One of the most annoying tics of the natcon opposition to US aid for Ukraine is its “forever war” rhetoric. And it must be noted that the same careless language is heard from the media also. Americans are “tiring of the war,” we are told; opposition to the war is growing. A visitor from Alpha Centauri could be forgiven if he concluded from this buzz that the United States is once again waging war on foreign soil.
Guess what, though? The United States is not directly engaged in the Russo-Ukrainian War. America’s involvement is limited to the provision of military aid in cash and in kind, the total of which is trivial in the context of the nation’s gargantuan federal government budget. Indeed, if you accept the (indisputable) proposition that V. Putin’s Russia is a predatory power and a threat to the security of its neighbors, many of whom are American allies, aid to Ukraine is quite a bargain. For mere chump change, we’re purchasing the long-term crippling of the Russian armed forces. We’re also signaling to V. Putin’s new best friend, the Chinese People’s Republic, that they’ve made a bad investment. Russia is a corrupt despotism in decline—and as an ally, more of a liability than an asset. The Chinese regime is welcome to that alliance.
The natcons, of course, are making a bad-faith argument. But I sense that the American public is to some extent influenced by the forever war meme. War weariness has become fashionable, despite the fact that America is not at war and even if it was, very few Americans would be directly affected.
Neither the Afghanistan War, the Iraq War, nor the wider war on terror directly touched the lives of most Americans; the era when military service was a rite of passage for large numbers of young American men ended in 1973. Unlike the world wars, the Korean War or even Vietnam, the conflicts subsequent to 9/11 have been fought by this country’s true one-percenters, the men and women of the all-volunteer armed forces of the United States. Meanwhile, the percentage of Americans who’ve served in the armed forces has been shrinking steadily. The Greatest Generation veterans of World War Two and Korea are almost gone, and the Baby Boomer veterans of Vietnam are passing from the scene in ever-growing numbers. My daughter, who enlisted in the US Army in 2008 and served in Afghanistan in 2010-11, will live to see the day when veteran status is an exotic rarity.
And of course, the terrible price to be paid for the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere after 9/11 has been paid by very few. Compared to the world wars, Korea and Vietnam, our twenty-first century wars have exacted a small price in human life and suffering. This is not to minimize the sacrifices that have been demanded: for families whose sons and daughters have been killed or grievously wounded, the casualty rate is one hundred percent. But consider these statistics. In the seven weeks’ course of the Battle of Normandy (6 June-31 August 1944) total US casualties were 29,000 killed and 106,000 wounded, evacuated sick or missing. And this was just the first battle of a campaign across northwest Europe that ended on 8 May 1945. By way of comparison, total US casualties in Iraq over the seven-year period between the 2003 invasion and the 2011 withdrawal were 4,431 killed and 31,994 wounded.
That there’s something petulant and shallow in the complaints about forever wars seems obvious—though it should be added that such attitudes are nothing new. Americans have always been ambivalent about their country’s status as a global superpower. After every war, successful or unsuccessful, something of an isolationist reaction sets in. But in the dismal aftermath of Vietnam War, isolationism acquired an ideological twist: It was seized upon by the Left, which concluded that Vietnam refuted the totality of post-World War II American foreign policy. A narrative identifying America as the problem, the primary threat to world peace, the imperialist colossus, shredded what was left of the so-called Cold War consensus.
This narrative gradually infected the Democratic Party and by the time that Ronald Reagan entered the White House, the fever was raging. Later on, Bill Clinton affected to miss the good old days when everybody agreed about foreign policy, but this was rubbish. Reagan’s approach to foreign policy aroused furious opposition on the broad Left, including in the Democratic Party. He was denounced, in terms that have become boringly familiar, as a warmonger and a fascist. Nor did the Left’s temper improve when Reagan was proved right about the Soviet Union.
The other day, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had a hissy fit over a story, apparently false, that she’d hosted a military recruiting event. “Does that sound like something I would do? No!” she fumed. And I have to agree: It certainly does not strike me as something that AOC would ever do. As it happens, she and my daughter took similar oaths to support and defend the Constitution, etc. But I have no doubt about which one of them took that oath seriously—and it isn’t the Member of Congress. AOC is the template for the post-patriotic American. She is, so to speak, the type of American that po-mo progressivism has been striving to create for the last several decades: a person (to use Mr. Orwell’s formulation) who’d be less ashamed of shoplifting cosmetics from Wallgreens than of standing with her hand over her heart for “the Star-Spangled Banner.”
The peculiarity of our time is that much the same attitude has come to manifest itself on the Right. Behind a façade of patriotism, the natcons are equally out of patience with decadent, declining, warmongering America. Like the progressives, they hate America as it is, and advocate the nation’s “fundamental transformation.” Supposedly, this transformation would restore “traditional values,” a proposition made dubious by the natcons’ embrace of Donald Trump—hardly an exemplar of manly Christian virtues and selfless patriotism, a Cincinnatus or a George Washington.
The pretense that the American commitment to Ukraine is another “forever war” derives from these political, social and cultural pathologies. And though the natcons get most of the press in that regard, there’s a sizeable body of opinion on the Left in favor of what they are pleased to describe as a peace process. Somehow—the details are not provided—the United States is supposed to bring the warring parties to the negotiating table, where sweet reason will prevail, and everybody’s interests will be respected. In this way, the terrible forever war that so torments America will be brought to a neat, convenient end.
Need it be said that such a peace process is a mere fantasy? I believe that it does need to be said, because the atavistic passions aroused by the Russo-Ukrainian War are alien to American sensibilities. They belong to our history—the Civil War, Pearl Harbor—not to our present. Even 9/11 was a blip by comparison: shocking, but soon submerged in partisan politics as usual. It takes either direct experience of war or a serious effort of the imagination for Americans to understand what’s going on in Ukraine, and both options are in short supply in this country today.
The Russo-Ukrainian War has been going on for more than a year now, and sweet reason has long since withered. But it’s not a forever war; the end will come when one side or the other reaches the limit of its endurance.
The forever war meme is a symptom of the malaise that’s eroding American greatness. The country that once saved the world from totalitarianism and preserved the peace through the decades of the Cold War has sickened of its responsibilities and lost its self-confidence. In this renunciation, average Americans have been egged on by elites of both the Left and the Right, who in one way or another have rewritten history to erase the idea of American exceptionalism. We’re nothing special, they say. America needs to get over itself.
That’s a proposition that V. Putin and other aspiring despots most heartily endorse—because if America does throw up the sponge, who then would stand in their way?