Sitting on a sofa on a Sunday afternoon
Going to the candidates’ debate
Laugh about it, shout about it, when you’ve got to choose–
Every way you look at it, you lose
–Simon and Garfunkel, “Mrs Robinson“
I didn’t watch the Republican debate last night. I don’t even remember what I did instead. I read about the debate this morning. I’m glad I missed it.
On foreign policy, the Republicans are divided over Ukraine, but united in their desire for war with Mexico, China, and migrants. That’s all I need to know to dismiss them from consideration. The Democrats have the mirror image view: united on war in Ukraine, divided and equivocal on the rest. That’s all I need to know to dismiss them.
No mainstream Republican or Democratic candidate has anything like a principled, good faith commitment to an anti-interventionist stance on foreign policy. “Anti-interventionism” is, in mainstream American discourse, nowadays derided as “populist isolationism” or “Blaming America First,” and dismissed without further consideration. As far as the mainstream Republican and Democratic candidates are concerned, then, we face a choice between various sub-species of hawk: rabid hawk, callow hawk, chicken hawk. None of the participants in last night’s debate, including the most “isolationist” of them, and few of those commenting, seem to have learned very much from the last 20 or 50 or 70 or 120 or 150 years of American warfare. The lesson to be learned: the need for articulable limits on the resort to military force. Try to raise the issue in virtually any form, and you will, within short order, be on the receiving end of some obvious fallacy intended to forestall discussion and fast-forward to the battlefield.
Commentators have described Chris Christie and Nikki Haley as the “adults” among the Republican candidates for their forthright defense of US involvement in Ukraine, but they actually strike me as the most infantile of an infantile bunch. The cognoscenti are still fulminating over Vivek Ramaswamy’s obnoxious demeanor in the debate, but Haley’s attack on Ramaswamy on foreign policy (below), widely praised, struck me as dishonest, obnoxious, and unhinged. For all her alleged gravitas and “experience,” this is a person for whom the hard realities of blood and death are little more than a rhetorical game. To cite Putin’s having killed Yevgeny Prigozhin as a reason for US involvement in Ukraine is about as puerile as George Bush’s citing Saddam Hussein’s attempted assassination of Bush’s “dad” as a reason for invading Iraq. But puerile belligerence is the ruling principle of our ruling class and the regime they run. That’s why Nikki Haley is part of it.
Other things equal, I think a voter has a choice about which issue they’ll regard as central to their thinking about an election, and conclusive with respect to which way they’ll vote in it. For me, it’s warfare. That’s why I’m voting for the only real anti-war candidate out there, Cornel West. I honestly wish West was a lot louder, clearer, and more explicit about his opposition to involvement in Ukraine, and about his anti-imperialism generally, but you do the best with what you have.
West has no chance of winning the presidency—but then, the United States has no chance of winning any of the wars the other candidates are fixing to get us into. It may be worth remembering that for all of the bravado expressed about the US military, and all the murderously hectic activity it’s engaged in over the last few decades, it hasn’t actually won a war since 1945. If it was a sports team, it would be the object of derisive laughter. As it is, it’s inspired “shock and awe.” It’s a conveniently opaque term that contains multitudes, running the gamut from admiration to contempt.
Many people have taken me to task for the quixotic nature of my support for Cornel West. I get it. Not long ago, I used this space to write fulsome anti-war paeans, only too obviously inspired by extra-political considerations, to Tulsi Gabbard. That didn’t quite work out as planned. It seems an act of yet further desperation now to proclaim that Brother West is our only hope. I plead guilty.
“A vote for Cornel West is a vote for Trump.” Well, a vote for anyone else is a vote for perpetual warfare. I’ll take the trade.
“Are you willing to sacrifice the future of the Republic to your pet issue?” Yes, in just the way that more conventional voters are willing to sacrifice peace to their pet party.
“Are you willing to let Putin’s aggression go unanswered?” I sure am. There’s a limit to our involvement in the world’s quarrels, and this is it.
I would ask in return of those in favor of involvement: Are you willing to bring the world to the brink of nuclear war to fight a proxy war over a place that is strategically irrelevant to us, in a war that is patently unwinnable, where the best case scenario is that Ukraine becomes our ward to “rebuild” for the foreseeable future, and gets a guarantee from us via NATO membership that the next time the Russians invade, we’ll have to commit our own troops to war, and fight until one side destroys the other? I’m not. Make Russia as evil as you want, and the Ukranians as blameless as you want. None of that tells us what to do, much less to get involved. Sorry.
