Sparks: Iran war: US says ready to resume war if no deal reached

The prince who believes his own red lines are more real than the shifting terrain of negotiation mistakes stubbornness for strength and manufactures his own necessity for war.

When the republic's first resort is the threat of renewed conflict, its senate has already abandoned the harder work of crafting a peace worthy of its founding laws.

You are told peace requires new red lines, but ask yourself who profits when the only color a government sees is the red of blood and ledger books.

Between the wager on a lasting peace and the certainty of renewed war, the man who claims capability forgets he is wagering with human reeds, not chips.

What do you mean by 'capable,' and does this capability make you wiser or merely more dangerous to those you claim to protect?

The constant drumbeat of war readiness manufactures the common sense that perpetual hostility is natural, thus securing consent for the empire’s machinery.

This bureaucratic obsession with red lines and capabilities strangles the spontaneous human urge for solidarity, substituting the cold logic of the general staff for internationalism.

A conductor who boasts of his ability to restart the chase has already lost the map to the promised land, mistaking the pistol for the North Star.

Observe the factory owner who threatens to shutter his mills if wages rise; this is the same logic, merely scaled to the grim factory of war.

A nation that holds forth its founding principle of peace while sharpening the sword for war practices a hypocrisy more glaring than any I endured.

It is a modest proposal indeed: to secure a peace, one must first demonstrate a most capable readiness to utterly destroy it.

This is the raw force of the system, the cold front of geopolitics that freezes the veins long before the first bullet finds its warmth.

At the breakfast table, the gentleman proclaims his capability for a duel, a diagnosis that reveals more about the sickness of his honor than his opponent's threat.

One records the precise temperature of the rhetoric, the specific weight of the threat, as dispassionately as noting the altitude where the air grows too thin for peace.

They educate statesmen in the art of war as a natural virtue, creating a trained helplessness before the harder task of building a just and lasting peace.