It’s said that you should never judge a book by its cover, but there’s a lot to be learned about a piece of writing from how it begins.* The opening to a piece of writing often marks out what the author takes to be uncontroversial, and in so doing, reveals the assumptions that structure his thought.

This column by Bret Stephens (back in September) is intended as a cautious defense of the presidency of Joe Biden. It opens with this apparently uncontroversial claim—or set of claims–about the war in Ukraine.

We are inflicting a strategic humiliation on Russia by arming Ukraine without putting American forces at risk.

A single sentence can assert several propositions at once. The preceding one asserts at least three:

1. Russia is suffering a strategic humiliation in Ukraine.
2. The United States is inflicting this strategic humiliation on Russia.
3. The United States is not putting American forces at risk.

If you’re the right kind of person, and adopt the right tone of voice, you can make almost any claim sound authoritative. Right now, I’m reading Karl Barth’s Epistle to the Romans. Barth is one of the most authoritative Protestant thinkers of the twentieth century. Given that status, he can write things like “The disclosure of non-sense is the revelation of sense” and be taken seriously by serious people. If you or I said that, we’d be laughed off the stage. When Barth says it, people write dissertations about it.

Something similar is true of Bret Stephens. It is not remotely true that the United States is inflicting anything on Russia, much less a strategic humiliation. Nor is it remotely true that Russia has been strategically humiliated. To be strategically humiliated, a party to a conflict has to have been defeated. But the war isn’t over. So Stephens’s first two claims are premature at best. But set those aside, because the last claim isn’t just “premature.” It’s straightforwardly, obviously, false.

It might appear at first glance that the United States is not putting its own forces at risk because it has deployed no such forces in Ukraine. Even that isn’t quite true. There are some American forces in Ukraine. But set even that aside. It’s not my real point.

Ask yourself: what is the putative aim of this war? The aim is, at the very least, to give Ukraine the independence and freedom to enter the NATO alliance. And what is the point of entering that alliance? At the very least, to enter into a mutual defense pact with the other members of the alliance. Article 5 of NATO’s Founding Treaty asserts that an attack on any member of the NATO alliance is an attack on all, one that obliges every member to come to the military aid of the attacked member.

There is only one plausible reason for Ukraine’s wanting membership in NATO: to guarantee collective defense against a future attack by Russia. And there is one nation within the NATO Alliance that carries the lion’s share of the burden of the alliance’s collective defense, namely the United States. So the point of the current war is to ensure that Ukraine has the independence and freedom to enter an alliance that guarantees specifically American military assistance against a future Russian attack. “American military assistance” in this case necessitates the deployment of American troops to Ukraine. And the deployment of such troops against a Russian attack entails that those forces would be put at risk. It follows that in arming Ukraine against Russia, we absolutely are putting American forces at risk.

Unless the United States comes out against Ukrainian membership in NATO, it makes no sense whatsoever to say that “[t]he United States is not putting American forces at risk.” That’s not just false, but the exact reverse of the truth. The whole point of the war is to guarantee that one day, American forces are to be put at risk at Ukrainian behest. To fail to grasp this is to fail to achieve even basic, minimal coherence about the world one inhabits. But that is Bret Stephens’s fundamental achievement as a journalist. This is a person who has achieved distinction and status for making no sense at all, and doing so on a consistent, weekly basis.

Now ask yourself: how could the United States come out against Ukrainian membership in NATO? That’s a logical, not a predictive question. I concede the possibility that the United States is idiotic enough to do just that. I mean: on what basis could the United States come out against Ukrainian membership in NATO? After demanding the inclusion of a series of states that make zero net contribution to the national security of the United States, and arming Ukraine explicitly in the name of its right to be included in that august company, what sense could it make for the United States to veto Ukraine’s membership in NATO?

If it were my decision to make, of course, I would do it: I would veto Ukraine’s entry into NATO. But I would do it by saying, explicitly, that Ukraine is not worth defending—whether actually or hypothetically. Ukraine is not worth defending now, and wouldn’t be worth defending at any time in the foreseeable or conceivable future. And by “not worth defending,” I mean “not worth arming,” either. One can’t effectively defend a country by arming it against a formidable aggressor, demanding the strategic equivalent of the sky of the weaker party, and then resolutely refusing to risk anything at all for the outcome. But that piece of cowardice and incoherence is what America’s leaders—including its putative intellectual leaders, like Bret Stephens–regard as a grand strategy. It will never work, but they have an easy solution for that: they’ll never admit it, whether failure creeps up on them with subtlety and tact, or blows up directly in their faces.

