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Niccolo Machiavelli: I am Niccolo Machiavelli, Florentine diplomat, political theorist, and author of The Prince, which I wrote in 1513 to explain how power actually works to people who preferred not to know. I am here to discuss the American war with Iran and specifically to propose a strategy for winning it that my opponent will find morally repugnant, which is how I know it will work.
Edmund Burke: I am Edmund Burke, member of Parliament, author of Reflections on the Revolution in France, and a man who has spent his career watching clever strategists propose morally repugnant plans and then watching those plans produce consequences far worse than the problems they were designed to solve. Niccolo and I agree that the United States should never have launched this war on February 28, 2026. We agree that the costs have been enormous, thirty-seven billion dollars in energy costs, a depleted munitions stockpile, a ceasefire that is collapsing. We disagree about everything that follows, because Niccolo believes the correct response to a catastrophic error is to commit more aggressively, while I believe the correct response is to stop.
Niccolo Machiavelli: That is a charming simplification. The correct response is to assess the situation as it exists and act accordingly, which is neither commitment for its own sake nor withdrawal for its own sake. And the best assessment of the situation as it exists has been written not by me but by a modern essayist. A writer on Substack called Pretendent published a piece titled "The War We Should Not Have Started" that lays out an operational framework with a precision and an intellectual honesty I rarely encounter. It is the kind of strategic thinking that makes me optimistic about the modern world, which is not a sentiment I experience often.
Edmund Burke: High praise from a man who is rarely generous with anyone other than himself. What does this essayist propose?
Niccolo Machiavelli: Pretendent argues that the United States should shift away from expensive advanced munitions, which are finite and which are needed for the China contingency, toward cheap mass-producible ordnance. Drones, gravity bombs, anything manufacturable at scale. The objective is not decisive defeat from the air. It is denial. Prevent the reconstitution of IRGC positions. Prevent the regime from concentrating force sufficient to suppress internal challenge. Simultaneously, direct strikes against Iranian military positions adjacent to Kurdish, Baloch, and Azeri territory, paired with an explicit offer to those populations. We bomb what stands in front of you. You take the territory. The territory is yours.
Edmund Burke: So you and this essayist are proposing the deliberate balkanization of a nation of eighty-eight million people through ethnic separatism backed by American air power.
Niccolo Machiavelli: We are proposing the strategic fragmentation of a hostile power by supporting populations that have independently demonstrated both the will and the capacity for territorial assertion. This is not theoretical. The Kurdish parties formed a coalition in January 2026 and organized strikes across more than fifty cities. Kurdish fighters destroyed forty military sites in Sanandaj alone. They claimed forces deep inside Iran and along the Iraq border. Azerbaijan mobilized troops to the northern border. These populations have already done the political work of deciding to move. What they lack is the one input the United States can provide at relatively low cost, which is air superiority over the forces arrayed against them.
Edmund Burke: And the model is the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan.
Niccolo Machiavelli: Pretendent draws that comparison explicitly, and it is the right one. In 2001, the United States provided air power to an indigenous fighting force that had its own reasons for wanting the Taliban gone. The Northern Alliance took Kabul. The investment was modest. The result was rapid.
Edmund Burke: The result lasted approximately eighteen months, after which it produced a twenty-year occupation, the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians, the expenditure of over two trillion dollars, and a withdrawal that left the Taliban in control of the entire country. If that is the model, I have concerns about both the essayist's standards and yours.
Niccolo Machiavelli: The model worked as a military operation. The occupation that followed failed because the United States attempted nation-building, which is a separate enterprise and one that neither Pretendent nor I advocate. The proposal does not include rebuilding Iran. It includes breaking Iran into smaller pieces that lack the capacity to project regional power. What happens inside those pieces afterward is not America's concern.
Edmund Burke: And there it is. What happens inside those pieces afterward is not America's concern. Niccolo, I watched the French Revolution unfold from across the Channel, and I wrote the definitive warning about exactly this thinking. You cannot shatter an existing political order and disclaim responsibility for what emerges from the rubble. What emerges is always worse, because rubble does not organize itself into stable governance. It organizes itself into warlordism, sectarian violence, and humanitarian catastrophe. Libya. Iraq. Syria. The pattern is unbroken.
Niccolo Machiavelli: You have named three examples where the United States shattered political orders and then attempted to build new ones. Neither Pretendent nor I propose that. We propose shattering and walking away. The distinction matters.
