Daily Inspiration Quote by Barbara Tuchman

Tuchman’s line lands like a cold corrective to the grand narratives nations tell about themselves. “War is the unfolding of miscalculations” refuses the romance of destiny and the moral theater of “inevitable” conflict. It frames catastrophe not as a single evil decision but as a process: errors compounding, assumptions hardening into doctrine, small gambles taken because they’re politically convenient rather than strategically sound. The verb “unfolding” matters. It suggests a mechanism that, once set in motion, reveals itself step by step, each move seeming logical inside the fog of pride, bad intelligence, and bureaucratic momentum.

The subtext is institutional as much as personal. Tuchman isn’t letting leaders off the hook; she’s indicting the systems that reward certainty, punish dissent, and confuse face-saving with strength. A miscalculation can be an honest mistake, but in her work it’s often willful blindness: ignoring signals, misreading an adversary’s resolve, betting that the costs will be someone else’s problem. War, then, becomes less a deliberate choice than a cascade of “surely they won’t” and “we can control this.”

Contextually, Tuchman wrote in the shadow of two world wars and amid Cold War brinkmanship, when misreading intentions could become existential. As a historian, she’s also pushing back against tidy causality. Her intent is to demystify conflict: history’s turning points aren’t always masterminded; they’re frequently botched. That’s what makes the line unsettlingly contemporary: it implies the real enemy is overconfidence dressed up as strategy.