Oh, yeah. There is nothing like a war—in particular, a good guys versus bad guys war—to pump up the circulation, to attract eyeballs—to cable talk shows, network news (OK, I haven’t actually seen one since, well, 2001, but I’m assured they still exist), websites, podcasts, videocasts, etc., etc. etc. I’m told they even have the power to sell newspapers!
The Washington Post certainly thinks so. The “above the fold” (top half) of the Post’s online edition (which, obviously, is what I see) is nuttin’ but Ukraine these days, and I mean nuttin! Nuttin but noble Ukrainians, heroic Ukrainians, and suffering Ukrainians. And, of course, evil, blundering, incompetent, bloodthirsty Russians. Funny I never read any stories about noble Iraqis, heroic Iraqis, and suffering Iraqis, or noble Afghanis, heroic Afghanis, and suffering Afghanis, or noble Libyans, heroic Libyans, and suffering Libyans back when we were doing the invading! It was all “shock and awe”, baby! Shock and awe all the way home!
Bad as all this is, painful as it is to behold just how low the Post (which is probably not the worst offender—or at least not the very worst) will go to feed its circulation, the effect of war on on the circulation of the journalists themselves is even worse. Reporters love war even more than editors do! There’s just nothing like that combat high to get the blood a-pumpin’!
I’m not (I hope) denigrating the courage of journalists who go into a war zone but I am (frequently) denigrating the utterly one-sided deluge of sob story/horror story kitsch they bring to our screens virtually every minute of the day. The sort of shameless cheerleading that gets passed of as either news or analysis reminds me of nothing so much as the florid gush poured out upon us during the recent Olympics. War, for our reporters, serves as the ultimate excuse to tug on our heartstrings, with all the finesse, and all the unrelenting tenacity, of the hunchback of Notre Dame workin’ Our Lady’s bell ropes back in the day.
Of course, it’s easy to see why. Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a lot more presentable than either Saddam Hussein or the Taliban, and Vladimir Putin makes even Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld look, well, presentable. But that doesn’t mean that we should let Volodymyr determine our foreign policy for us. Our determination to bring democracy to Eastern Europe and elsewhere, while noble in theory, has proved disastrous in practice, and, in fact, often ignoble in practice, as we have often bullheadedly championed whatever faction told us what we wanted to hear and promised to do whatever we wanted them to do, as I have argued many times. But now our noble journalists, their pulses pounding with righteous fury, seethe with scarcely restrainable bloodlust, hungering for Vladimir Putin’s scalp. In a recent article for Reason, Fiona Harrigan gave a prime example of said pulse-pounding:
In a press conference on March 15, reporters pelted White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki with questions regarding the Biden administration's opposition to certain military support for Ukraine. There were over one dozen questions mentioning military assistance—including five distinct mentions of a no-fly zone—and only one question about the potential American role in facilitating negotiations between Russia and Ukraine.
Neither were the numerous questions about military assistance purely fact-based. "Zelenskyy and other Ukrainian officials have made so clear that what they believe they need the most is more warplanes and fighter jets. So why is the U.S. assessing something different?" asked a reporter. "Why does the U.S. believe they know better what Ukraine needs than what Ukrainian officials are saying they need the most?"
That’s because explosions attract eyeballs, and negotiations don’t. As both Harrigan and Adam Johnson, in this post at his substack blog “The Column”, note, most mainstream reporters are in the bag for the military intellectual complex, and tend to go apeshit when the necessity for continued bloodshed is disputed, both in Ukraine and Afghanistan, particularly in the case of Ukraine, which is clearly a good war, as opposed to Afghanistan, which was, well, bloody, pointless, costly, and interminable. But, for all of that, still a war, and one upon which the Pentagon, and many others, were much loath to turn their backs!
