feast of a merchant; the latter merely wastes his own capital, while the former squanders the blood and industry of a whole nation.
When I consult the impartial spectator within my breast, I find no sympathy for this calculated escalation. Each side claims to act in defense of some abstract honor or future security, yet they ignore the immediate misery of the common man who must bear the tax of war. The merchant of Tehran and the artisan of New York are bound by a thousand invisible threads of potential exchange, yet their leaders see only a chessboard. It is the great delusion of the “man of system” to imagine he can move the pieces of a society as easily as a hand moves the figures upon a table. In reality, every individual has a principle of motion all his own, which these volleys of shot and shell serve only to crush.
The delay in peace is not a failure of diplomacy, but a success of the military interest. Those who provide the munitions and those who seek the glory of command seldom meet together, even for a brief council, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public peace. They claim the peace deal is “dragging out,” as if it were a stubborn mule, when in truth, they are the ones holding the reins. They find more profit in the friction than in the flow. How much more wealth might be created if the energy spent on these retaliations were turned toward the improvement of the lands they currently seek to scorch? But alas, the passion for dominion is a fire that consumes the very ledger it purports to protect.