“They say we must fight to keep our freedom, Lord,” as the old song goes. “There’s got to be a better way.” There is a better way, but you have to stop speeding down the highway to hell if you ever want to find it. Unlikely that “we”—“the West”–will stop our collective slide into perpetual warfare for long enough to do that. But if so, I’d prefer the role of spectator to participant.
August 29, 2023: Here’s a response I got to the Facebook version of this post from an academic philosopher on Facebook. I showcase it here not because I regard it as somehow typical or representative of the war’s advocates, but as typical of a certain kind of advocate–shrill, loud, dogmatic, incoherent, and dumb.
I’ve announced, in public, that I intend to vote for a third-party candidate against the two mainstream parties’ candidates because the first is more consistently anti-war than the other two. This doesn’t seem a terribly complex or difficult thought to comprehend, but in this case it elicits a sub-Wittgensteinian lecture on the publicity of meaning. How is that relevant? Evidently, voting for a candidate against the other two candidates requires assigning a “private meaning” to voting, a meaning simultaneously too vague to be comprehensible, too outrageous to be left unanswered, and so banal that no one should “give a shit” about it. I can see how people who want to square circles of this kind find wars easy to get into, and at least notionally easy to win.
I’m against involvement in the Ukraine war; hence I’m a “supporter of genocide.” Because when you refuse to rush into trouble, you’ve caused it.
As for an actual “public” rationale for our involvement in the war, or some indication of the strategy by which it’s to be won, don’t hold your breath waiting for an answer from people like this. Gaslighting is one thing, cogent answers another.
Policy of Truth 
Goddamn, I don’t miss the days when I used to watch those things.
Though watching them while following Jesse Walker’s running commentary on Twitter was often amusing.
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I can’t remember the last one I watched in full. I usually force myself to watch a few snippets. I pride myself on my capacity for endurance, but after four or five minutes, I’m done. The print commentary was bad enough.
Try to get through some of that: let’s see how tough you are. I got through about a fifth of it, then had to put it down and do some hospital revenue cycle management for relief.
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I envy your moral clarity on this issue. I lean toward agreement with you at a high level, but when I get into the details it gets harder for me to decipher whether there is any right moral stance. Maybe I’m just too wishy-washy.
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I wasn’t sure whether you were referring to my views on Ukraine, or my voting for Cornel West. I’m going to assume you meant the first.
My views on Ukraine put me in a minority, not only on this blog, but in my social circle generally. But I don’t think Ukraine is a particularly difficult or complex case. I can’t think of a single good reason for our being involved in that war, but I can think of a long list of reasons against. Here are some.
(1) The armed forces of the United States exist for the defense of this country against external threats. The Russian invasion of Ukraine may be evil, but it represents no threat to us. Ukraine was once a part of the Soviet Union. It then came out. It’s now partly been occupied by Russia. The United States suffered no national security threat by the sheer fact that Ukraine was part of the USSR when it was, so it’s mystifying how a partial Russian takeover could become the existential threat that’s been made of it. To turn the Russian invasion into a threat relevant to our security, defenders of the war have resorted to far-fetched hypotheticals and ideological confabulations.
Some of the hypotheticals have the down-side that they simply continue, in a new form, the very fallacy involved in treating the invasion of Ukraine as an existential threat. “What if Russia invades the Baltics?” Yes, what if. There was no reason to incorporate the Baltics into NATO in the first place, so that we would face this artificially-created problem. But we can’t allow our having made one mistake to be the reason for making two.
I often hear people cherry-picking what little they think they know about Russian culture to spin out some grand scale cosmic narrative about how the Russians want to take over the world. All I can say to this is: this is the kind of fantasy-thought that perpetual warfare encourages. People now would rather live in a terrestrial equivalent of the Star Wars saga than deal with the world we actually inhabit.
In short, we should never commit to armed conflict where we face no articulable threat. But since we face none here, we should not commit, or at least should not have when the issue arose.
(2) A war requires a goal, articulated in strategy. There is no clear goal here, and never has been. Are we supporting the Ukrainians so that they can get back the lands that were taken in 2022? Or 2014? Or are we supporting their desire for an overthrow of Putin, and for war trials for the upper echelons of the Russian government? Or are we fighting for our own reasons, to eliminate Russia as a rival to us on the world stage?
