Authored by Sohrab Ahmari via UnHerd,
An all-too common analytic error is to reduce complex problems to simplistic causes (sancta simplicitas, "holy simplicity", as Nietzsche mockingly referred to this tendency, particularly among religious believers). But there is also the reverse error: a deliberate seeking out of complexity when simple explanations suffice.
In the wake of the Democratic blowout in Tuesday's midterms - South Carolina, Kansas, and Texas have gone blue - beware the preachers of holy complexity bent on obfuscating the obvious: President Trump and the GOP broke their pledge of peace, launched an ill-conceived war with Iran, and thus exacerbated an affordability crisis they'd been elected to solve.
To be sure, other failures marked the first two years of the Trump administration: the chaotic tariff regime, the grotesque corruption, the performative cruelty of ICE, Trump's own descent from mere reality-TV vanity to ballroom-obsessed, Neronian caprice. But the Iran war - given both its inflationary effects and galling betrayal of one of Trump's core pledges - looms largest.
The preachers of holy complexity have good reason to avoid this bare truth. Because it indicts their entire project: a hawkish foreign policy that sees US and Israeli interests as identical or nearly so. Its advocates have for years underwritten Israeli maximalism at great cost to American global prestige and domestic well-being. After the ballot-box shellacking wrought by the Iran
