Why are politicians fixated with declaring war?

War rhetoric is everywhere in our volatile politics: from Ukraine to the resurrection of the war on terror in Gaza, from the ‘wars’ on human smugglers, drugs and crime, through to more metaphorical culture wars, ‘war on motorists’, on a virus – even on climate change. Keir Starmer accuses Rishi Sunak of prosecuting a ‘one-man war on reality’ while ‘anti-woke’ campaigners decry a war on Christmas. Some of these wars are spurious (last time we looked, Christmas is still happening). Others are all too real.

What’s clear is that war rhetoric is attractive either to rally one’s troops or to smear one’s opponents. No surprise: war mobilises. If a politician were to proclaim ‘a mild push on climate change’ or ‘a moderately important attempt to curtail migration,’ they’d get few plaudits from the ranks. But, as my colleague Ruben Andersson and I found in our book Wreckonomics, our addiction to waging (or announcing) war on everything has brought underhand benefits for politicians and massive problems for the rest of us.

For a start, politicians frequently use the spectacle of war to direct attention away from their deeper failures.