This column was originally published by TheStatehouseFile.com.
By John Krull
TheStatehouseFile.com
July 8, 2026
Years ago, I sat next to U.S. Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Indiana, at a formal dinner.
This was during a time fraught with tension, if not menace. It was just a couple of months past the tragic terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.
President George W. Bush already had sent troops into Afghanistan. Before that, he had declared a “war on terrorism.”
Lugar was perhaps the most respected American figure on the world’s stage.
He was the leader who had defied a president of his own party—the revered Ronald Reagan, no less—to broker a peaceful transfer of power in the Philippines when the Ferdinand Marcos regime seemed determined to defy the public’s will and election results. Lugar also had forged a partnership with U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Georgia, to peacefully reduce the arsenal of weapons of mass destruction a collapsing Soviet Union otherwise might have sold to terrorists and other international outlaws.
That achievement alone should have earned both men a Nobel Peace Prize.
I had tremendous respect for Lugar. Even though we disagreed on certain issues—some of them fundamental ones—I always considered his judgment to be first-rate. He had a rare gift for seeing the world whole and yet in detail. His mind could track almost endless amounts of information and somehow both contemplate and analyze myriad possible developments and outcomes.
I wanted to know what he thought about seemingly open-ended conflict to which the second President Bush had committed us. I told Lugar that I could understand wanting to fight terrorism, particularly after we had been attacked so viciously.
That said, I continued, what would constitute victory in a war against terrorism? Would we call it a win when we punished the people who had planned and carried out the Sept. 11 attacks? Or would we have to eliminate all the world’s terrorists to call it a victory?
And would another terrorist incident mean we’d lost?
Lugar looked at me for a long moment.
“That’s the $64,000 question,” he finally said.
He continued, as if he were thinking aloud. He said that he spent a lot of time thinking about how we could get out of the fight now that we were fully engaged—and how we would make sure that we didn’t leave things in the region and the world in even worse shape after our involvement.
He said that the problem with even just wars is that they were much, much easier to start than they were to end.
That was why it was important to have an exit strategy mapped out before one began fighting.
I’ve been thinking a lot about that long-ago conversation with Lugar.
We’re now trapped in what’s beginning to look like an endless war with Iran, one launched by President Donald Trump.
Like George W. Bush before him, Trump seems to think that wars simply were tests of will—and that contemplating contingencies or developing an exit strategy before firing the first missiles was how wimps behaved.
Bush’s war in the Middle East stretched on for two decades.
Along the way, it cost American lives that could have and should have been spared and much American treasure that could have been better spent elsewhere.
Trump’s war promises to be similarly open-ended. He’s announced that peace is at hand more than 30 times—each time right before he launches another attack on Iran in a desperate attempt to bomb them into capitulating.
It hasn’t worked—and it likely won’t.
Because Lugar was right all those years ago.
Wars are much, much easier to start than they are to end.
About 15 years after that first conversation, Lugar was my guest on a radio show I hosted. I asked him if plunging into such an open-ended war in the Persian Gulf without determining a way out had been a mistake.
Lugar didn’t hesitate.
He said that, in retrospect, it had been a mistake.
We should have devoted more thought to what we were getting into before we entered that war.
Richard Lugar was a smart man. He was also an honest man.
His party turned on him 15 years ago, in part because too many Republicans thought his intelligence and his honesty were weaknesses, not strengths.
And now we’re stuck in another unending war in the Middle East.
There’s a connection there.
John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students. The views expressed are those of the author only and should not be attributed to Franklin College. Also, the views and opinions expressed are those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Indiana Citizen or any other affiliated organization.
