“God created war so that Americans would learn geography.”
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Norman R. Morrison was a 31-year-old American Quaker and anti-war activist from Baltimore. On November 2, 1965, he doused himself with kerosene and set himself on fire outside the Pentagon office window of Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara to protest against growing U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. He died shortly afterwards. Morrison, a pacifist and father of three, was motivated by reports of civilian suffering – including napalm burns on Vietnamese children – and earlier Buddhist self-immolations in Vietnam, such as that of Thích Quảng Đức. He brought his infant daughter Emily with him but handed her off safely to a bystander before igniting himself; she was unharmed. McNamara later described the act as “a tragedy not only for his family but also for me and the country. It was an outcry against the killing that was destroying the lives of so many Vietnamese and American youth.”
Morrison’s shocking death features in John Frankenheimer’s 2002 film ‘Path to War’, which shows how President Lyndon Johnson became gradually embroiled in a costly foreign war despite his better instincts. (Sound familiar ?) One could even draw a direct line between the decision to escalate the Vietnam war and President Nixon’s decision to take the US dollar off gold in 1971 – which arguably set the US currency and bond markets on a one-way, half-century journey to self-destruction.
Another high-profile military policy disaster: on 17 April 1961, a brigade of 1,400 Cuban exiles with the support of the United States Navy, the US Air Force and the CIA, invaded the swampy coast of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. Their goal was to overthrow Castro. But nothing went as planned. Four ships were supposed to supply them with ammunition and supplies, but not one of them arrived. Two of them were sunk by the Cuban Air Force and the other two fled.
On the second day, the brigade was completely surrounded by 20,000 Cuban soldiers. By the third day, almost all of the insurgents that hadn’t been killed were captured and led off to prison camps.
In his book ‘Groupthink: psychological studies of policy decisions and fiascos’, the psychologist Irving L. Janis writes that the Bay of Pigs plan “ranks among the worst fiascos ever perpetrated by a responsible government… all the major assumptions supporting the plan were so completely wrong that the venture began to founder at the outset and failed in its earliest stages”.
How did such a disaster happen? There was no doubt about the technical qualifications of President Kennedy’s policy team that dreamt up the plan. Dean Rusk, Secretary of State, had been recruited by the President himself from acting head of the Rockefeller Foundation. Robert McNamara (again !), the Secretary of Defence, was an expert statistician who had worked his way up the presidency of the Ford Motor Company. The President’s brother, Bobby, the Attorney General, was one of the most influential members of the team. McGeorge Bundy, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and Richard Goodwin, were Harvard men of impeccable reputation.
Janis points to six major miscalculations made by the President’s team. The first was that the invasion would never be traced back to the US government. The second was that the Cuban air force could be knocked out completely before the invasion began. The third was that the 1,400 men would be willing to carry out the invasion without any help from US ground troops. The fourth was that Castro’s army was too weak to counter the insurgents. The fifth was that the invasion would trigger support by the Cuban underground and set off armed uprisings that would topple Castro himself (sound familiar ?). The sixth was that if the brigade did fail in its primary objective, the men could retreat to the mountains and reinforce anti-Castro guerrilla units. Each assumption was proven wrong.
Groupthink is the means by which humans make their worst mistakes. Because when power is concentrated among a small group their mistakes are bigger and more costly. When power is diffused across the population no one bad decision can lead to disaster.
Janis also identifies the traits common to all groupthink. The group’s discussions are often limited to a handful of alternatives – there is insufficient choice. The group fails to survey the objectives of the task and the values implied by the favoured plan. The group fails to re-examine the consensus choice in the context of risks and drawbacks never initially considered. And the group neglects courses of action initially considered unsatisfactory. They spend almost no time discussing whether they have overlooked anything. And members of the group make little or no attempt to obtain information from outside experts. Members of the group also disregard information from outside the group. And they spend little or no time considering how the chosen policy might be hindered by bureaucratic inertia, thrown off course by political opponents or derailed by accidents. So they don’t make contingency plans that could help them cope with any setbacks.
Beating groupthink boils down to some common sense principles. Nobody is perfect, for example – easy to say, but difficult for a robust group, confident in its own ability, to accept in practice. And the decisions made by groups can be particularly imperfect. The more cohesive the group, the more resistant it becomes to external criticism.
