Winning the Moral High Ground in Cold War II
And Honoring Our Veterans
It's Veterans Day. To all former soldiers and sailors and airmen, fighters in foreign wars, volunteers and conscripts: thank you for your service. Thank you for liberating Western Europe from Nazism, for fighting communism in Korea and Vietnam, for striking back against terrorism in Afghanistan, and for liberating Iraq, among other wars and skirmishes.
If I had to guess, I'd say most veterans probably underestimate the good that they did. One purpose of this post is to explain why, so as to honor veterans more than perhaps our cynical and skeptical times are inclined to do. The general public underestimates the value of veterans’ service, because so many people now mistakenly regret most American wars, and fail to appreciate the great force multiplier by which each American military action reinforces the credible threat of American power and thereby restrains bad actors in many theaters that it doesn’t touch directly. The work of America's veterans has made the world a better place out of all proportion to their sacrifice in a way that most Americans today don’t realize.
Whether veterans will be pleased by the hardheaded neocon argumentation of this post being spun as a tribute to them, I have no idea. Most veterans probably aren't neocons. I see a world spinning out of control, getting more dangerous by the day, and I think some things need to be said, and praise of America’s veterans happens to be one of the ramifications, so let the chips fall where they may.
Even more than I want to honor American’s veterans, I want the fighting in Ukraine to stop. But the themes are connected.
Escaping the Treadmill of War
In my church, we regularly pray for peace in Ukraine. There's very little I can practically do to help bring that about. But it seems that if I’m asking God to end the bloodshed, I ought to try to do what little I can to help. Hence this post.
But the theme has to be a lot bigger than that, for of course, the ramifications of the Russia-Ukraine war are global. At stake is not only whether Ukraine will survive as an independent nation or be subjugated to Russia, but also, whether our liberal post-Cold War world order, uniquely free of endemic and widespread aggression and conquest, can endure. We can't get peace by letting Russia have what it wants, not only because Ukraine wouldn't and shouldn't stop fighting, but because if the West and the UN and the world order generally ultimately acquiesces in the annexation by Russia of Ukrainian territory through an act of sheer, unmitigated aggression, then every potential aggressor in the world will be encouraged, and bloody chaos will proliferate.
At the same time, it would be good to have some option less dangerous, difficult, and uncertain of success than the complete military expulsion of Russia from Ukrainian territory before the killing stops. For one thing, that will involve a lot of killing, which is terrible. For another, there’s too much risk of losing. It doesn’t seem all that likely that Ukraine can drive Russia out, even with the help of Western arms.
It would be good to be able to freeze the Russia-Ukraine war for a while, conceding nothing in principle about Ukraine’s rights to its territorial integrity, but letting tempers cool. Russia and Ukraine can’t make that happen. They’re trapped on the gruesome treadmill of war, escalating feverish propaganda to justify all the sacrifice, in ways that drive their demands and ambitions ever further apart. But as for the US, the West, NATO— we probably have enough power and authority and freedom of action to achieve that, if we try.
Is it worth it? In weighing the decision, we must never forget that war is a terrible thing. It's not just the dying, but the killing, and the hatred, the propaganda, the loss of rights. The "war socialism" of the Kaiser's Germany during World War I was the template for the tyranny later established by the Nazis. War, even just war, can cast very long and bitter shadows. Peace, even a bad peace fraught with confusion and unfairness, tends to be more conducive to happiness, mutual appreciation, innocence, and the maintenance and elaboration of beautiful traditions. Peace between Russia and Ukraine would be worth much. It would be worth compromising for. It would be worth fighting for.
Fighting for peace? Is there a paradox in that? If so, it's a very slight one. It's not hard to understand that a man's strategy for getting out of debt might involve borrowing a bit more money to buy a cheap old car so he can stop renting a fancy new one. Likewise, only a kind of intentional stupidity or myopic cynicism can blind someone to the obvious truth that the path to peace sometimes leads through war.
But the subtler and even more important truth is that, if only one is willing to fight means, one often doesn't have to actually do it. Deterrence.
