A man without convictions, without habits, without traditions. He had no plan. Yet he alone could justify what had to be done through his ideal of glory and grandeur, his insane self-adulation, his boldness in crime, and his frankness in lying.
That was Leo Tolstoy describing Napoleon Bonaparte in War and Peace.
The parallels to Donald Trump are striking. But my interest lies less in the similarities between the two men than in what they reveal about the public’s fascination with strong leaders during periods of social upheaval and geopolitical disorder. In such times, people are drawn to larger-than-life figures who seem capable of imposing order on chaos, embodying the hopes, fears, and ambitions of an unsettled age.
Tolstoy regarded this as a profound misunderstanding of how history works. Great men do not make history; they are swept along by forces much larger than themselves. The most they can do is alter its course at the margins. They are not masters of events but riders on a wave of complexity whose origins and destination remain largely beyond their control.
War and Peace follows two Russian families against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars beginning in 1805 and culminating in the French invasion of Russia in 1812. On one level, it is a sweeping family saga. On another, it is a remarkably detailed military history with descriptions of campaigns, battles, war councils, and the strategic thinking of generals on both sides.
But Tolstoy is no passive storyteller. He is an intrusive narrator who periodically stops the action to remind the reader that his real subject is Napoleon and the way history is understood. Napoleon was the great disruptor of the early nineteenth century. Like Trump, he was intensely polarizing and impossible to ignore. People could not stop talking about him.
Tolstoy, writing half a century after the events in his novel, tells the reader that historians remain divided. Was Napoleon a genius or merely a lucky fool?
His rise to power was as unconventional as Trump’s. He was an outsider, not even French but Corsican. He emerged from the chaos of the French Revolution as a national hero after military success in Italy. That was followed by a disastrous Egyptian campaign in which the French army was ultimately forced to surrender after Napoleon abandoned it and returned to France to pursue political power.
He was intelligent, charismatic, and politically gifted. But his rise owed as much to the collapse of the old French order, weak governments, public exhaustion, and his ability to cultivate an image of strength and success as it did to any achievements of his own.
France and Britain were the superpowers of the early nineteenth century, much as the United States and China are today. Nearly all of Napoleon’s grand strategy revolved around that rivalry. After abandoning hopes of invading Britain following defeat at Trafalgar, he launched the Continental System, a trade embargo designed to isolate Britain from European markets. Like Trump, he started a trade war.
Russia’s Tsar Alexander increasingly resisted the arrangement, and in 1812 Napoleon invaded Russia to force him to comply. The campaign was initially a spectacular tactical success. French armies defeated Russian forces in the field and occupied Moscow. Yet it became one of history’s greatest strategic failures. Russia refused to surrender, the French supply chains collapsed, and the retreat from Moscow turned into a catastrophe of cold, disease, hunger, and exhaustion. Most of the Grand Army never returned.
The parallels to Trump’s war against Iran are not exact, but they are suggestive. Both campaigns achieved important military objectives while failing to resolve the larger strategic problem that prompted the war in the first place. In both cases, a superior military confronted a weaker adversary that used geography, asymmetry, and unconventional methods to create leverage and avoid decisive defeat.
Yet the deeper lesson of War and Peace is not about Napoleon. It is about how history works.
Tolstoy was not a philosophical observer of war. He served as an artillery officer during the Crimean War and took part in the defense of Sevastopol during its famous siege. Before the war, he largely accepted the conventional view that battles were directed by generals and won through superior plans. What he witnessed was completely different.
Strategies evaporated once the fighting began. Orders arrived late, were misunderstood, or no longer matched conditions on the ground. The courage, fear, confusion, and initiative of ordinary soldiers often mattered more than the directions from officers or headquarters. The battlefield was not a chessboard directed by great men but a sea of chaos in which few participants understood the larger picture, and where most were focused on personal survival.
Tolstoy concluded that history worked much the same way.
He asked, What moves peoples? What force moves nations? But then he asked a deeper question: “What is power?”
That question goes to the heart of how we see the world. We mistake a world of processes for a world of things. We think in terms of leaders, wars, nations, ideologies, and factions as if they were separate actors moving independently through history. In reality, they are parts of a larger whole, interacting in ways that are often difficult to see, and harder to understand.
Breaking reality into component parts is useful. It helps us identify patterns and simplify complexity. But when it becomes our dominant way of thinking, we lose sight of the relationships that connect those parts together.
Tolstoy illustrated this with the example of a chess player who loses a game and becomes convinced that a mistake in the opening caused his defeat. He ignores the many mistakes that followed and the countless decisions that shaped the outcome. He focuses on the one error his opponent exploited and treats it as the explanation for everything.
“How much more complex than this is the game of war,” Tolstoy observed.
Unlike chess, war unfolds under severe constraints of time, imperfect information, conflicting objectives, and the interaction of millions of human wills.
He was addressing a deeply human need for simple explanations. We search for decisive moments, turning points, and great men because complexity is uncomfortable.
The insight I take from Tolstoy is that historians compress countless actions, decisions, accidents, and circumstances into a single event, then attribute that event to the will of a leader. Yet the relationship is often the reverse. Events emerge from forces far larger than any individual can fully perceive or control. They generate consequences that exceed the scope of human agency and understanding. Leaders and nations are carried along by these currents much as a rider is carried by a wave. Their actions matter, but only to the extent that they align with forces already in motion.