In addition to the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Janis studied in depth four other American policy disasters: Pearl Harbour; Truman’s invasion of North Korea; Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War, and Nixon’s cover-up of the Watergate scandal. He found that groupthink played a critical role in every one.
JFK at least learnt from his Cuban misadventures. When he subsequently held Cabinet meetings, he would frame the issue at hand and invite comments from those assembled. Only once everyone had expressed an opinion would he then weigh in and offer his own judgment. Perhaps someone within the MAGA movement could buy President Trump a copy of Janis’ excellent book.
Speaking of massive geopolitical mistakes brings us to the current situation in Iran. The Middle East has done for multiple political reputations. Take, for example, the Suez crisis. What follows is a lightly edited summary via Grok.
The Suez Canal — opened in 1869 — remains one of the world’s most important shipping routes, connecting the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea and drastically shortening the journey between Europe and Asia. It carried roughly two-thirds of Europe’s oil supply at the time. The canal was owned and operated by the Suez Canal Company, a private firm controlled by British and French shareholders.
Egypt (under British influence for decades) experienced growing nationalist sentiment after the 1952 revolution that brought Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser to power.
In mid-1956, the US and UK withdrew promised funding for Egypt’s massive Aswan High Dam project (partly because of Nasser’s growing ties to the Soviet bloc, including an arms deal with Czechoslovakia).
On July 26, 1956, Nasser responded by nationalizing the Suez Canal Company, intending to use the canal’s toll revenues to fund the dam and assert Egyptian sovereignty.
This move outraged Britain and France (who saw it as a direct threat to their economic interests and prestige) and alarmed Israel (which faced an Egyptian blockade of the Straits of Tiran, blocking Israeli shipping access to the Red Sea, plus fedayeen raids supported by Egypt).
Britain, France, and Israel secretly colluded in a plan (often called the Sèvres Protocol). On October 29, 1956, Israel launched a large-scale invasion of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, rapidly advancing toward the canal. Their stated goals included opening the Straits of Tiran and weakening Egyptian forces.
October 30–31, 1956 — Britain and France issued a pre-arranged ultimatum demanding both Israel and Egypt withdraw 10 miles from the canal — knowing Egypt would refuse.
When Egypt rejected it, Britain and France began aerial bombing of Egyptian targets (October 31) and then landed paratroopers and troops along the canal starting November 5, claiming they were “separating the combatants” and protecting the waterway.
The military campaign was quick and initially successful: Israeli forces crushed Egyptian defenses in Sinai, and Anglo-French troops seized parts of the canal zone.
The plan backfired spectacularly due to massive international pressure. The United States (under President Eisenhower) strongly opposed the action — partly on principle (anti-colonialism), partly because it distracted from the simultaneous Soviet invasion of Hungary, and partly because it feared pushing Arab states toward the USSR.
The Soviet Union threatened rocket attacks on Britain, France, and even Israel.
Massive financial pressure (especially the US threatening to withhold support for the British pound) and condemnation at the United Nations forced a ceasefire.
By November 6–7, 1956, a ceasefire took effect. British and French forces withdrew by late December 1956; Israeli forces pulled out of Sinai and Gaza by March 1957 (under US pressure). A new United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) — the first major UN peacekeeping mission — was deployed to supervise the border.
Egypt under Nasser was militarily defeated but emerged as a huge political victor. Nasser became a hero of Arab nationalism and anti-colonialism across the developing world.
Britain and France suffered deep humiliation. It marked the effective end of their status as independent great powers in the Middle East and accelerated decolonization (e.g., Britain’s influence collapsed rapidly afterward).
Israel achieved temporary gains (open Straits of Tiran until 1967) but had to withdraw from captured territory.
In short, the Suez Crisis was about control of a vital global trade artery, wounded imperial pride, Arab nationalism, and Cold War manoeuvring — and it dramatically accelerated the shift toward a post-colonial world order.
As Professor John MearScheimer has pointed out, it is naïve for a sports team to arrive on the field with their strategy and tactics planned, but to assume that their opponents won’t have their own response. The US-Israeli attack on Iran smacks of groupthink. The economic and geopolitical consequences from an extended conflict will be for the rest of the world to continue to find out.