The answers to these questions change with every vicissitude of the events on the battlefield, because no one has (or has ever had) any idea of why we decided to commit to the war in the first place. Our involvement was just a reflexive response to the outrage of an invasion. Precisely because we have no national security interest in the war, we have no way of formulating a coherent, stable strategy. Every day’s news consists of some military triviality: the Ukrainians have taken back another town! If their goal is the overthrow of the Russian Federation (which is what they’ve said it is), then sacrificing tens of thousands of soldiers to take a few towns over the summer of 2023 is a form of mass suicide. Same if they scale it down to taking back all territories conquered by Russia since 2014. Suicide is not a strategy.
No strategy, no war.
(3) As it happens, none of the goals I mentioned above is feasible within any rational cost-benefit calculus. Overthrowing the Russian Federation is self-evidently insane. Taking back all of the Donbass and Crimea is close to that. Even taking back every square centimeter of land taken by the Russians since 2022 is a quixotic stretch. Yet, we’re too far into the war to make peace talks viable, either. So the window for rational solutions might well have closed. I don’t regard that as a reason for continuing. I regard that as a confirmation of the irrationality of entering the war in the first place.
No path to victory, no reason for war.
(4) Suppose we get close to full victory on a maximalist interpretation; the Ukrainians miraculously over-run Crimea and start a counter-offensive headed for Moscow (to “arrest” Putin and put him on trial). The closer we get to victory, the higher the likelihood of nuclear war. We keep hearing that the Russians are too crazy and devious for peace negotiations. Well, then they are too crazy and devious to avoid nuclear war. If they feel existentially threatened, there is a good chance that they will launch nuclear weapons. Then what?
At this point, the defenders of involvement assure us that such a thing would never happen. How do they know? They’re betting that they do. I’m betting that they don’t.
(5) We’re told that resolve in Ukraine will deter China from attacking Taiwan. Why would China be deterred from attacking Taiwan if they find us bogged down in a proxy war in a country outside of our security perimeter? This is to assume that the Chinese are intimidated by displays of quixoticism. If so, the wars in Korea and Vietnam should have taught them everything they needed to know. But obviously they didn’t.
I’m not particularly enthusiastic about fighting a war for Taiwan, but at least in that case, we have a treaty obligation to satisfy. Given the current fear of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, you’d have expected rational people to prepare for that, rather than getting involved in some costly side show. But their response is that getting bogged down in a costly side show in Ukraine just is preparation for a war with China! Because as everyone knows, the best way to prepare for a war in the Pacific is to get bogged down in a war in Central Europe. It makes no sense, but that’s what they seem to regard as its selling point.
(6) This is the least consequential point on my list, but to me, also the most offensive. For almost sixty years, I have heard Westerners lecture Palestinians on the need for magnanimity and “compromise” on territorial issues after the Israeli conquest of Palestine. For almost sixty years, the Indian occupation of Kashmir has escaped Western attention. For almost sixty years, the Chinese occupation of Tibet has been regarded as an afterthought to our trade and diplomatic relations with China. We went out of our way to abet Saudi intervention in Yemen, and we abetted civil wars and outright destruction in Libya, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. How is it that, of all places, Ukraine has suddenly rocketed to the top of our strategic concerns?
So: The Palestinians must compromise with occupation; the Ukrainians must not. The Kashmiris must live with occupation; the Ukrainians cannot. Russia must be sanctioned, but not China. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is “genocide,” but the civil wars we’ve produced around the world are of no consequence.
I can’t have any respect for the architects of policies of this kind, and for people who have moral priorities of this nature. I’m not one to play the race card, but the only consistent theme here seems to be: white lives matter. Any other kind of death can be shrugged off at whim. I’m willing to one-up such people: unless we encounter a clear case of self-defense, no lives matter. A nation is not an armed charity organization or world police force. We have enough on our hands in this country without having to get involved in other countries’ wars. The Ukraine war has just become a distraction from doing any of it. And when all is said and done, the war is bound to end in failure anyway.
As far as I’m concerned, any single one of (1)-(4) is enough by itself to oppose the war. Points (5) and (6) should at least give pause. Accepting all six will turn you into an anti-war fanatic, like me.
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