Now suppose that the United States comes out in favor of Ukrainian membership in NATO. That’s not hard to do, since it has. How do you come out in favor of Ukrainian membership in NATO while claiming that the United States is not putting its own forces at risk? It’s not impossible, I admit. What you do is to adopt the myopia of the present moment. Right now, there are no—well, not many—American troops in Ukraine. And if we treat the present moment as predictive of every future moment, then no troops now means no troops ever. The problem is that while there is such a thing as the uniformity of nature, there is no such thing as the uniformity of the present military moment. In military matters, what is true today need not be true tomorrow. This is especially so if the whole point of the “strategic humiliation” you claim to be “inflicting” on someone is to guarantee that the next time they attack, your troops will be there, on the front lines, bleeding their lives away to stop them. But that’s the delusionally unacknowledged point of our strategy in Ukraine.

You might wonder why it’s taken 1200 words to rebut a single devoutly dumb sentence. The answer is: because falsehood is easier to manufacture than rebut. People like Bret Stephens have devoted their careers to the manufacture of contorted, grotesque falsehoods like the one I’ve singled out here. No one in their right mind would devote even half of that effort to rebutting them. But if no one does, they clog the world like intellectual pollution.

Feel free to defend American involvement in Ukraine. But don’t pretend for a minute that American involvement there means non-involvement. Don’t, in other words, claim that by arming Ukraine we are guaranteeing that we ourselves will never commit troops to Central or Eastern Europe against Russia. We’re doing just the reverse. By arming Ukraine, we are facilitating its membership in NATO. By facilitating its membership in NATO, we are committing ourselves to its defense against Russia. By committing ourselves to its defense against Russia, we are guaranteeing that our soldiers must fight and die for Ukraine.

And we are doing this without bothering to ask why we should. When the pro forma question about “why” arises, the only pro forma answers one hears are the dogmas that:

• We have been tele-transported back to the year 1939…
• …with the proviso that Ukraine 2023 is Poland 1939;
• …and that Putin is Hitler;
• … and that no argument is needed for any of these fanciful pseudo-historical claims;
• …and that no other fact or historical moment matters to our evaluation of the situation we actually face.

If we’re Americans, we’re to ignore the fact that the United States didn’t enter World War II when (or because) Poland was invaded in 1939; it entered a totally different front for totally different reasons two years later. If we’re Western Europeans, we’re to suffer amnesia over the fact that it was the Russians, not the Western Allies, that liberated Poland from the Nazis. The Western Allies entered World II after the invasion of Poland; that doesn’t mean they did anything about Poland after entering. Obviously, historical accuracy is not the foremost concern of the Ukraine war’s defenders, and neither is logic or common sense. What matters is just the cynical, sophistical use of half-processed images of “Hitler,” “the Third Reich,” “Anne Frank,” and “the Holocaust,” all in the service of the same damn thing over and over: one imperial war after another, leading from one abyss to the next.

The only escape from my (unapologetic) defeatism is the fantasy that by arming Ukraine (while resolving not to fight there) we will defeat Russia so decisively that it will be vanquished once and for all, never to attack anyone again. Unfortunately for those who believe this, there is no human way of bringing about that outcome without destroying ourselves in the process. The only way to bring about a truly “decisive” victory against Russia is either to conquer and occupy it, or to destroy it altogether. And if we couldn’t do that with North Korea, North Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, or Libya, I leave it to wiser heads than mine to figure out how we’ll do it with Russia.

There is no such thing as a risk-free victory in warfare. Either you really fight, or you pretend to fight, or you just decide to leave things alone. Nothing can conceal the fact that our “strategy” in Ukraine is and has always been 100% pretense. Bret Stephens may not have figured any of that out, but I’d like to think that most of the rest us can.

*I wrote this post back in September when Bret Stephens’s column first came out, but distracted by Gaza, neglected to post it. Though it technically breaks my “vow of silence,” I thought I’d post it anyway. For one thing, since I wrote it before the vow, there’s a sense in which posting it doesn’t break the vow. Anyway, I haven’t been super-strict about the vow, and given the current situation in Ukraine, would be remiss in failing to attack defenders of the war at any and every opportunity I got. It would be tasteless to say that I told them so, but I did–over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over, ad nauseum. So here’s one more for the road–the road to denial, betrayal, displacement, destruction, mass death, and defeat.