I spent seven years in the Navy, some of it supporting operations in the Persian Gulf, Somalia, and Panama. I was young, and like most young sailors, I believed what I was told: that American military power was so overwhelming that any conflict would be swift and decisive. We were the good guys. We had the best equipment. The math was obvious.
The math, as it turns out, was never obvious at all.
I’ve been watching the news from the Middle East with a familiar knot in my stomach. There’s confident talk about what we could do to Iran, how quickly we could neutralize their capabilities. And I keep thinking: we’ve said this before. And we’ve been wrong before, in ways that cost lives and something harder to measure, which is our ability to learn from our mistakes.
But this post isn’t really about Iran. It’s about a pattern I see everywhere. A pattern of hubris and dehumanization that plays out on battlefields overseas and in our own communities and across dinner tables where families have stopped speaking to each other. The same inability to see others clearly. The same assumption that we have nothing to learn from people who disagree with us. The same surprise when those we’ve dismissed turn out to be more capable and more human than we wanted to believe.
The Pattern
Somalia in 1993 was supposed to be straightforward. We had overwhelming firepower and technology. What we didn’t have was an appreciation for how a determined adversary with cheap weapons and local knowledge could turn our advantages into liabilities. Iraq in 2003 was supposed to be quick and clean. Afghanistan stretched across twenty years, cost over two trillion dollars, and when we left, the Taliban reclaimed the country in weeks.
What strikes me about all of these: we were genuinely surprised each time. Surprised that our adversaries were resourceful. Surprised that they adapted. Surprised that they had the courage and conviction to keep fighting despite our advantages.
We had built such a fortress of assumptions about our own superiority that we couldn’t see what was right in front of us. We were so certain of our moral high ground that we couldn’t imagine our adversaries as proud nationalists capable of bravery and sacrifice for their own sovereignty, faith or countrymen. Courage and determination are human traits, not uniquely American ones. If anything, the hubris might be more uniquely ours.
The Same Pattern at Home
I grew up poor. The food insecurity, the instability, the sense of being invisible to people who had more than we did. What I remember most is not the material deprivation but the feeling of being written off. Teachers who assumed I wouldn’t amount to much. Systems that seemed designed to confirm rather than challenge those assumptions.
That experience shaped how I see this pattern now. Because the same hubris that led people to underestimate me as a kid leads people to underestimate whole communities and regions today.
Think about how we talk about people who live differently from us. How coastal progressives talk about rural conservatives. How urban elites talk about Appalachia. How wealthy suburbanites talk about inner-city neighborhoods. The specific words vary, but the underlying attitude is consistent: those people are less sophisticated, less capable of understanding their own interests.
The coal miner in West Virginia who voted for a candidate you despise is not stupid. The young Black man in Chicago who doesn’t trust the police is not irrational. The immigrant family in Texas who holds conservative social values is not confused. They are responding to their circumstances with the same intelligence and self-interest that you bring to your own decisions. Until we learn this lesson, we are doomed to repeat our mistakes.
When we treat them as problems to be solved rather than people to be understood, we make the same mistake we make with foreign adversaries. We mistake our certainty for their reality.
The Math That Never Works
Right now, the United States has expended nearly a decade’s worth of Tomahawk cruise missile production in a matter of weeks. Patriot interceptors costing four million dollars each are being fired at drones that cost thirty thousand. Iran has built an entire military doctrine around this asymmetry. They’re not trying to match us in a fair fight. They’re trying to make every engagement cost us more than it costs them. Who then is winning?
We wrote this lesson in blood across Iraq and Afghanistan. What’s less clear is why we keep ignoring it. Perhaps because today’s leader convinced you somehow that he is smarter than all his predecessors. History repeats itself largely because we refuse to own it. We externalize it as something others are responsible for. This kind of othering is expensive.
The domestic version of this math is just as brutal. We spend billions on policing and incarceration in communities we’ve systematically deprived of educational and economic opportunity. We’re shocked when crime persists. We fund emergency rooms instead of preventive care. We send in enforcement instead of investment. And then we wonder why we’re not making progress.
A Different Kind of Strength
I don’t have a policy prescription to offer. What I have is an observation about strength.
Real strength includes the capacity for humility. The willingness to say “we were wrong” and “we don’t know” and “maybe our assumptions need revisiting.” The strongest organizations I’ve worked with believe in their mission but question their methods. They learn from failure instead of explaining it away. They treat adversaries and critics as sources of information rather than obstacles to be dismissed.
This means taking seriously the grievances of people we’ve been trained to dismiss. Going to Appalachia and listening before proposing solutions. Going to inner-city neighborhoods and asking what residents actually need. Crossing the political divide not to win arguments but to understand how the world looks from the other side.
It also means, overseas, recognizing that the people on the other side of our conflicts are fully human. Not because their causes are necessarily just, but because pretending they’re not real adversaries with real capabilities has cost us dearly.
The cost of hubris is measured in lives lost in wars that didn’t have to happen. In communities hollowed out by policies that treated them as problems instead of people. In a nation increasingly divided between groups that have stopped seeing each other as fully human. In families that can’t talk to each other anymore.
That’s what hubris costs. And it’s a cost we can no longer afford.
