Niccolo Machiavelli vs Edmund Burke on the Iran War: The Case for Doubling Down vs the Case for Walking Away

Both men agree the war should never have been started. They cannot agree on a single thing that follows from that shared premise. The sources, the strategy, and why these two.

Why This Topic

The Iran war started on February 28, 2026, when the United States and Israel launched joint strikes on Iranian military and government targets, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in the opening hours. Iran responded by closing the Strait of Hormuz, launching missiles at US bases and allied Gulf states, and triggering a global energy crisis that has cost American households over thirty-seven billion dollars so far. A ceasefire brokered by Pakistan took effect on April 8. That ceasefire is now in shambles, with competing naval confrontations in the Strait and a US blockade of Iranian ports that has done nothing to resolve the underlying conflict.

The debate over whether to continue the war or seek an exit has produced one of the most interesting pieces of strategic writing we have read this year: “The War We Should Not Have Started” by Pretendent on Substack, which makes the case, from the perspective of someone who opposed starting the war, that the structural logic now demands continuation. The argument is that the costs predicted by war opponents have already been incurred, the pre-war world is gone, and American deterrent credibility depends on demonstrating the willingness to finish what was started, however imprudently it was started. It is a genuinely impressive piece of strategic analysis, and we built much of Machiavelli’s case around it.

The underlying philosophical question is one of the oldest in political thought: when you have made a catastrophic error, does wisdom lie in cutting your losses or in committing fully to the course you are on? That question has a five-hundred-year-old answer on each side, and the two men who wrote those answers are about as far apart as political philosophers can get.

Why Niccolo Machiavelli

Machiavelli is the natural advocate for doubling down, and not because he is a simplistic hawk. His argument in The Prince, particularly chapters three through five, is specifically about the catastrophe of half-finished conquests. When you take a territory with different customs and institutions, he writes, you either destroy the old order completely and build a new one, or you lose everything. The middle way is the worst of all options because it leaves your enemies alive, resentful, and capable of reorganizing against you while you have already spent the resources of conquest without achieving its benefits.

The Discourses on Livy reinforce this with historical examples. Machiavelli’s contempt for the “middle way” in matters of force is absolute. He looked at the Italian city-states of his era, which hired mercenary armies and relied on foreign patrons rather than committing their own populations to warfare, and he saw a civilization committing slow suicide through half-measures. The parallel to American strategy in the Middle East, where enormous resources are committed but full strategic commitment is withheld, would be instantly recognizable to him.

Crucially, Machiavelli would not need to argue that the war was wise. He would argue that the question of wisdom is irrelevant once the costs have been incurred. The only relevant question is what the current situation demands, and he has a very specific answer to that question that involves proxy mobilization, sustained low-cost bombardment, and the deliberate fragmentation of the Iranian state along ethnic lines.

Why Edmund Burke

Burke is the definitive voice against imposed regime change, and his argument comes from the most famous political treatise against revolutionary transformation ever written. Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1790, is a sustained argument that you cannot destroy an existing political order and expect anything good to emerge from the wreckage. Political institutions are not machines that can be disassembled and reassembled according to rational design. They are organic growths shaped by centuries of accumulated experience, and tearing them up releases forces that no designer can predict or control.

Burke applied this logic not only to France but to every case of externally imposed political transformation he encountered. He supported the American colonists against Britain, arguing that the British attempt to override the colonists’ organic political development would produce exactly the catastrophe it was meant to prevent. He opposed hasty intervention against the French Revolution, warning that military action would radicalize the Revolution and produce something worse than the monarchy it replaced. He was right on both counts.

For this debate, Burke brings something Machiavelli cannot counter easily: a track record of being right about the consequences of the exact kind of strategic ambition Machiavelli advocates. Every case Burke warned about played out as he predicted. The question is whether Iran is another instance of the same pattern or a genuinely different situation that his framework does not cover.

Who Else We Considered

Clausewitz was the strongest alternative to Machiavelli for the “continue the war” position. His concept of the culminating point of victory, the moment where further advance weakens rather than strengthens your position, is directly relevant. But Clausewitz would focus narrowly on military strategy, and the real debate here is political and philosophical, not tactical. Machiavelli covers the military ground while also engaging the deeper questions about regime change, credibility, and the ethics of strategic action that make this topic worth debating.

Wellington could have taken Burke’s side as the practical soldier who understood the limits of what military force can actually accomplish. But Wellington has already appeared twice on this channel debating the Iran war against Napoleon, and we wanted a fresh voice. Burke also brings philosophical depth that Wellington, for all his strategic brilliance, does not possess.

