I have one more prediction to add to the last two, and this one might be the most important of the three, because it’s not really a prediction about the war itself, it’s a prediction about the language people are going to use to lie about their relationship to the war. Here it is. As this conflict keeps expanding, as the political winds shift and the script flips the way I already described, there are going to be people who show up claiming to be antiwar, wearing all the language of antiwar sentiment, using all the right phrases about civilians and de-escalation and the horrors of conflict, who are actually still fully in favor of the war continuing. They will not admit this. They will not say “I still support escalation but I’ve dressed it up in different words now.” Instead they will insist, with total confidence, that they never changed at all, that they were always consistent, that they’ve held the exact same position this whole time. And they will be lying, maybe even to themselves, and in doing so they are going to muddy the water for everyone else who is actually trying to think clearly about what’s happening.
This is a different phenomenon than the one I described before, and I want to be precise about the distinction because I think it matters. Before, I was talking about people who genuinely flip, who go from opposing the war to supporting it or vice versa, and who do so because their tribal loyalties shifted along with the shape of the conflict, not because of any deep moral reasoning. That’s a kind of dishonesty too, but it’s mostly unconscious, mostly just people being swept along by identity without realizing it. What I’m describing now is something more deliberate, more calculated, and honestly more corrosive, because it’s not about people who accidentally deceive themselves, it’s about people who consciously repackage a pro-war position inside antiwar language because they’ve figured out that pure pro-war rhetoric doesn’t sell as well anymore, doesn’t poll as well, doesn’t hold up as well once a conflict starts dragging on and casualties start piling up and the public gets exhausted. So instead of abandoning the position, they abandon the vocabulary. They keep the substance and swap out the packaging.
You’re going to see it happen in very specific, recognizable ways once you know what to look for. You’re going to see people say things like “I’ve always been for peace, that’s exactly why we need to keep supporting this war, because the only path to real peace is total victory,” which sounds on its surface like some kind of nuanced antiwar-adjacent position, but functionally means absolutely nothing has changed, they still want the war to continue, they still want more weapons flowing, more strikes happening, more escalation, they’ve just found a way to frame endless escalation as the true path to peace instead of framing it honestly as what it is. You’re going to see people claim that de-escalation right now would actually cause more war later, so the truly antiwar position is to escalate as hard as possible now to “end it quickly,” a framing that conveniently justifies literally any level of violence in the present by pointing to a hypothetical, unfalsifiable future where things would have been worse otherwise. That’s not antiwar reasoning. That’s pro-war reasoning wearing an antiwar costume, and it’s a costume specifically designed to be hard to argue against, because who’s going to stand up and say “no, I think prolonging the war is actually better than trying to end it quickly,” even if that’s functionally the position they’re opposing.
The reason this bothers me so much, the reason I think it’s worth calling out in advance before it fully takes hold, is that this kind of rhetorical shape-shifting doesn’t just deceive the public, it actively poisons the possibility of honest debate. When war and peace stop being clearly defined positions and instead become labels that anyone can slap onto any policy depending on how they want to frame it, you lose the ability to actually have the conversation that matters. If “antiwar” can mean both “stop the fighting now” and “keep fighting harder to end it faster,” then the word has stopped functioning as language and started functioning as a weapon, a tool people use to borrow the moral credibility of a position they don’t actually hold. And once enough people start doing that, once enough people learn that you can say “peace” while meaning “more war,” the whole vocabulary around this conflict becomes unusable, because nobody can trust that the words being used mean what they appear to mean anymore.
And it’s not just the war and peace labels that are going to get twisted, I think the same thing is going to happen to the word “involvement” itself, which is something I already touched on before but I think deserves its own focus here, because I think it’s about to become one of the most contested and most deliberately confused terms in this entire conflict. Right now, involvement gets narrowly defined by a lot of people as boots on the ground, direct troop deployment, an actual declaration of war, and anything short of that gets waved away as “support” rather than “involvement,” as if there’s some clean, meaningful line between the two. I don’t buy that distinction and I never have, but I think as this war keeps expanding, as the political costs of admitting involvement keep rising, you’re going to see people work even harder to redefine involvement into a smaller and smaller box, so that almost nothing counts as involvement anymore except the most extreme, most visible forms of it. Supplying weapons won’t count. Sharing intelligence won’t count. Providing satellite data won’t count. Training foreign militaries won’t count. Funding operations won’t count. Coordinating strikes won’t count. Each of these will get its own careful euphemism, its own technical justification for why it doesn’t really rise to the level of “involvement,” even though stacked together they add up to exactly what any reasonable person would call involvement if they weren’t motivated to avoid the word.
This kind of definitional maneuvering isn’t new, people have been doing it forever with war, it’s basically as old as war itself, but I think we’re about to see an especially aggressive version of it precisely because the stakes are getting higher and the conflict is getting more dangerous and more people are starting to ask uncomfortable questions about how deep the involvement actually goes. The higher the risk, the more incentive there is to minimize how connected you are to that risk in the eyes of the public. Nobody wants to be the country, or the leader, or the political faction that gets blamed for dragging the public into a wider war, so instead of owning that reality, the strategy becomes to redefine the terms until the reality doesn’t sound like what it actually is. Call it support instead of involvement. Call it assistance instead of participation. Call it a partnership instead of a war footing. None of these redefinitions change what’s actually happening on the ground, they just change how comfortable it is to talk about what’s actually happening on the ground, which is precisely the point.
