You don't understand the saying. If you want to find some of the most anti-war people there are, speak to veterans who have lived through such. If you want to find some of the most pro-war people there are, talk to people who have never experienced the consequences of such. Out of curiosity I just looked up 'us warmonger political advisor guy' because his named temporarily escaped me, and search delivered - John Bolton. [1]

I wanted to see his history because it's just about always the same - and yeah, good ole Yale grad who was a draft dodger getting his college deferment then immediately getting a national guard position to avoid conscription. For those that may not understand the latter - National Guard units were basically never deployed, extremely difficult to enlist in, and basically worked as a means for the well connected to avoid service. Bush, Cheney, Biden, Trump, Clinton, and all of them - draft dodgers, often using similar tricks.

It has nothing to do with political systems. There have been great times under dictatorial systems and horrible times under democracies. It has to do with weak people trying to be strong, which drives chaos. Maybe it could be framed up succinctly in that the "hard decisions" are indeed hard for strong men, but for weak mean they happily make them without the briefest of hesitation, though of course they'll put on a solemn face for the cameras.

[1] - https://search.brave.com/search?q=us+warmonger+political+adv...

I like your philosophy, but I think this phrase is a horrible way to express it. You should try to come up with a different pithy way of saying what you mean.

Perhaps

Beware those who make hard decisions easily.

Or

Hard times come when decision makers pay no part of the cost of their decisions.

It isn’t a good saying, in the sense that what the speaker means by “good times,” “bad times,” “strong men,” and “weak men,” is so open to interpretation as to be meaningless. I like your interpretation. But I think the expression is often interpreted with “strong” implying a certain sort of roughness/propensity toward violence.

Anyway, it is clearly not accurate—“good times” and “bad times” must at least be opposite, however we define them, right? But we see all sorts of countries in history that have multi-generational reinforcing stretches of excellency. And we see many countries that suffered from many-generation-long stretches of bad times. These good and bad men don’t seem to pop up anywhere near as reliably as the expression claims.

A lovely example of this is Starship Troopers and The Forever War. Both were written by veterans, but only one of them was written by someone who served during wartime. Unsurprisingly, it’s the anti-war one.