If they had—if Grandpa had been able to deliver his sage advice to the two would-be strongmen—both they and the world would be in a better place.
When I was a boy, Grandpa cautioned me to be careful about starting fights.
“You should never throw the first punch,’ he said. “Because there’s always the possibility the other guy will swing. If he does, you can never be certain about where things will go, no matter how confident you might be.”
Grandpa was a wise man. Every time I have ignored or forgotten that bit of guidance from him—when I was young, physically, or when I was older, metaphorically—I have regretted it.
Because he was right.
Fights always take us places we don’t anticipate and often don’t want to go. Even when we win them, fights can be costly.
That’s what Trump and Putin are learning now.
Let’s deal with Putin first.
The Russian autocrat started his invasion of Ukraine a little more than four years ago. He and much of the world thought that his unprovoked attack on a much smaller neighbor would result in a quick and easy conquest.
It didn’t turn out that way.
For one thing, Ukraine’s president—a former TV comedy star named Volodymyr Zelenskyy—proved far more adept at rallying his nation and his people to resist Russian aggression than anyone anticipated. Zelenskyy, who rose to fame playing a fictional president on television, proved to be even more effective in the real job than he had been in the fake.
In part, this was because he managed, with the help of former U.S. President Joe Biden and other Western leaders, to bring together a coalition of countries with democratic traditions to oppose Putin’s attempted conquest.
That coalition proved so effective that, even after Trump all but abandoned it upon his return to the White House, Putin found himself bogged down helplessly, unable to win the war he started and yet unable to extricate himself from the fighting without inflicting great harm upon his nation’s prestige and imperiling his own leadership.
There are even reports that he’s hiding in bunkers these days, afraid of what is to come. He’s all but begging Ukraine for a cease-fire, but Zelenskyy and the Ukrainians aren’t likely to save Putin from himself. They have suffered too much at his hands to quit now that he’s had enough.
He didn’t anticipate that this fight would take him and his country to this dangerous place, but that’s the thing about fighting. It always takes you places you didn’t plan to go.
When President Trump launched his war with Iran, he, too, thought the conflict would end in a hurry.
He ignored the warnings of senior military leaders and experts on the Middle East and chose to attack Iran. His rationale for doing so shifted from day to day.
Some days, he said the war he started was about regime change. If so, it failed. He’s replaced an old and radicalized Islamic supreme leader with a younger and even more radicalized one.
Most often, though, Trump says he started this fight to keep Iran from developing nuclear weapons—an argument that neatly ignores the fact that former President Barack Obama negotiated just such a deal, a deal Trump backed out of.
Trump has contended—falsely—that Obama paid the Iranians not to develop nuclear weapons. The opposite is true. Obama froze Iranian funds under U.S. control and refused to release them unless Iran agreed to his terms.
He forced the Iranians to buy peace with their own money.
Because Trump threw away a deal that would have cost us little to keep Iran defanged, to save face he started this self-destructive and deluded fight.
When the Iranians responded by closing the Strait of Hormuz, which sent oil prices skyrocketing, Trump began to flail.
He, like Putin, now pleads for peace and a cease-fire that will hold, but the Iranians, like the Ukrainians with Putin, feel no need to save him from himself—particularly now that they know just how much leverage controlling the Strait of Hormuz gives them.
Two self-proclaimed strongmen.
Two messes in which they stuck the world because they just had to throw the first punch.
Yeah, Grandpa was a smart man.
