State violence is often framed by its authors as education. Time and again we witness presidents, prime ministers, junta bosses, and lesser leaders of nominally government bodies take to the airwaves to announce that a bombing, an invasion, or an assassination is meant to be “a lesson” to the enemy camp.

In The Room Where It Happened, his 2020 memoirs about his time as President Trump’s national security advisor, John Bolton presents the state violence he pushes as “lessons” for states he loathes: Syria, for example, or North Korea. In August 2024, a member of the parliament of Iran, another country for which Bolton reserves particular hatred, used Bolton’s own language when he called for Iran to “teach the Zionist entity and its main supporter, the United States, a historical lesson”– that is, via violence (see here). This lesson was to be an answer to another attempt at educating through murder, namely the killing of Ismail Haniyeh, a Palestinian leader whose assassination at the hands of Israeli forces was itself also said to be a “lesson” directed at the enemies of Israel (see here).

Bolton and Trump disagreed on many things, but in the end they seem to have agreed on one big thing. In late June 2025, Donald Trump, again as president (but with a new national security advisor), bombed uranium enrichment sites in Iran. Will Iran learn its lesson this time? Or will class be called into session again, at the time and place of Iran’s choosing, so that the same lesson — seemingly so simple to grasp — can be explained yet again, written on walls, as always, with splattered blood?

Choose any conflict in the world and you will find that these “lessons” go on getting taught, in circles, indefinitely. American policy in the Middle East around the turn of the century could be summed up in the frat boyish slogan “shock and awe.” By this was meant that America’s enemies would be so overwhelmed by America’s capacity for state violence that they would stop in their tracks and cower from doing violence of their own. In other words, “shock and awe” was a kind of MOOC, a widely available lesson that anyone could access and study. The whole world, not just the Middle East, was expected to learn the lesson that America meant business and was ready to unleash unimaginable violence to get its way. There were plenty of explosions, blinding flashes of light, and piles of smoking rubble so that nobody would miss the point.

But as American experience in the Middle East following the heady “shock and awe” days attests, lessons cut both ways, and almost nobody ever learns what they themselves teach, or what anyone else tries to teach them. Teaching people a “lesson” by bombing them, or killing their leaders, or cutting off their supply of natural gas, or imposing economic sanctions on them, or ensuring that their children do not get food and medicine, seems to be the stupidest education of all. Nobody ever learns the lesson as intended. People do not roll over and capitulate when a “lesson” comes to town. They learn another lesson instead. They learn to hate the enemy even more, to thirst even harder for revenge. When the time is right, those people go on to teach lessons of their own. And in the end, nobody has learned anything.

“War is a hard teacher,” wrote Thucydides, firsthand witness to and chronicler of the Peloponnesian War. State violence was a lesson for Thucydides, too, but not in the way we speak of it today. When states organize killing, it leads to the worst in man coming out, Thucydides saw. Not always, but the lesson of the Peloponnesian War is clear. Those who appeal to the sword will die by it. Empire is a poison which all men are tempted to drink, thinking it will strengthen them and protect them from their rivals. Once war starts, it is almost impossible to stop. “War is a hard teacher.” It does not teach us the lessons we want to drill into our enemies’ heads, for the real lesson is for us, and it is the last thing we, who would be teachers, are willing to learn.

Today, people speak of the “Thucydides Trap,” an abstraction from a war two and a half millennia ago supposedly about whether the United States and the People’s Republic of China will clash. Thucydides would have been reduced to hot tears. Two thousand years and more have passed and still nobody learns anything. The “Thucydides Trap” is not the lesson of the Peloponnesian War. The lesson is that human beings are flawed, broken somewhere, prone to doing foolish things and then calling their folly justified.

Wait for the next round of violence to flare up somewhere in the world. Pay attention to the rhetoric surrounding it. “Lessons” will fly back and forth. But the unteachability of man will be the only thing that anyone could possibly learn at the school of blood-soaked statecraft.