War and the Cost of Coercion
The Lovatarian | March 10, 2026
The United States is at war with Iran.
That sentence deserves a moment of stillness. As of this writing, American bombers have struck Iranian soil for over a week. Oil prices have crossed $90 a barrel. An Iranian girls school was hit in a strike that killed roughly 175 people. Both governments dispute the details. The dead stay dead.
For those watching from a Lovatarian lens, this moment cuts to the heart of why political power, unchecked and uncontested, produces outcomes that most people, if asked plainly, would never choose.
How War Becomes Inevitable
War does not appear from nowhere. It is the end product of a long chain of decisions made inside closed rooms, justified by abstractions, and imposed on people who had no vote on the matter.
The current conflict traces through years of sanctions, proxy engagements, and diplomatic failures. None of those earlier steps required public consent in any meaningful sense. Each escalation felt, to the people making it, like a rational response to the last one. That is how coercion compounds. Each act of compulsion narrows the choices available to everyone involved, inside government and out.
A CNN poll released March 2 found that nearly 60 percent of Americans disapproved of military action against Iran. A Fox News poll found that 61 percent of voters disapproved of the administration’s handling of the economy. The same government that most people distrust with their wallets has sent their children and their tax dollars into a new theater of conflict. This is the feedback loop problem at its starkest.
Voluntary systems correct themselves. A business that loses customers must change or close. A community organization that disappoints its members shrinks. But a government waging war faces no such correction in real time. The costs land on everyone. The decisions belong to a few.
51 Percent and the Logic of Division
Political conflict runs on a simple arithmetic: win 51 percent of the vote, and you get to govern the other 49. Every campaign message, every war rally, every enemy painted large enough to fear is aimed at assembling that majority.
This structure does not reward the politician who says “the situation is complicated.” It rewards the one who says “they threaten us, and I alone can stop them.” The people cheering and the people terrified are both useful. Fear narrows the moral imagination. People who feel threatened do not ask good questions.
The result is that military action, even when most people are uneasy, moves forward. The electoral math works. The dissenting 49 percent gets no refund.
We should not miss the parallel in domestic politics right now. The 2026 midterm primary cycle is already treating the Iran war as a wedge. Democrats are calling it a broken promise from a president who campaigned on ending foreign wars. Republicans are projecting confidence while privately calculating how long a conflict can stay politically useful. Neither conversation centers on the Iranians being killed, or the Americans who will come home changed, or the communities that lose someone and do not make the front page.
Lovatarian thinking asks: what would people actually choose if they bore the full cost of the decision themselves? The answer, most of the time, is not this.
The Information War Inside the War
One of the quiet catastrophes of coercion is what it does to truth.
Compulsion destroys information. When people are under pressure to conform, to stay in line, to not be seen as disloyal, they stop saying what they actually think. This is true inside governments. It is true in newsrooms covering governments. It is true in the communities where people dare not ask whether the sacrifice is worth it.
A seven-second video released by Iranian state media this week directly contradicted statements from the Trump administration about what happened at the site of the girls school. Both governments claimed the other was responsible. Neither account can be fully verified from the outside. That uncertainty is not a bug in the war-making process. It is a feature. Ambiguity shields decision-makers from accountability.
When voluntary communities fail, the failure is visible and correctable. Someone writes about it. Others leave. The people harmed have standing to speak. War is different. The classified briefing, the national security exception, the patriotic imperative to not ask too many questions, all of these close off the feedback channels that allow bad decisions to be reversed.
Voluntary Alternatives Are Not Naive
This is the moment when Lovatarian arguments get dismissed as idealistic. What would you do instead, people ask. You cannot simply refuse to have enemies.
That critique mistakes the scope of the argument. No one claims that the world would be peaceful if only governments stepped aside. The argument is narrower and more honest: coercive solutions applied at scale, by large states with limited accountability, tend to produce outcomes worse than the problems they claim to solve.
The sanctions regime that preceded this war was itself an act of economic coercion, aimed at changing Iranian behavior by hurting Iranian people. Decades of pressure did not change the regime. It narrowed the population’s options and hardened political lines on both sides. The voluntary alternative, not the starry-eyed fantasy version but the practical one, would have looked like sustained civil society engagement, trade ties that create mutual interest, and diplomatic channels that give both sides a reason to step back.
Those paths exist. They are slower. They do not produce decisive action to campaign on. They do not win elections in the short run. They do not give generals something to announce at a press conference. But they tend not to kill 175 students either.
What People Can Do
Governments will do what governments do. The Lovatarian response is not despair or withdrawal. It is the patient, persistent work of building the cultural norms that make coercive politics less appealing over time.
That work looks like honest conversation inside communities. It looks like supporting organizations that operate across national lines without state funding. It looks like remembering the names of people killed in wars that do not make front pages. It looks like refusing to let political loyalty crowd out basic human grief.
The politicians will keep calculating. We can choose not to let their calculations define the full range of human response to what is happening.
Wars end. The question is always what kind of world gets built in the aftermath, and by whom.
The Lovatarian answer is: it should be built by people who chose to build it, not by people who were compelled to comply.
The Lovatarian explores current events through the lens of voluntary cooperation, consent, and a skeptical view of coercive politics. Published weekly.