The Iran Stalemate

Wars always take much less time to start than you think they will, and last much longer than you thought they could.

“In economics, things take longer to happen than you think they will,” the economist Rüdiger Dornbusch famously observed, “and then they happen faster than you thought they could.”

He had financial crises in mind. In history, and especially the history of war, it’s different. Wars take much less time to start than you think they will, and last much longe…