The Emotion of Wars

Wars are easy to begin and difficult to end. Starting one can be a decision made in a room by a handful of people; ending one requires millions of people, and the willingness of societies to accept an outcome that falls short of what they once demanded. As a war continues, its original political objective gets buried under sacrifice, honor, fear, revenge and the survival of governments, until the question shifts from “can we win?” to “how can we stop now, after everything we’ve sacrificed?” This paper examines that dynamic through two current wars – Russia against Ukraine, and the United States against Iran – whose causes and legal circumstances are not comparable, but which both illustrate how hard it is to convert military confrontation back into political negotiation, and why peace so often waits until war becomes unbearable.

War exists in several dimensions at once: Military, political, economic, diplomatic, emotional. The last is the least visible. A commander can estimate the odds of taking a city; an economist can price reconstruction. But a society experiences war through fear, grief, anger, pride and hope – emotions that intensify the longer a war lasts. This is one reason wars continue even as their costs become enormous and their outcomes grow more uncertain. The logic of war is not always the logic of economics, or even of strategy. Sometimes it is the logic of emotion.

At the outset, war is a means to a political objective. But as it continues, the objective gets buried under sacrifice, honor, fear, revenge, and the survival of governments. Eventually the question shifts from “Can we win?” to “How can we stop now, after everything we’ve sacrificed?” That is when a war becomes trapped inside itself.

This is not the whole story, and it would be a mistake to treat it as one. Sometimes a war cannot end early because the balance of power hasn’t yet been settled on the battlefield. Sometimes an aggressor must be deterred, or a country must be allowed to defend itself before anyone can talk seriously. Peace reached too early, or on the aggressor’s terms, can simply be the down payment on the next war.

Russia’s war against Ukraine has entered a stage where the human cost keeps rising even as the front lines barely move. The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU) verified that at least 437 civilians were killed and 2,610 injured in July 2026 alone – a 30 percent increase over June and the highest monthly death toll since May 2022.

“Every month this year the number of killed and injured civilians has increased.”

Danielle Bell, Head of the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, August 13, 2026

As of late August, Russian drone attacks on Kyiv had continued for a fifth consecutive day; President Volodymyr Zelensky said roughly 800 Russian jet-powered drones had been launched over the preceding four days, and a strike on an ammunition depot near Kyiv killed 38 people. Ukraine continues striking targets inside Russia in turn, a self-reinforcing cycle in which each side calculates that continuing to fight will eventually cost the other more than a settlement would, while also calculating that stopping now would be worse than continuing. That is the essence of a strategic stalemate: Not that neither side can fight, but that neither has yet been convinced that fighting costs more than compromise.

This produces a strange psychology. If a side is losing badly, it becomes willing to negotiate. If it is winning decisively, it believes it can win better terms by continuing. But when neither side is losing decisively, each can point to something that seems to justify going on, as “we are making progress,” says one; “they have failed to defeat us,” says the other. Both may be correct from their own vantage point, so neither feels compelled to stop. And the more a country has already sacrificed its soldiers, cities, displaced families, the harder it becomes for leaders to accept a compromise that appears to make those losses meaningless. Past sacrifice cannot be recovered; the only real decision left is what the next year will cost. Societies rarely experience it that way.

The confrontation between the United States and Iran shows a different version of the same problem, one driven less by grinding stalemate than by repeated diplomatic collapse. On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel struck Iran’s nuclear and missile programs; the strikes killed Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei. After roughly a week of an interim leadership council, his son Mojtaba Khamenei was named successor. Iran struck U.S. bases and closed the Strait of Hormuz; the U.S. imposed a naval blockade.

A Pakistan-mediated, 14-point memorandum of understanding, signed June 17, 2026, was meant to open a path to a lasting settlement: An end to strikes, sixty days of tariff-free passage through the Strait, and a window for follow-on talks. It held for about three weeks before Iranian attacks on shipping broke it. By late August the UK House of Commons Library noted six months had passed since the strikes began with no active talks underway. On August 31, fighting resumed after roughly a month’s pause, U.S. strikes near the Strait of Hormuz, and Iranian retaliation against U.S.-linked targets in the UAE, Jordan, Kuwait and Bahrain.

The Strait itself shows how a regional war becomes a global one. It normally carries about a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil trade and roughly a fifth of global LNG shipments. Since the conflict began, flows through it have fallen to a fraction of pre-war levels, and analysts don’t expect a full return to normal before 2027 even under an optimistic settlement. A missile fired in the Persian Gulf can move fuel prices on the other side of the world. Peace, in that sense, is not only a humanitarian aspiration, it is actually an economic one.

If strategy explains how wars are fought, emotion often explains why they continue.

Fear says: If we stop now, the enemy will attack us later. It is the hardest argument to disprove, because there is always another hypothetical threat.

Pride says: We cannot surrender. It can unite a society under attack, but becomes destructive once every concession reads as humiliation, and diplomacy runs entirely on concessions.

Anger says: They must pay. Retaliation creates more casualties; more casualties create more anger. Violence supplies its own justification for further violence.

Humiliation carries defeats, occupations and treaties a population considered unjust across generations. A war that looks irrational to an outsider can look emotionally necessary to people carrying that memory.