And I think “support” itself is going to get twisted in the same way. Right now if you ask most people what it means to support a side in a war, they’d probably say something about wanting that side to win, wanting them to have what they need to succeed, wanting the public to back their cause. But I think you’re going to see that definition get stretched and narrowed simultaneously depending on who’s using it and what they’re trying to justify. Some people are going to stretch it wide enough that literally any criticism of a wartime ally counts as “not supporting them,” turning support into a loyalty test where questioning strategy or tactics or leadership decisions gets treated as betrayal rather than legitimate concern. And other people are going to narrow it down so far that active material assistance, weapons, funding, intelligence, doesn’t even count as support anymore unless it’s paired with explicit public cheerleading, so that a government can quietly keep fueling a war while claiming in public that it isn’t really “supporting” anyone, just “helping stabilize the region” or some similarly vague phrase that avoids the word support entirely. Both of these moves are dishonest in opposite directions, but they serve the same underlying purpose, which is to make the actual relationship between funding and consequence, between action and responsibility, harder to see clearly.
This is what I mean when I say the language itself is about to become a battlefield, maybe even more contested than the actual physical battlefield in some ways, because the physical battlefield eventually produces facts that are hard to dispute, a strike happened or it didn’t, a ship was hit or it wasn’t, a person died or they didn’t. But the language around those facts, whether we call it involvement or assistance, whether we call it support or partnership, whether we call it war or peacekeeping or defense, that’s infinitely more malleable, and the people with the biggest platforms and the most at stake in how the public perceives their choices are going to spend enormous energy trying to control that malleable space rather than the actual facts, because controlling the facts is much harder than controlling the words used to describe them.
I want to say something about why I think this particular kind of dishonesty, the charlatan kind, the pro-war-dressed-as-antiwar kind, is actually more dangerous in some ways than open hawkishness, even though open hawkishness is more obviously distasteful to people who care about avoiding needless conflict. At least when someone stands up and openly says “I think we should escalate, I think more military action is the right call, I’m not going to pretend otherwise,” you know exactly where they stand, and you can argue with them honestly, you can weigh their reasoning against your own, you can disagree in the open. But when someone shows up claiming to want peace while actually advocating for policies that guarantee more conflict, they’re not just wrong, they’re actively sabotaging the ability of everyone else to have an honest conversation about what’s happening. They’re recruiting the moral authority of the antiwar position to advance the opposite of what that position is supposed to mean, and in doing so they make it harder for genuinely antiwar voices to be heard clearly, because now the word itself has been contaminated, now saying “I’m against this war” doesn’t tell anyone anything specific about what you actually believe should happen next, because the same phrase is being used by people who mean radically different, even opposite things by it.
I think the way to protect against this, both for myself and for anyone else trying to think clearly through all of this, is to stop paying attention to labels almost entirely and start paying attention only to what specific outcome someone is actually advocating for. Not what they call themselves. Not what banner they’re marching under. What do they actually want to happen next, concretely, in terms of policy, in terms of military posture, in terms of funding and weapons and diplomatic pressure. If someone says they’re antiwar but every specific policy position they hold points toward more weapons, more strikes, more funding, more military pressure, then they are not antiwar regardless of what they call themselves, they are pro-war wearing a mask, and the mask doesn’t change the substance underneath it. And if someone says they’re a hardliner, a hawk, fully supportive of aggressive action, but every specific position they actually hold points toward negotiated settlement, reduced funding, diplomatic off-ramps, then maybe the label doesn’t fit them either, maybe they’re more complicated than the label suggests. Labels are cheap. Anyone can claim one. What actually matters, what actually reveals where someone stands, is the specific, concrete outcome they’re pushing for when you strip away all the rhetoric around it.
I also think this is going to get worse before it gets better, precisely because the incentives all point in that direction. As public exhaustion with prolonged conflict grows, and I think it will grow, especially as this expands into something involving more countries, more fronts, more risk of the kind of escalation that could genuinely threaten global stability, the political cost of openly supporting continued war is going to keep rising. And when the cost of honesty rises, the incentive to lie about your position rises right along with it. Nobody is going to stand up in a year or two and say “yes, I still think we should keep pouring resources into an ever-expanding conflict that now involves multiple nuclear-armed countries,” because that position is going to sound increasingly reckless and increasingly unpopular the longer this drags on and the more dangerous it becomes. So instead, people who actually hold that position are going to get better and better at disguising it, wrapping it in language about strength through peace, about ending war through decisive victory, about how the truly compassionate position is actually the most aggressive one because it “shortens the suffering,” whatever twisted logic gets them to a place where they can keep advocating for escalation while sounding like they care about peace more than anyone.
So here’s my actual prediction laid out plainly, separate from all the analysis around it. Watch for people who suddenly claim to be antiwar while never actually shifting a single one of their concrete policy positions. Watch for people who insist they’ve been consistent the whole time while the substance of what they’re advocating for keeps pointing toward more conflict, not less. Watch for the redefinition games around involvement and support and war itself, watch how carefully certain words get avoided, watch how certain actions get renamed into something that sounds less alarming than what it actually is. None of this is going to be obvious on the surface, that’s the whole point of it, it’s designed to be hard to catch, designed to let people keep their moral self-image intact while advocating for outcomes their moral self-image should actually reject. The only defense against it is to stay stubbornly focused on outcomes instead of labels, on what people are actually asking for instead of what they’re calling themselves while they ask for it, and to remember that peace isn’t a word you get to claim just by saying it, it’s a set of specific choices that actually reduce harm to the people who never had any say in any of this to begin with.