‘Don’t start wars you can’t stop’. This advice is not just meant for the US government, but for the transnational corporate interests that influence it. The monstrous genocidal fraud otherwise known as Covid was, for many of us, a casus belli. Why, for example, is a former Marxist terrorist with no medical qualifications running the WHO ? Why is its biggest donor a businessman with no medical qualifications but with established links to the eugenics movement ? How did so many anti-human Marxists with an explicit one world government agenda – the UN’s foul Agenda 2030 – manage to infiltrate western administrations ?
The good news is that humanity is waking up – and also that we may not need 51% of the population to start challenging discredited governments; as this presentation makes clear, the real effective figure may be closer to just 3% or so. A small but committed number (or ‘remnant’) is all it takes; most people will simply follow.
Now is not the time to get disheartened, but rather the time to take action, even if that action is strictly limited to peaceful non-compliance with tyrannous socialist regimes. We seek what Churchill called
“Victory. Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.”
Or as another source (specifically John 16:33 KJV) puts it,
“These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.”
………….
As you may know, we also manage bespoke investment portfolios for private clients internationally. We would be delighted to help you too. Because of the current heightened market volatility we are offering a completely free financial review, with no strings attached, to see if our value-oriented approach might benefit your portfolio – with no obligation at all:
Get your Free
financial review
…………
Tim Price is co-manager of the VT Price Value Portfolio and author of ‘Investing through the Looking Glass: a rational guide to irrational financial markets’. You can access a full archive of these weekly investment commentaries here. You can listen to our regular ‘State of the Markets’ podcasts, with Paul Rodriguez of ThinkTrading.com, here. Email us: info@pricevaluepartners.com.
Price Value Partners manage investment portfolios for private clients. We also manage the VT Price Value Portfolio, an unconstrained global fund investing in Benjamin Graham-style value stocks and real assets, and also in systematic trend-following funds. The fund was “Highly commended” in Investment Week’s 2026 Fund Manager of the Year Awards.
“God created war so that Americans would learn geography.”
Get your Free
financial review
Norman R. Morrison was a 31-year-old American Quaker and anti-war activist from Baltimore. On November 2, 1965, he doused himself with kerosene and set himself on fire outside the Pentagon office window of Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara to protest against growing U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. He died shortly afterwards. Morrison, a pacifist and father of three, was motivated by reports of civilian suffering – including napalm burns on Vietnamese children – and earlier Buddhist self-immolations in Vietnam, such as that of Thích Quảng Đức. He brought his infant daughter Emily with him but handed her off safely to a bystander before igniting himself; she was unharmed. McNamara later described the act as “a tragedy not only for his family but also for me and the country. It was an outcry against the killing that was destroying the lives of so many Vietnamese and American youth.”
Morrison’s shocking death features in John Frankenheimer’s 2002 film ‘Path to War’, which shows how President Lyndon Johnson became gradually embroiled in a costly foreign war despite his better instincts. (Sound familiar ?) One could even draw a direct line between the decision to escalate the Vietnam war and President Nixon’s decision to take the US dollar off gold in 1971 – which arguably set the US currency and bond markets on a one-way, half-century journey to self-destruction.
Another high-profile military policy disaster: on 17 April 1961, a brigade of 1,400 Cuban exiles with the support of the United States Navy, the US Air Force and the CIA, invaded the swampy coast of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. Their goal was to overthrow Castro. But nothing went as planned. Four ships were supposed to supply them with ammunition and supplies, but not one of them arrived. Two of them were sunk by the Cuban Air Force and the other two fled.
On the second day, the brigade was completely surrounded by 20,000 Cuban soldiers. By the third day, almost all of the insurgents that hadn’t been killed were captured and led off to prison camps.
In his book ‘Groupthink: psychological studies of policy decisions and fiascos’, the psychologist Irving L. Janis writes that the Bay of Pigs plan “ranks among the worst fiascos ever perpetrated by a responsible government… all the major assumptions supporting the plan were so completely wrong that the venture began to founder at the outset and failed in its earliest stages”.