Hope may be the most dangerous of the five. It says: One more offensive, one more sanctions round, one more year. “We are almost there” can justify a great deal of continued suffering.

The deepest obstacle to peace is usually not territory but trust. Each side wants security before it will compromise, but security may require compromising first. A ceasefire, from that angle, is genuinely dangerous, it can let an opponent rebuild the capacity to fight again. This is why durable agreements need more than signatures, verification, guarantees, enforcement, and a credible belief the deal survives the next crisis.

The second obstacle is rarely discussed publicly. Leaders need a way to explain peace to their own people. A settlement can be strategically sound and politically impossible, an opposition asks why soldiers died; families of the fallen ask whether the sacrifice meant nothing. A leader needs not just an agreement but a narrative that lets their side say it protected its vital interests. That doesn’t mean both sides get everything; it means neither has to describe itself publicly as having surrendered.

War’s largest cost is usually the least visible, what a destroyed economy would have produced. A missile that is launched cannot become a hospital or a school. A soldier killed at 25 represents decades of foregone work and family life, not just a personal tragedy. And beneath the economic cost is a demographic one, wars kill and displace the young, depress birth rates, and drive skilled workers abroad. A country can rebuild its roads and its military equipment. It cannot as easily replace a generation.

For a child, the war does not end when the shooting stops. A child who hears air-raid sirens for years does not become settled the moment they stop. A child who loses a parent does not recover that parent through reconstruction. The true duration of war is measured in generations, not in the years combat actually lasted.

Modern wars rarely stay confined to their original battlefield. Russia’s war is bound up with the wider European security order; Iran’s confrontation with the U.S. draws in Israel, the Gulf states, and global energy markets. Weapons, sanctions and information all cross borders, so a regional conflict behaves like a network, action in one country moves markets in another, which reshapes politics in a third, which returns to the battlefield. Negotiators at the table may not control every actor capable of restarting the war. And the longer a war lasts, the more it gets absorbed into ordinary life: Institutions built around wartime spending, industries around reconstruction, entire political identities around the conflict. At that point, peace itself requires disruption, which is one reason “frozen conflicts” are not peace, just wars that have temporarily stopped moving.

Military history celebrates victory. It judges wars differently once the emotions have cooled, asking a question leaders rarely pose at the outset: Was the price worth the outcome? War’s cost is immediate; its justification is always projected into the future, tomorrow we will be safer, tomorrow the enemy will negotiate. But tomorrow keeps moving, and the cost keeps accumulating today.

Most wars eventually end in some form of negotiation, even the ones settled by military victory, someone still has to administer borders, exchange prisoners, restore trade. If diplomacy is where every war ends up anyway, the real question is why societies wait so long to let it do what it must eventually do. Wartime leadership is usually defined by the ability to mobilize and win battles. A rarer form of leadership is the ability to recognize when victory has become less valuable than peace, not surrender, not abandoning security, but remembering that military power is a political instrument in service of a country’s people, not an end in itself.

On August 31, 2026, even as Russian drones continued striking Ukraine, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi urged Vladimir Putin, on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Bishkek, to bring the war to an end. Putin’s reply committed to nothing specific. On the same day, the United States and Iran resumed exchanging fire after a month without attacks. Diplomacy exists, the desire for peace exists. And still the wars continue, because that desire is competing against fear, pride, anger, humiliation and the hope that one more round of fighting will produce a better outcome.

Nearly a century ago, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk reduced the entire problem to six words:

“Peace at home, peace in the world.”

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

The line is often read as a slogan. It is closer to a diagnosis. Atatürk was pointing to something that fear, pride, anger and humiliation all obscure: That the peace a nation seeks abroad and the peace it manages to build within itself are not two separate achievements but one. A society still governed by grievance and the demand for vindication rarely produces leaders capable of accepting an imperfect peace, and a state that cannot make peace with its neighbors rarely stays settled at home for long. Perhaps that is the real emotion of wars: Not hatred alone, and not ambition alone, but the difficulty of accepting an imperfect peace while victory still seems possible, right up until the moment a society finally asks not “how much more can we endure,” but “what future are we trying to save?”

• UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU) / OHCHR. (2026, July). Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict, July 2026. UN News, August 13, 2026.
• Reuters. (2026, August 31). Russian Drone Barrage on Kyiv Enters Fifth Day; India’s Modi Tells Russia’s Putin That the War in Ukraine Must End for Humanity’s Sake.
• The Kyiv Independent. (2026, August 30). 800 Russian Jet-Powered Drones Launched Over 4 Days.
• UK House of Commons Library. (2026, August 28). Iran in 2026: Six Months After the US/Israeli Strikes; Israel/US-Iran Conflict 2026: Reopening the Strait of Hormuz.
• NPR. (2026, August 31). Attacks Flare Between the U.S. and Iran After a Monthlong Pause.
• Al Jazeera. (2026, March 8). Iran Names Mojtaba Khamenei as New Supreme Leader After Father’s Killing.
• CNN. (2026, June 17). US Releases Official Agreement with Iran. Read the 14-Point Text.
• Al Jazeera. (2026, August 27). How a 95 Percent Drop in Hormuz Traffic Changed Global Shipping.