What the War is Telling Us About Ourselves

 Americans love defining their foreign policy, but because the world does not easily bend to our will our actual policies always combine our definitions and the reality that emerges when we try to apply them.  The New York Times remains the voice of the liberal establishment in foreign policy, just as it has been for the whole of my lifetime, and today's coverage of the Ukraine war illustrates how that establishment sees the world and the united States' role in it today.

Ever since Woodrow Wilson--who entered the First World War mainly in response to the apparently uncivilized German tactic of submarine warfare--the United States has stood strongly for the idea that certain international and even national political behavior should be outlawed and punished.  Franklin Roosevelt declared during the Second World War that Axis leaders would be tried and punished for war crimes, and a number of them were, some for the crime of waging an aggressive war.  The strategic imperatives of the Cold War led us to turn a blind eye to human rights abuses within many allies, and in some cases like Indonesia even to encourage them, and the strategic realities of that era meant that we could not possibly try to enforce our standards within the Communist world.  After Communism fell in 1989, however, our foreign policy elite dreamed of enforcing our will all over the globe.  That proved impossible almost at once, and NATO intervened very tardily to stop massacres in former Yugoslavia, and not at all in Rwanda.  We did assume the right to impose our will on Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11, and we failed in both cases to accomplish our objectives while inflicting enormous suffering on those countries ourselves.  Undeterred by the failure of the Bush administration, the Obama administration repeated this disastrous mistake, with similar consequences, in Libya and Syria.  Donald Trump abandoned any attempt to impose US morality on the world, ignoring the human rights records of the Russians, the Saudis, and the North Koreans, but tried and failed to overthrow the Venezuelan government.  

The Biden administration has revived the tone of US moral superiority--and added, it seems, a strategy of dealing with wicked enemies without fighting ourselves.  Russia and Ukraine are now waging a conventional war in Europe.  Civilians suffered massively in the last such war from 1939 through 1945, but civilian suffering was always a secondary subject in the press coverage of that war.  The fate of civilian populations, everyone understood, depended on victory on the battlefield, which remained the focus.  That is not the case now.  The lead story in Friday's New York Times headlines, "Survivors Found in Theater Rubble, but Suffering Widens," and three photos show bombed-out buildings.  Below that story a "news analysis" reads, Biden Makes in Personal by Use of 'War Criminal'"--in response to Putin.  A third story, also about information warfare, reports that Putin is arousing Russian memories by referring to "Nazis" ruling Ukraine. A fourth story focuses specifically on the destruction of Kharkov. There is no separate story on the military situation, which is summarized in only three paragraphs of the page one lead.  Showing how horrible Vladimir Putin is, it seems should be enough to deal with him.

The op-ed page is equally revealing.  Both centrist conservative David Brooks and centrist liberal Paul Krugman have columns arguing that the attack on Ukraine represents the failure of Vladimir Putin's regime, and implying that it is bound to fail.  Numerous stories are speculating about a possible military or oligarchic coup that might remove him and focusing on the domestic harm that the war is doing to Russia.  It may be that Ukraine's resistance and western sanctions will defeat Putin, but I am not convinced that that is true.  The remarkable NPR program This American Life just put together a compilation of reporting about Putin in the last decade or so which illustrates his willingness to use force for his objectives--beginning with the 1999 war in Chechnya--his very real popularity among the Russian people, and the strength of his dictatorship. I highly recommend it.  With refugees streaming out of Ukraine and more bombs and artillery shells falling every day, Putin may win this war.  If he does the new millions of refugees will destabilize the rest of western Europe further and Putin will have proven that expansion via military force works even in the developed world.  And US prestige will fall lower than ever.

Vladimir Zelensky is now the political hero of the western world and an odds-on favorite to win the net Nobel Peace Prize, but one leading national legislature after another--Parliament, the Congress and the Bundestag--cheers him while refusing to consider giving him the thing he wants and needs most, a no-fly zone over his beleaguered, invaded country.  Our leadership cannot evidently shake the fantasy that we are destined to prevail without fighting serious wars.  Worse, it cannot distinguish between cases like Iraq and Libya, where American power created anarchy, on the one hand, and assisting a very viable democratic nation in a critical area on the other.  Greater peace and security for the world does not come from knee-jerk attempts to apply universal principles anywhere, but from taking advantage of situations where military force can create political stability.  We are sending the message that our mlitary force will not be available in some of the situations where it would do the most good, and gambling with too little evidence that dictatorships are bound to fail.