Thomas Paine was considered as Burke’s opponent since their historical rivalry is one of the most famous in political philosophy. But Paine’s instincts on this topic are muddled. He would support the right of the Iranian people to overthrow their government but oppose American imperial intervention to do it for them. That internal conflict makes him a less clean debater than Machiavelli, whose position is unified and unapologetic.

Hobbes was briefly considered for the continuation side, since his framework of sovereign authority and the state of nature maps onto some of the deterrence arguments. But Hobbes lacks Machiavelli’s comfort with proxy warfare and ethnic manipulation, which are the most provocative and substantive elements of the doubling-down position.

Why Each Man Takes the Position He Does

Machiavelli’s position follows directly from his experience watching Florence destroy itself through indecision. He spent fifteen years watching his city bleed in an on-again, off-again war against Pisa that everyone knew needed to be resolved but nobody wanted to pay the full cost of resolving. The parallel to Trump’s bomb-stop-bomb-stop pattern with Iran is almost exact. When Machiavelli argues against half-measures, he is not speaking abstractly. He is speaking from the specific, personal experience of watching half-measures consume his country.

His use of Rome against Carthage as the central historical example is characteristic. Three wars over 118 years, each caused by the failure to finish the previous one. The total cost of three wars was immeasurably greater than the cost of finishing the first one would have been. This is his core claim applied to Iran: the cost of cycling through escalation and withdrawal will always exceed the cost of decisive commitment, however brutal that commitment must be.

Burke’s position follows from the French Revolution and, more broadly, from his career-long argument that political institutions cannot be designed from outside. He watched the French revolutionaries attempt to build a rational political order from first principles, and he watched that attempt produce the Terror, the Revolutionary Wars, and eventually Napoleon. His prediction that intervention against the Revolution would produce something worse than the monarchy was vindicated so thoroughly that it became the foundation of conservative political philosophy for the next two centuries.

For Iran specifically, Burke would insist that the assumption underlying the doubling-down strategy is the same assumption that produced the Iraq catastrophe: the belief that removing a hostile regime creates space for something better. His argument is that this belief reflects a universalist liberalism that does not survive contact with the actual political cultures it claims to liberate. Iranian political culture, shaped by Shia Islam, the memory of Mossadegh, and the experience of the Revolution itself, will not produce a Western-style outcome regardless of how much ordnance is applied. Even the Green Movement of 2009 and the Mahsa Amini protests of 2022, the closest things to liberal democratic uprisings in Iranian history, were not seeking Western-style secular democracy. They were seeking reform within an Iranian framework.

The most interesting tension in the debate is that both men agree the war should not have been started, but for completely different reasons. Machiavelli opposed it because the timing was wrong and the strategy was incoherent. Burke opposed it because the entire concept of externally imposed regime change is wrong. This shared conclusion masking diametrically opposed premises is what makes the debate productive rather than just combative.

A Note on the Sources

Machiavelli’s positions are drawn primarily from The Prince (chapters 3-5 on new principalities and why half-measures fail, chapter 12-13 on auxiliary forces and why dependence on foreign arms is fatal) and the Discourses on Livy (the extended analysis of Roman military practice and the argument against the middle way in matters of force). His personal experience with the Pisan War, documented in his diplomatic correspondence and later writings, provides the autobiographical anchor for his contempt toward strategic indecision.

Burke’s positions are drawn from Reflections on the Revolution in France (the central argument against revolutionary transformation and designed political orders), his speeches on the American colonies (supporting organic political development against imperial imposition), and his speech on Fox’s East India Bill (the argument that governing foreign peoples requires understanding their institutions rather than replacing them). Burke’s correspondence during the Revolutionary Wars, in which he reluctantly supported limited intervention while warning against overcommitment, is particularly relevant to the Iran debate.

The strategic framework from “The War We Should Not Have Started” by Pretendent on Substack provided the contemporary analytical backbone for Machiavelli’s position, particularly the argument that American deterrent credibility rests on demonstrated willingness to absorb cost rather than on stockpile depth alone, and the specific proposal for sustained low-cost bombardment paired with proxy mobilization targeting Kurdish, Baloch, and Azeri populations. It is the most serious and intellectually honest version of the continuation argument we have encountered, and Machiavelli cites it repeatedly in the debate itself.

What Comes Next

Watch Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of the Machiavelli vs Burke debate on the PhilosophersTalk YouTube channel. Parts drop in sequence; subscribe at PhilosophersTalk.com to get every debate in your inbox the day it goes live.

Future debates in development include several pairings we have been holding for the right moment. The Iran conflict has produced enough strategic material to sustain multiple angles, and we are not done with it yet.

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