The Teacher of Life

Bad policies...unnecessary wars...foolish theories — never go away. Like zombies, they rise up in the light of the full moon, and terrorize the world once again.

Thursday, March 26th, 2026

Bill Bonner, writing from Baltimore, Maryland

A man who is pretty undisciplined, doesn’t like to read, doesn’t read briefing reports, doesn’t like to get into the details of a lot of things, but rather just kind of says, ‘This is what I believe’...

...a f**king moron.

—Rex Tillerson, former Secretary of Defense, describing his Commander-in-Chief

Our big picture view, here at BPR, is not unique...and not original.

It is not at all ‘mainstream,’ either. And yet, tested against recent events, it seems to be holding up pretty well.

Here’s the latest...after declaring the war ‘won’ on at least five different occasions, claiming that Iran was ‘dead’ and its military capacity ‘obliterated,’ suddenly something doesn’t add up. The Wall Street Journal:

Pentagon to Deploy 3,000 82nd Airborne Soldiers to Gulf

The Pentagon is planning to deploy about 3,000 soldiers from the Army’s elite 82nd Airborne Division to the Middle East to support operations against Iran, according to two U.S. officials, with a written order expected in the coming hours.

Officials cautioned that a decision to put boots on the ground in Iran hasn’t been made. But deploying the 82nd opens the door to President Trump for several strategic options.

Many are those who’ve noticed that ‘history tends to repeat itself.’ Never exactly. Never reliably. And never predictably. Still, the misfortunes that man engineers for himself show up so often that news reporters say their job is simply to remind readers about what happened before.

As the Trump administration sends troops for what could be an invasion of Iran, for example, they might remind them of a war game conducted 24 years ago. It showed that the Iranians would win big...sinking the US flotilla in a matter of minutes.

But just because it would have been a bad idea back then doesn’t mean it is a bad idea today. Bad policies...unnecessary wars...foolish theories — never go away. Like zombies, they rise up in the light of the full moon, and terrorize the world once again.

These ‘mistakes’ come so frequently in history that they appear as a ‘pattern.’ But for that to happen, there need to be people around who are dumb enough to repeat them.

As the Soviet army smashed through Germany’s defenses in WWII, for example, a Russian officer, with a sense of humor, stood before a group of German captives. ‘Didn’t any of you bother to read Tolstoy?’ he asked.

None raised his hand.

Tolstoy described, in his novel War and Peace, the disaster that befell Napoleon Bonaparte’s army when it invaded Russia. But it wasn’t the history of the war that was important. It was the history lessons. They might have been useful to the Nazi strategists in the 1940s...and might be helpful to the Trump crew today. But the Big Men do not study history...they live it.

Tolstoy’s central idea, similar to our own, is that these illustrious leaders do not write their own scripts. Instead, they read those History gives them. They are actors on the big stage, fully outfitted with the myths, mores, and madness of their time. “Historia magistra vitae,” is how Cicero put it (history is the teacher of life).

Few Frenchmen would have dared to attack Russia in the early 19th century. But when the opportunity arose, the one-in-a-million leader appeared on the scene — Bonaparte. Clever enough to win battles and organize the Grande Armee into the world’s finest fighting force, he channeled the post-revolutionary energy of France into war. And so, the gods must have chuckled as the most talented military genius of his time was totally defeated...and his army virtually wiped out. Not by a superior military machine, but by time, mud, cold, hunger, Cossacks, and peasants.

Then, 128 years later, Germany found the one-in-a-million leader mad enough to repeat Napoleon’s catastrophic adventure. “We have only to kick in the door,” said the Fuhrer, “and the whole house [the Soviet Union] will collapse.” It didn’t happen.

Subsequent events will tell the tale, but it appears that the US is stepping up to the historical challenge. All we have to do, said Trump, is take out the leadership and Iran will surrender. That didn’t happen either.

Obviously, the MAGA team hasn’t come up with something new. And Donald Trump for all his flamboyant novelty, is hardly as wicked as many of his predecessors. Nor is he uniquely responsible for the attack on Iran or its most barbaric features. Tolstoy explained that “kings are the slaves of history...in historical events great men...are but labels...having the least possible connection with the event itself.”

Wickedness lies dormant in all of us...as in frozen soup, ready to bubble up as soon as you put it on the stove. It must have been simmering in the US for many years. Iran was a designated enemy back in the Carter administration. Senator McCain was calling on the US to bomb it in 2007. Finally, the Trump Team sat down to eat.

History needs such benighted leaders. Otherwise, the ‘patterns’ disappear into a shapeless broth.

Regards,

Bill Bonner

---