Have you seen the wisdom acquired from the Iranian experience

I meet many men who eventually say, “How did you know?” Some will even pat me on the back and tell me, “You were right.”

The problem is that I’m not looking for validation.

Being right after the fact doesn’t get us anywhere.

What we need to understand about boomers—and increasingly about aging generations, including many xers and millennials—is that the stakes are too high for leadership to be based on shallow understanding, fashionable narratives, or wishful thinking.

We do not have the luxury of having people in positions of influence who do not profoundly understand the world they are shaping. Wise decisions require clear thinking, accurate incentives, and the ability to see consequences before they arrive.

The uncomfortable reality is that the price of misunderstanding reality is rarely paid by the people who created the mistake alone. The cost is distributed across society, across institutions, and across future generations.

And the longer we fail to recognize that, the greater the price all of us will ultimately pay.

There are sound bites circulating that argue the United States should never have been involved in the first place. At the same time, there are reports and news coverage suggesting that certain highly motivated groups may have elevated the conflict to the top of the foreign-policy agenda.

There is also ample evidence of the unintended consequences that emerged from the war.

One of the strongest rebuttals to the idea of overwhelming power is this: if you hold all the cards but cannot author the outcome over time, are you truly holding all the cards?

If the result diverges materially from the original objective, then the distinction between possessing power and exercising power becomes impossible to ignore.