How did such a disaster happen? There was no doubt about the technical qualifications of President Kennedy’s policy team that dreamt up the plan. Dean Rusk, Secretary of State, had been recruited by the President himself from acting head of the Rockefeller Foundation. Robert McNamara (again !), the Secretary of Defence, was an expert statistician who had worked his way up the presidency of the Ford Motor Company. The President’s brother, Bobby, the Attorney General, was one of the most influential members of the team. McGeorge Bundy, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and Richard Goodwin, were Harvard men of impeccable reputation.
Janis points to six major miscalculations made by the President’s team. The first was that the invasion would never be traced back to the US government. The second was that the Cuban air force could be knocked out completely before the invasion began. The third was that the 1,400 men would be willing to carry out the invasion without any help from US ground troops. The fourth was that Castro’s army was too weak to counter the insurgents. The fifth was that the invasion would trigger support by the Cuban underground and set off armed uprisings that would topple Castro himself (sound familiar ?). The sixth was that if the brigade did fail in its primary objective, the men could retreat to the mountains and reinforce anti-Castro guerrilla units. Each assumption was proven wrong.
Groupthink is the means by which humans make their worst mistakes. Because when power is concentrated among a small group their mistakes are bigger and more costly. When power is diffused across the population no one bad decision can lead to disaster.
Janis also identifies the traits common to all groupthink. The group’s discussions are often limited to a handful of alternatives – there is insufficient choice. The group fails to survey the objectives of the task and the values implied by the favoured plan. The group fails to re-examine the consensus choice in the context of risks and drawbacks never initially considered. And the group neglects courses of action initially considered unsatisfactory. They spend almost no time discussing whether they have overlooked anything. And members of the group make little or no attempt to obtain information from outside experts. Members of the group also disregard information from outside the group. And they spend little or no time considering how the chosen policy might be hindered by bureaucratic inertia, thrown off course by political opponents or derailed by accidents. So they don’t make contingency plans that could help them cope with any setbacks.
Beating groupthink boils down to some common sense principles. Nobody is perfect, for example – easy to say, but difficult for a robust group, confident in its own ability, to accept in practice. And the decisions made by groups can be particularly imperfect. The more cohesive the group, the more resistant it becomes to external criticism.
In addition to the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Janis studied in depth four other American policy disasters: Pearl Harbour; Truman’s invasion of North Korea; Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War, and Nixon’s cover-up of the Watergate scandal. He found that groupthink played a critical role in every one.
JFK at least learnt from his Cuban misadventures. When he subsequently held Cabinet meetings, he would frame the issue at hand and invite comments from those assembled. Only once everyone had expressed an opinion would he then weigh in and offer his own judgment. Perhaps someone within the MAGA movement could buy President Trump a copy of Janis’ excellent book.
Speaking of massive geopolitical mistakes brings us to the current situation in Iran. The Middle East has done for multiple political reputations. Take, for example, the Suez crisis. What follows is a lightly edited summary via Grok.
The Suez Canal — opened in 1869 — remains one of the world’s most important shipping routes, connecting the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea and drastically shortening the journey between Europe and Asia. It carried roughly two-thirds of Europe’s oil supply at the time. The canal was owned and operated by the Suez Canal Company, a private firm controlled by British and French shareholders.
Egypt (under British influence for decades) experienced growing nationalist sentiment after the 1952 revolution that brought Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser to power.
In mid-1956, the US and UK withdrew promised funding for Egypt’s massive Aswan High Dam project (partly because of Nasser’s growing ties to the Soviet bloc, including an arms deal with Czechoslovakia).
On July 26, 1956, Nasser responded by nationalizing the Suez Canal Company, intending to use the canal’s toll revenues to fund the dam and assert Egyptian sovereignty.
This move outraged Britain and France (who saw it as a direct threat to their economic interests and prestige) and alarmed Israel (which faced an Egyptian blockade of the Straits of Tiran, blocking Israeli shipping access to the Red Sea, plus fedayeen raids supported by Egypt).
Britain, France, and Israel secretly colluded in a plan (often called the Sèvres Protocol). On October 29, 1956, Israel launched a large-scale invasion of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, rapidly advancing toward the canal. Their stated goals included opening the Straits of Tiran and weakening Egyptian forces.
