Then the wizards of high finance began to work their alchemy. As they moved themselves and the rest of the economy up the slippery hill to higher yields, the word “risk” not only started losing its implication of danger but also actually started to become synonymous with “high-yield.” Taking on more and more risk, which in finance usually means convoluted, obscure and massive amounts of debt, became a strategy of fearlessness. Right up until the whole thing imploded, causing a global recession that still hasn’t fully ended.

AD

AD

And as with finance, now too with politics. Voters decided to “take a chance” with Donald Trump — a man who clearly didn’t know anything relevant to governing, a man whose internal moral compass always pointed right at his own personal interest, a man with a history of allegedly scamming and chiseling people who worked with or bought from him, a man unmoored and unstable in his thinking and behavior, and a man who had learned how to make fantastical promises to a vulnerable electorate. What could go wrong?

And now he is the commander in chief of the largest military arsenal in the world. Again, what could go wrong? Already you can reading apologies from pundits saying that President Trump’s very instability could pay dividends by scaring adversaries. And what is wrong with that, you ask? Here’s what: It’s once again sleight-of-handing the “risk” part of this bargain out of the equation. Yes, you may get a higher yield, sometimes, but you also may get a fireball of disaster. Not all war is inevitable. Some of it results from blundering, backing adversaries needlessly into corners, making wild threats and proclaiming positions from which it is impossible to back down.

The terrain surrounding potential war is not simple. It is a minefield that you blunder across at your peril and everyone else’s peril.