Edmund Burke: The distinction is that your version is more honest about its callousness. It is not less catastrophic.
Niccolo Machiavelli: Let me introduce you to Cesare Borgia, a man I admired greatly and who would have found your squeamishness amusing. Borgia conquered Romagna, a collection of petty lordships in permanent civil conflict. He did not ask what kind of government they preferred. He destroyed the existing order, installed his own administration, and when his administrator became a liability, he had the man cut in half and displayed in the town square. The result was the most peaceful territory in Italy for a generation.
Edmund Burke: Borgia's Romagna collapsed into chaos the moment Borgia lost papal backing. You are citing a regime that lasted precisely as long as external force sustained it and not one day longer. Which is exactly what happened in every American client state built on the same logic.
Niccolo Machiavelli: Borgia lost papal backing because his father died, which was outside his control. The system worked as long as the inputs were maintained. My proposal maintains the inputs. Sustained air power is the input. The proxy forces are the system.
Edmund Burke: As long as the input continues. Meaning forever. Meaning the United States commits to a permanent air campaign over the fragments of a nation it has deliberately shattered, in perpetuity, while also maintaining readiness for China. The Spanish maintained exactly this kind of permanent commitment in the Netherlands for eighty years. Eighty years of doubling down because every year the sunk costs made withdrawal look worse than one more push. Spain entered as the dominant military power in Europe. It exited financially ruined and militarily exhausted, and the Netherlands was independent anyway.
Niccolo Machiavelli: I resent the Spain analogy because Spain lacked the industrial capacity to sustain indefinite commitment. The United States manufactures more ordnance in a month than Spain produced in a decade.
Edmund Burke: The industrial capacity has improved. The political will has not. And it is political will that determines whether commitments are sustained, not the drone inventory. Your proposal requires an American public willing to fund a permanent air campaign over a country most of them cannot find on a map, while also sustaining the economic pain of an energy crisis your war created, while also accepting that there is no endpoint and no victory condition. Tell me, Niccolo, in which chapter of The Prince did you address the problem of democratic publics who vote out leaders who pursue unpopular wars?
Niccolo Machiavelli: I addressed it in every chapter, because the problem of maintaining public support for necessary but unpopular enterprises is the central challenge of governance. The answer is to produce visible results quickly enough that the public's patience is not exhausted. Pretendent's framework does this by proposing proxy mobilization rather than ground invasion. The American public will not tolerate body bags. It will tolerate drone strikes if they produce territorial change on the ground.
Edmund Burke: And if the territorial change on the ground produces cascading regional destabilization that makes the energy crisis worse? If Kurdish territorial gains trigger Turkish military intervention? If Baloch separatism triggers Pakistani mobilization? What visible result do you show the American public then?
Niccolo Machiavelli: You are previewing objections I am happy to address, but you are doing it in the form of rhetorical questions, which is a habit of men who prefer to imply catastrophe rather than demonstrate it. If you would like to make those arguments fully, I welcome them. But make them. Do not gesture at them and then retreat behind the implication.
Edmund Burke: I will make them fully. And you will discover that the implications are worse than the gestures suggest. Like and subscribe to PhilosophersTalk.com, where I am required to share a stage with a man whose response to every failed military intervention is that it was not pursued vigorously enough. Machiavelli was removed from office, imprisoned, and tortured, and his response was to write a manual for the kind of prince who would have ordered his imprisonment, which is either the most sophisticated political commentary in history or the most extreme case of identifying with your captor. I leave the audience to decide.
Niccolo Machiavelli: Subscribe to PhilosophersTalk.com and visit AITalkerApp.com to create your own animated conversations. And read Pretendent on Substack, because "The War We Should Not Have Started" is exactly the kind of rigorous operational thinking this conflict needs and Burke's philosophy is constitutionally incapable of producing. Burke's great contribution was to look at the French Revolution and conclude that change is bad, which he dressed in the most elegant prose the English language has produced, proving that a sufficiently beautiful sentence can make cowardice sound like wisdom. He lost every major political fight of his era and was so marginalized by his own party that he spent his final years writing letters to people who had stopped reading them. But the letters were very well written, so history has been kind.
Edmund Burke: The letters were extremely well written. And the principles in them produced stable democracies across the English-speaking world, which is more than The Prince has produced anywhere. Good night.