Understanding Deterrence
It's good to be loved, and it's good, in another sense, to be feared. Deterrence is an indispensable ingredient in all practical schemes of world peace.
Fear and deterrence require, not only that a leading power possess great military force, but that it is thought to be prepared to use it. In the unprecedented peacefulness of the immediate post-Cold War decades, a general presumption that the US and its allies would apply overwhelming force to prevent or reverse violations of international law was the crucial factor securing world peace. The 1991 Persian Gulf War, in particular, when a US-led coalition enjoying full UN authorization intervened with stunning effectiveness, much aided by just-invented stealth fighters and bombers, to drive back Saddam Hussein’s Iraq from occupying the neighboring nation of Kuwait, was decisive in standing up a powerful threat of force behind the UN and international law.
The second Gulf War, Operation Iraqi Freedom starting in 2003, both undermined and reinforced the lesson of the first. Unlike in 1991, the international law legitimacy of a US-led coalition’s intervention, though defensible, was much less clear-cut. Still, it was well calculated to display the Free World's muscular willingness to fight for its values all over the world, to put fear into the hearts of aggressors and mass murderers, and to keep even dictators from going too far. Operation Iraqi Freedom could have bolstered the credible threat of force wielded by the actors destined to champion international law. Unfortunately, the US and its allies more or less threw away that advantage through a repudiation of that war in politics and public opinion.
To get back the credible threat of force, the power of deterrence, the privilege of being feared by bad actors, it would be very helpful to find a way to repudiate that repudiation. The West need to relearn the virtues of war, the appetite for fighting, the value and universal authority of freedom, the defense of international law, and the art of deterrence.
The (Partial) Unraveling of the Liberal World Order
As a liberal world order seems to unravel around us, many of us are feeling a sense of historical deja vu. Once before, after all, a liberal world order unraveled.
Why? Who caused the global chaos of the 1930s that culminated in World War II? American isolationists, of course, are the prime culprits. Their doctrine of myopic selfishness, of refusing to be their brother's keeper, of sticking their heads in the sand, weakened the forces of civilization and opened the way for multiple barbarisms to emerge and spread.
Finally, at Pearl Harbor, the consequences of isolationism were brought home. The US left its wicked isolationist ways behind, returned to its destiny as the bastion and champion of the freedom of the human race, and led the forces of freedom to victory in World War III and Cold War I. By the 1990s, the US presided over a more peaceful and prosperous world than ever before in recorded history. Isolationism had sunk into decades of shameful oblivion as the vast majority of Americans were patriotic enough to side with generosity and justice and take pride in their country's leadership of an ever-expanding Free World.
But recently, isolationism has made a comeback, and again it’s undermining deterrence and international law, and leading to bloody chaos and war, which seems likely to culminate in World War III.
There's a lot of blame to go around, and it starts when the Obama administration tried to translate the escapism of the anti-Iraq War groundswell into a foreign policy. In 2008, Russia invaded Georgia, occupied two provinces, and got away with it. Georgia was a staunch US ally. It had fought alongside America in Iraq. But America didn't fight for Georgia when its own homeland was invaded. Aggression 1, Peace 0.
That was on Obama's watch. How differently history might have unfolded if the American people had had the wisdom to elect John McCain!
Then in 2014, also on Obama's watch, but no one gets great kudos for vigorously dissenting– Do you remember the "FREE CRIMEA" "FIGHT PUTIN" protests in 2014? Neither do I– Russia occupied and officially annexed (though of course without international recognition) Crimea. There were sanctions, but no one thought of fighting. Aggression 2, Peace 0. The credible threat of overwhelming force that had undergirded the regime of international law was being eroded.
Then we pulled out of Afghanistan in 2021 and the Taliban took over. America's longest war ended in comprehensive defeat. The obvious ramification that this made the US look a lot less scary to its enemies went strangely unremarked. Or not strangely. Predictably. To think rationally about deterrence is neocon, and being neocon is very unfashionable these days.
