Artificial intelligence is the perpetrator: That’s who spurred us into a war with Iran. According to CNN, Israel used advances in AI to turn vast volumes of “visual, human, and signals intelligence” into precise strike targets throughout Iran, fooling Trump and Netanyahu into believing they could win a quick and easy victory.
However, as Yonatan Touval, a foreign policy analyst based in Tel Aviv, tells us in a recent New York Times article, war is never simply a technical event. “It is shaped by grievance, sacred narrative, the memory of past humiliations and the desire for revenge.”
While an AI system can tell a general where the enemy is, it can’t tell you what their death will mean to the country under attack. “Such systems are trained on behavior, not on meaning — they can track what an adversary does but not what he fears, honors, remembers or would die for.”
Counterintuitively, Touval argued that the solution to this technological snafu is for leaders to become well-versed in literature and the humanities. Such a background would have provided Trump with what he clearly lacks: the insight to comprehend that we are not all the same. Other minds have their own goals and histories, different from ours.
“A mind tutored by history and literature knows that actors in the grip of a sacred cause tend to mean what they say — and that bombing a founding myth is more likely to consecrate it than to dissolve it.”
Examples of this wisdom abound in literature and history: Ancient Athens, at the height of its golden age, chose to wage a war of choice against Syracuse; as a result, Athens was weakened so much that it lost its empire. Thucydides, a renowned historian from that era, definitively explained why this happened — a lesson beyond Trump’s grasp.
Shakespeare understood the mind of Trump better than the Pentagon: ‘Macbeth’ is a play about blind ambition. It provides a handy psychological profile of our president, who declares his narcissistic desires on Truth Social in the dead of night and then tries to force events to conform to his wet dream fantasies.
Unlike Trump and Hegseth, our founding fathers, like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, were highly educated and well-versed in history and literature. They were well-versed in political philosophy and keenly aware of the dangers of tyranny, partly through their study of the ancient republics of Rome and Greece.
Because of their historical studies, our founding fathers understood the cost of war. They held a deep distrust of standing armies because, throughout history, they were the stepping stone to despotism. James Madison once described war as a “petri dish” for expanding state power, arguing that, “Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded.”
These examples demonstrate why understanding history and literature is crucial. Tragically, in Trump’s war in Iran, we have rejected our vast repository of human wisdom for high-tech, machine algorithms.
Yes, a philosophy of war based on AI might appear to offer some advantages, but it is fraught with trade-offs and unresolved moral and ethical issues. While AI systems can increase speed and tactical surprise, they also heighten the risk of faster escalation — as we are now seeing today. Worse yet, adopting AI will inevitably trigger a new military AI arms race.
Preventing AI technology from outstripping strategic and ethical considerations requires constant vigilance, oversight and accountability to ensure humans stay in control. Sadly, the Trump administration is doing the opposite.
Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jstim.substack.com.