Or: how to trade complexity for detail and pay the price

There is something deeply human – and therefore dangerous – in the temptation to simplify what is not.

History, from this point of view, is nothing but a long collection of mistakes born of overconfidence. One of the most famous bears the name of George Armstrong Custer. When, in 1876, Custer arrived in the vicinity of the Little Bighorn, he was not facing a simple encampment. There was a vast coalition of Native Americans, led by leaders like Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse.

But what matters is not so much reality as perception: and Custer perceived an inferior, dispersed, vulnerable enemy. In other words, manageable.

It is at this point that history stops being chronicle and becomes pattern. Because the pattern repeats itself every time a political or military decision-maker confuses his will with the reality of the facts.
Today that pattern seems to resurface, in a different but recognisable form, in the tensions between the United States and Iran. The protagonist, this time, is Donald Trump, whose posture towards Tehran oscillates between maximum pressure and a rhetoric that tends to reduce an extremely complex system to a sequence of apparently linear moves. The implicit idea – never quite stated, but constantly evoked – is that the situation can be brought to a solution with a combination of firmness, deterrence and, if necessary, force.

The problem is that Iran is not an isolated target.
It is a ramified system, embedded in a network of regional balances, energy interests and asymmetric dynamics that by definition defy simplification.
To think of ‘solving’ a crisis there quickly is to ignore the very nature of the problem. It is a bit like observing an encampment on the banks of a river and convincing oneself that it is just an encampment, when in fact it is the convergence point of much larger forces.

Little Big Horn, after all, is also a matter of mathematics. Not the abstract kind, but the concrete kind: how many there are of them, how many of us, how much we can sustain.
Custer miscalculated – and paid for that mistake in the most definitive way possible. Today the numbers are more sophisticated, they concern energy flows, alliances, indirect response capabilities, but the logic does not change.

Underestimating the scale of a potential conflict does not make it easier: it only makes it more dangerous.

There is another element that links these two historical moments, and that is the illusion of speed. The idea that a crisis can be closed quickly, that there is some sort of shortcut to victory, is a recurring constant. It works well in public discourse, it reassures, it gives the impression of control. But it rarely survives contact with reality.
Contemporary conflicts, especially those involving complex regional actors, are not resolved: they transform, extend, change shape.

It is here that the parallelism ceases to be a mere provocation and takes on a deeper meaning. Little Big Horn is not just an episode from America’s past; it is an operational metaphor, a reminder of what happens when analysis gives way to conviction.
When complexity is treated as a nuisance rather than a given.

Of course, history never repeats itself identically. The differences between a 19th century battle and a contemporary geopolitical crisis are enormous, starting with the scale of the consequences. And this is precisely the most disturbing point.
Custer lost a battle and became a legend. A miscalculation today, in a strategic area like the Persian Gulf, on the other hand, would not produce legends, but shockwaves capable of rippling through economies, alliances and political systems.

Perhaps, then, the most topical lesson does not concern courage or ambition, but something much simpler and much more difficult to accept: the need to recognise the limits of one’s reading of the world. Because, yesterday as today, the problem has never been to attack. The problem is knowing what you are really looking at before you decide to do it.