I have, in the past, beat on poor Ross Douthat so lustily that the poor man recently moved to have me declared a public nuisance. But now I feel compelled to admit that, despite the appalling mendacity of his pseudo “Never Trumper” posturing/apologetics, Ross can still serve an occasional winner, and he did so with his recent post on the occasion of the dispatching of modern U.S. M-1 tanks to Ukraine, The U.S. Has Made a Coldly Logical Decision in Ukraine. So Has Russia., pointing out that we’ve seen this movie before:
A war breaks out, it’s expected to end swiftly but a stalemate ensues instead, and both sides become convinced that increasing their commitment to the conflict will bring it to a swifter end on more favorable terms.
This mutual conviction isn’t a matter of romance or fantasy or simple folly (though of course those forces enter in). Instead, escalation is embraced as a coldly logical decision, as the only reasonable course.
And out of such rationality, you get closer to the irrationality of fighting for years in a war that neither side can fully hope to win.
The most “optimistic” take—albeit entirely unwittingly so—I’ve seen on the latest escalation in U.S. support for Ukraine was the irate complaint of one U.S. general (I didn’t catch his name) that we weren’t sending enough of them to matter. The lure of “one final push” that will solve everything remains potent. It will, at least, delay the inevitable, whatever that inevitable might be!
Over at the New York Review of Books, Fred Kaplan takes a long look at a long study of Putin’s Russia, Putin’s Wars, by British scholar Mark Galeotti, discussing in great detail why Putin has made such a mess of things. The problem is, so have we. As I’ve complained many times before, it was entirely unnecessary, and deeply unwise, to expand NATO into eastern Europe, and particularly unwise for George W. Bush to declare that Ukraine should join NATO.
One can’t blame the eastern Europeans for wanting us there—who wants to have to choose between Germany and Russia?—but U.S. foreign policy should not be governed by fantasies of achieving a cost-free peaceable kingdom all around the globe. I don’t know if denying tanks to Ukraine would have shortened the war. But sending them will almost certainly make it longer. The short-term political benefits to the Biden administration may be significant—nothing is more obvious than that interventionists of all stripes are giddy with the joy of a just war—A good war! A good war! I’d almost given up hope!—and are happy to forget how ghastly our past “good” wars have turned out to be. But moral intoxication, I think, makes a poor guide to wise policy.
Would having women occupying higher positions in international government lead to a more peaceful world? At least statistically they are less likely to start a war, and after all, represent the majority of people on our planet. They are the most abused sex, even within their own families. They live significantly longer than men, care for the sick and nurture the young. Their innate, positive philosophy is shown in literature, science, humanities, etc. Join ’em as you will. It works for bonobos!