It's true that our repeated failures abroad—costing the U.S., you know, thousands of lives and trillions of dollars, had come to close to giving war a bad name, but, now, all of that has changed! War is good again! War is fun again! Listen to Anne Applebaum, and hear how a passion for democracy can sour into a conspiratorial rage, hungering for a new Cold War whose sweep would dwarf the original:
[W]e need a completely new strategy toward Russia, China, and the rest of the autocratic world, one in which we don’t merely react to the latest outrage, but change the rules of engagement altogether. We cannot merely slap sanctions on foreign oligarchs following some violation of international law, or our own laws: We must alter our financial system so that we stop kleptocratic elites from abusing it in the first place. We cannot just respond with furious fact-checking and denials when autocrats produce blatant propaganda: We must help provide accurate and timely information where there is none, and deliver it in the languages people speak. We cannot rely on old ideas about the liberal world order, the inviolability of borders, or international institutions and treaties to protect our friends and allies: We need a military strategy, based in deterrence, that takes into account the real possibility that autocracies will use military force.
There is nothing, absolutely nothing, regarding the possibility that the constant expansion of U.S. influence—always in the name of “right”, of course—in central and eastern Europe that upset the relations among states that had prevailed for centuries, an expansion that was entirely dependent upon, not our virtue but Russia’s weakness, might have “unfortunate” consequences when Russia’s weakness might vanish. We are good and they are bad: that is all we know and all we need to know. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, about the staggering cost the U.S. would assume to establish a “full court press” on close to half of humanity for, say, the next 50 years. We are good and they are bad! That is all we know and all we need to know!
It is unfortunately quite likely that “forbearance” is simply too difficult a virtue to serve as a meaningful guide for foreign policy. In a pinch, “the stronger the better” always seems to make more sense. If they have 2,000 missiles, well, we need 4,000. Or maybe eight! You can’t be too safe! You can’t have too many missiles! You can’t spend too much money!
For decades, the American foreign policy establishment deliberately preserved Iran as “the Great Satan”, an evil empire with which no compromise could be tolerated, treating a rigid, retrograde theocracy without a nuke to its name as worse than the USSR and Red China all rolled into one. Now, Anne, for one, is clearly ready to take on Russia, China, Venezuela (also bad), Iran, North Korea, and even those Belarus guys too! Anything to keep up the circulation!
I am old enough to remember the dual intoxication, of both power and righteousness, that swept virtually the entire American intellectual community—aka “the chattering class”—in the wake of our glorious victory in “Gulf I”, the splendid little war arranged by George I to erase the memory of Vietnam. And I am also old enough to remember the litany of disasters that followed in its wake, under both Democratic and Republican presidents, contributing, more than any other factor, to the deep morass in which we now find ourselves. Right now I’m lookin’ for a rainbow, and they’re hard to find.
Afterwords
The sometimes estimable (and sometimes not) Dan Drezner had a nice column up a week or two back warning that the current “Let’s kick Vladimir Putin in the Ass” frenzy in Washington, which is creating a swarm of “tough” sanctions on just about everything and everyone Russian, including the dressing, could have untoward consequences:1
To sound social science-y about it, the sanctioners need to have a theory of the case. Otherwise, all this behavior is just an exercise in maximizing the economic pain of ordinary Russians without any conception of what that will achieve. One thing it could achieve is a Russian populace that embraces the demented imperial ambitions that Putin embodies. Another is to capsize a tottering global economy.
In the wake of 9/11, Reason’s Matt Welch published an impressively thorough study of the effects of sanctions and came up with the following conclusions:
Yet the basic argument against all economic sanctions remains: namely, that they tend to punish civilians more than governments and to provide dictators with a gift-wrapped propaganda tool. Any visitor to Cuba can see within 24 hours the futility of slapping an embargo on a sheltered population that is otherwise inclined to detest its government and embrace its yanqui neighbors. Sanctions give anti-American enclaves, whether in Cairo or Berkeley or Peshawar, one of their few half-convincing arguments about evil U.S. policy since the end of the Cold War.
It seems awfully hard not to conclude that the embargo on Iraq has been ineffective (especially since 1998) and that it has, at the least, contributed to more than 100,000 deaths since 1990. With Bush set to go to war over Saddam's noncompliance with the military goals of the sanctions, there has never been a more urgent time to confront the issue with clarity.
It’s really too bad that no one thought to listen to Matt on this one.
1. In his latest take on sanctions, I regret to say that Dan now seems to be going with the flow, just a bit, expressing cautious assent while compiling a long, sensible list of “next steps” that, I regret to say, are extremely unlikely to be followed by anyone, as, I suspect, Dan himself knows but does not wish to admit. Well, who wants to be a “gadfly” these days? Look what happened to Socrates!
