Politics & Power Quote by William Kirby

War gets labeled irrational because it looks like collective self-harm: bodies, budgets, legitimacy, all torched for uncertain gains. Kirby’s line needles that comforting moral clarity. He separates “irrational” as an ethical judgment from “rational” as a strategic method, insisting the two can coexist in the same decision. That’s the move: he reframes war not as a breakdown of reason but as reason deployed toward ends we may find appalling.

The intent is diagnostic, almost clinical. By stacking motives - “rational calculation,” “national interest,” “stability,” “longevity of their regime” - he shifts attention from battlefield passions to the colder logic of state survival. The subtext is that the scandal of war isn’t simply that leaders lose their heads; it’s that they often keep them. Regimes may calculate that a quick campaign will deter rivals, unify factions, distract from domestic unrest, or preempt threats. Even losing can be “rational” if the alternative is collapse.

Context matters: Kirby’s lifetime runs through the American and French Revolutions and the Napoleonic Wars, an era when “nation” and “regime” were being reinvented at gunpoint. As a scientist, he speaks in the register of systems and incentives, not sermons. That posture gives the quote its unsettling power: it denies us the easy story that peace would prevail if only leaders were more reasonable. Kirby’s suggestion is darker and more modern - war can be a logical output of political structures where rulers treat citizens as resources and conflict as a tool for continuity.