The lesson is not that leaders are unimportant. It is that they are less important than we imagine.
The current war in the Persian Gulf was not necessarily inevitable, but it cannot be understood apart from the long arc of history that preceded it. The struggle for Middle Eastern oil was intertwined with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, shaped the outcome of two world wars, and became a central pillar of American foreign policy throughout the twentieth century. The present conflict is not an isolated event but the latest chapter in a century-long struggle over energy, power, and strategic geography.
That perspective challenges a common misconception about the Trump administration. One can criticize its policies—and I certainly do—but it is difficult to argue that Trump or his advisers were blind to the importance of energy and strategic chokepoints. The 2025 National Security Strategy repeatedly identifies freedom of navigation, critical supply chains, strategic materials, Middle Eastern oil and gas supplies, and the chokepoints through which they pass as core national interests. Competition with China is framed as both an economic and geopolitical contest centered on trade routes, strategic resources, and critical infrastructure.
In that sense, “energy dominance” and “drill, baby, drill” were not slogans born of ignorance. They reflected a coherent view that energy abundance, control of supply chains, and access to strategic sea lanes are fundamental sources of national power.
The problem was not a failure to recognize the importance of energy. The problem was the assumption that these forces could be managed through a short, decisive military campaign.
This is where Tolstoy’s view of history becomes useful. Looking backward, it is tempting to reduce the Iran War to a single decision by a single man. Trump chose to attack Iran and therefore the war followed. But that explanation stresses cause and effect without accounting for processes and systems.
The forces that produced this conflict were decades in the making: the Iraq War, the rise of Iran as a regional power, the shale revolution, the evolving relationship between Saudi Arabia and Iran, China’s growing dependence on Middle Eastern energy, and the enduring strategic importance of the Strait of Hormuz. The war was not inevitable in the sense that it had to occur when it did, but some confrontation among these forces was becoming increasingly difficult to avoid.
Trump’s decision to strike Iran deserves scrutiny and criticism. Let me be clear: it ranks among the greatest military and strategic blunders of modern history.
That is one reason the comparison with Napoleon is so instructive.
Napoleon was arguably the greatest military commander of his age. He invaded Russia after years of extraordinary success on the battlefield and after repeatedly proving that boldness, speed, and superior force could overcome seemingly impossible obstacles.
Trump attacked Iran after years of mixed results, failed pressure campaigns, and repeated overconfidence in the power of sanctions, coercion, and American leverage.
Napoleon had earned the right to believe in his own military genius. Trump had not.
Yet both men appear to have shared a common assumption: that superior force could rapidly solve a larger strategic problem. History has a way of punishing that assumption.
The role of the “great man” largely began and ended with the decision to strike. After that, control reverted to the flow of history.
What followed increasingly belonged to forces larger than Trump or any other individual leader: energy markets, shipping networks, alliances, domestic politics, military institutions, financial systems, and the reactions of millions of people whose actions no one could fully predict or control. Like the battlefield Tolstoy observed at Sevastopol, events quickly overtook those who set them in motion.
This is why reactions to the Iran War have swung so wildly with each new headline. One day Trump is a genius. The next day he is a fool. One analyst argues that everything turned on a failure to seize Hormuz; another insists the outcome was determined by Chinese strategy. Each explanation captures part of the story while mistaking the part for the whole.
People focus on a move and mistake it for the game itself. They cannot separate the move from the board, much less the board from the larger forces shaping the outcome.
The agreement signed between the United States and Iran last week is far from a done deal. I do not want to get lost in details, events, and risks that remain too complex and uncertain for anyone to fully understand at the moment. Yet from today’s vantage point, it is difficult to see the agreement as anything other than a recognition of Iran’s extraordinary leverage through the Strait of Hormuz and the unacceptable economic consequences of testing that leverage further.
The immediate reality is that Trump is under intense criticism for what many view as a surrender to Iran. The great man suddenly looks weak.
Yet Trump appears to have recognized that this war cannot be won on the battlefield and that the risks to the global economy are too great to ignore. Whether out of pragmatism, necessity, or both, he is now hoping to find a way out before the situation deteriorates further.
Many observers are searching for a hidden strategy behind what appears to be a capitulation. Perhaps there is one. But more often than not, circumstances are roughly what they seem to be. We have a tendency to invent elaborate explanations when simpler ones will do.
In that sense, Trump increasingly resembles the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. He did not create the forces that produced this conflict. But by acting at a particular moment, he helped unleash forces that now exceed his ability—or anyone’s ability—to control. Anyone who claims to know how this story ends understands neither history nor war.
Like the soldiers at Sevastopol, we remain too close to the battlefield to discern the shape of events. The outcome lies somewhere beyond the smoke, confusion, and competing narratives of the present moment.
Tolstoy’s enduring insight is that history is not made by riders directing the wave. The wave comes first. Leaders, nations, and armies rise upon it, struggle against it, and are ultimately carried by it. Only afterward do historians persuade themselves that someone was steering all along.
By the same author:
Truth Is No Longer the Bottom Line
Hormuz: A Logistics Crisis, Not Yet an Inventory Crisis
The Search for a Living Myth
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Art Berman is Director of Labyrinth Consulting Services, Sugar Land, Texas, and a world-renowned energy consultant with expertise based on over 40 years of experience working as a petroleum geologist. Visit his website, Shattering Energy Myths: One Fact at a Time, and learn more about Art here.
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