October 30–31, 1956 — Britain and France issued a pre-arranged ultimatum demanding both Israel and Egypt withdraw 10 miles from the canal — knowing Egypt would refuse.
When Egypt rejected it, Britain and France began aerial bombing of Egyptian targets (October 31) and then landed paratroopers and troops along the canal starting November 5, claiming they were “separating the combatants” and protecting the waterway.
The military campaign was quick and initially successful: Israeli forces crushed Egyptian defenses in Sinai, and Anglo-French troops seized parts of the canal zone.
The plan backfired spectacularly due to massive international pressure. The United States (under President Eisenhower) strongly opposed the action — partly on principle (anti-colonialism), partly because it distracted from the simultaneous Soviet invasion of Hungary, and partly because it feared pushing Arab states toward the USSR.
The Soviet Union threatened rocket attacks on Britain, France, and even Israel.
Massive financial pressure (especially the US threatening to withhold support for the British pound) and condemnation at the United Nations forced a ceasefire.
By November 6–7, 1956, a ceasefire took effect. British and French forces withdrew by late December 1956; Israeli forces pulled out of Sinai and Gaza by March 1957 (under US pressure). A new United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) — the first major UN peacekeeping mission — was deployed to supervise the border.
Egypt under Nasser was militarily defeated but emerged as a huge political victor. Nasser became a hero of Arab nationalism and anti-colonialism across the developing world.
Britain and France suffered deep humiliation. It marked the effective end of their status as independent great powers in the Middle East and accelerated decolonization (e.g., Britain’s influence collapsed rapidly afterward).
Israel achieved temporary gains (open Straits of Tiran until 1967) but had to withdraw from captured territory.
In short, the Suez Crisis was about control of a vital global trade artery, wounded imperial pride, Arab nationalism, and Cold War manoeuvring — and it dramatically accelerated the shift toward a post-colonial world order.
As Professor John MearScheimer has pointed out, it is naïve for a sports team to arrive on the field with their strategy and tactics planned, but to assume that their opponents won’t have their own response. The US-Israeli attack on Iran smacks of groupthink. The economic and geopolitical consequences from an extended conflict will be for the rest of the world to continue to find out.
‘Don’t start wars you can’t stop’. This advice is not just meant for the US government, but for the transnational corporate interests that influence it. The monstrous genocidal fraud otherwise known as Covid was, for many of us, a casus belli. Why, for example, is a former Marxist terrorist with no medical qualifications running the WHO ? Why is its biggest donor a businessman with no medical qualifications but with established links to the eugenics movement ? How did so many anti-human Marxists with an explicit one world government agenda – the UN’s foul Agenda 2030 – manage to infiltrate western administrations ?
The good news is that humanity is waking up – and also that we may not need 51% of the population to start challenging discredited governments; as this presentation makes clear, the real effective figure may be closer to just 3% or so. A small but committed number (or ‘remnant’) is all it takes; most people will simply follow.
Now is not the time to get disheartened, but rather the time to take action, even if that action is strictly limited to peaceful non-compliance with tyrannous socialist regimes. We seek what Churchill called
“Victory. Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.”
Or as another source (specifically John 16:33 KJV) puts it,
“These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.”
………….
As you may know, we also manage bespoke investment portfolios for private clients internationally. We would be delighted to help you too. Because of the current heightened market volatility we are offering a completely free financial review, with no strings attached, to see if our value-oriented approach might benefit your portfolio – with no obligation at all:
Get your Free
financial review
…………
Tim Price is co-manager of the VT Price Value Portfolio and author of ‘Investing through the Looking Glass: a rational guide to irrational financial markets’. You can access a full archive of these weekly investment commentaries here. You can listen to our regular ‘State of the Markets’ podcasts, with Paul Rodriguez of ThinkTrading.com, here. Email us: info@pricevaluepartners.com.
Price Value Partners manage investment portfolios for private clients. We also manage the VT Price Value Portfolio, an unconstrained global fund investing in Benjamin Graham-style value stocks and real assets, and also in systematic trend-following funds. The fund was “Highly commended” in Investment Week’s 2026 Fund Manager of the Year Awards.
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