There Won’t Be Peace in Ukraine

In recent years a conviction has taken hold among some on the right, usually held by the left, that wars were an unnatural state of affairs that would not exist without conspiracies by the military-industrial complex, profiteering defense contractors, warmongers, covert interests looking to spread chaos, and everyone and everything except the actual causes of wars.

Most wars are fought to seize territory. They arise from tribal tensions between ethnic and national groups that provide the underlying impulses for the conflict.

Everything else, including geopolitical tensions and defense industries, are layers on top of this underlying reality of human nature as it has been for thousands of years.

Denying one of the most basic patterns of human history is an ideological fantasy. Hate the players like Putin or Zelensky, but the game is an old one that goes back hundreds of years. And it isn’t getting resolved today, tomorrow or a hundred years from now unless everyone dies.

Regardless of their leaders, the Ukrainians and the Russians have proven willing to fight and soak up hundreds of thousands of casualties. If they weren’t willing, then one side or the other would have collapsed by now. We know how quickly armies that don’t actually want to fight fall apart in the face of attrition. We’ve had recent examples of them in Afghanistan and Syria.

The Russians and Ukrainians want to fight each other because they genuinely hate each other. Anyone truly familiar with the region has already experienced that.

And anyone who hasn’t seen that hatred doesn’t understand the reality of the war. Anyone who does not understand this, who wants to pretend that the only reason these wars keep happening is because of Putin, Zelensky, NATO, the EU or some dark unseen force has no understanding of the region, history or human nature. There are local and global factors that led to this particular outbreak of fighting, but the current war is just the latest round of killing.

And as horrifying as the loss of life is, there’s something admirable about both sides sticking it out on the battlefield. Western Europeans, who were once willing to wreck a continent over territory and nationalism, now freely surrender their cities, homes and daughters to invaders. Imagine if the French and the English had the spine to fight off the invaders flooding their nations instead of asking how they can change their culture to better please these new arrivals.

War is to be deplored, but there are worse things than war. Like defeat. Or abject surrender.

“War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth a war, is much worse,” John Stuart Mill wrote.

The same sentiments that lead young men to die horribly on the battlefield also make patriotism and nationalism more than mere words that cynical college professors roll their eyes at in class.

Once upon a time we used to admire generals and soldiers who fought well, regardless of the side, before we were taught to view wars as a global shell game with the men fighting and dying as mere puppets of international bankers, and the whole thing not worth a single drop of blood.

That corrosive attitude, carefully nurtured by Marxists, almost doomed Western Europe before WWII, and drank it dry during the Cold War leaving men who would no longer fight for anything.

It was the Marxists and other Socialists who taught that war was a conspiracy of bankers, that nations were puppets of industrialists and capitalists starting senseless conflicts for profit and to distract the working class from the revolution. Eventually this cynical posture came to be widely accepted, spread by academia and the entertainment industry, and is now everywhere.

Westerners gave up on fighting, but no one else except a handful of other first worlders did.

Wars aren’t going anywhere. We’ve just forgotten how to fight them. And especially win them. We have ‘endless wars’ because in the twentieth century we came to believe that governments mattered more than nations and peoples, and that if we exchanged bad non-democratic governments for democratic ones, all the wars would end and endless peace would reign.

The same folly that started with WWI, the War to End all Wars, to ‘Make the World Safe for Democracy’, continued on through the ‘Nation Building’ democracy wars of the 90s and 00s.

We stopped fighting wars for clear national interests and with clear goals. So the wars became endless. But they never ended because they were not fought to be won and were never won.

The pursuit of ‘endless peace’ led to ‘endless wars’ and both are a myth. War is a natural condition of mankind. Peace isn’t. Nations and peoples fall from one into the other. Accepting this common sense reality will help us see the world as it is, rather than as a bunch of 19th century socialists decided that it ought to be seen, and will help us make good choices.

We can’t end wars or bring peace. We can choose to intervene in a war but we should do so if it serves our national interests not because of some fantasies about ending all wars. Just because some nations somewhere are fighting does not mean that we have to step in and do something.

Whatever we do in Russia and Ukraine will only lead to a temporary cessation of hostilities. If we respect the sacrifices both sides have made on the battlefield, we should understand that. We may have an interest in intervening to prevent further conflicts or we may not, but whatever we do will be a bandaid on history that will be torn off sooner or later by the peoples at war.

History, as even Hillary Clinton learned in Geneva, doesn’t come with a ‘reset button’.

Perhaps the best thing that the Trump administration could do is to step away from the war. If the Western Europeans (and some of the Eastern Europeans) really want Ukraine to win, then let them do what they can. A war may do for their backbones what generations of peace did not. And maybe they will even find the courage to clean the Augean stables of Jihad in their capitals.

Stranger things have happened.

Trying to bring peace to the Russia – Ukraine war is an even worse mistake than the war itself. Whatever their virtue, wars can at least be won, but peace is a choice for both sides. And we cannot choose for them. That is more nation building. Only they can choose their own futures.