If you start by saying that the liberation of Iraq in 2003 was a "stupid war," you can't really get any further. Why was it stupid? To what end was it a poorly chosen means? How is the cost-benefit analysis to be conducted? There's no way to answer those questions and arrive at a conclusion that is anywhere near as negative about the liberation of Iraq as political correctness now requires everyone to be. So unless you have the guts to be a Bush apologist, don't ask the questions. Don't think. We don't really have foreign policy doctrines anymore. It takes too much intelligence to formulate them. And to try to be intelligent about foreign policy runs too much of a risk of becoming a neocon.
As the painter Goya once said, "the sleep of reason breeds monsters." Our foreign policy reasoning has slept, and now the monsters are coming forth. We're well on our way to sleepwalking into a world war. Just like we did during the isolationist swoon into wishful thinking and myopic selfishness back in the 1930s.
But let's not call it World War III just yet. Let's call it, more optimistically, Cold War II, even if it’s already not nearly as cold as I would like. We've got hot war underway in Ukraine and Israel. But many of the fronts of the war, notably China vs. Taiwan, are still frozen. In general, my preferred grand strategy would be to keep a lot of fronts frozen and freeze some more, and then win slowly and idealistically, by moral suasion and civil disobedience and the spread of freedom, like how we won Cold War I. But Cold War I could have become World War III, and Cold War II might.
The liberal world order isn’t unraveled yet. It still has strength and prevails over much of the globe. But it’s weakening fast.
What Should Our Goals Be? Peace, Victory, but Above All, the Moral High Ground
All that's in the past, and you can't change it. Maybe we could have thrown the ring into Mount Doom by sending troops to defend Georgia in 2008, and we wouldn't have Vladimir Sauron besieging Ukraine's Minas Tirith now. But you play the hand you're dealt. With that in mind, let me summarize the big questions we face as follows:
Will Cold War II become World War III? Can we stop it? What can we do to chart a course towards less war and more peace?
Are we, and will we be, the good guys? However violent and polarized the current global unrest may become, how can we do the right thing through it all, and find the just side to be on?
And how do we win? How do we avoid being beaten, ruined, defeated, perhaps even conquered? How do we expand the reach of our friends and our values?
Always bear in mind that the worst case scenario is (3) and not (2): winning while being the bad guys. Better to have (2) and not (3): to fight for the right, and lose.
And while (1) is very desirable, we also don't want (1) and not (2). We shouldn't want to keep the peace by being in the wrong, by allying ourselves with the bad guys and sharing the spoils.
So (2) is the most important. We must above all wish to be just and to do the right thing. The moral high ground is more important than either peace or victory.
But the moral high ground is also a strategic resource, a means to peace and victory. This is the crucial point that foreign policy “realists” continually miss. It’s easier to make a credible threat of fighting, and to mobilize allies to support you, when you’re in the right. And you stir up fewer enemies against you. So for the sake of doing the right thing, but also for the sake of peace and victory, we should be continually examining the justice of our own cause, and competing for the moral high ground.
Sometimes you reap peace and victory for doing the right thing if and only if you’re doing it because it’s the right thing, and not if you’re doing it for the sake of peace and victory.
If we had preached and proved that we loathe aggression as such, and that we'll fight it wherever it rears its head, Putin would never have ordered the invasion of Ukraine. He wouldn’t have dared. Russia didn't invade Crimea for twenty years on the off-chance that the West was principled. But since the realist reaction to the neocon idealism of Bush has asserted the primacy of national interest, Russia calculated but fighting for Ukraine's territorial integrity probably wasn't in the US “national interest,” so it wouldn't happen. Without principles, deterrence fails. The failure of deterrence doesn’t serve the “national interest,” but it’s the result of the pursuit of the national interest.
Likewise, if the Arab street trusted the US to resolutely advocate and pursue and insist upon the full application of its professed principles of national self-determination to the Palestinian people, it would be much less angry when America supports Israel in fighting Hamas. But Arabs don’t trust us, and they shouldn’t. Hamas is evil and ought to be destroyed, but Israeli settlements in the West Bank are also evil and ought to be removed.
Israel is desperately unjust to the Palestinians all the time. Israel's demands upon the world for sympathy and aid in the face of terrorism should be answered with a question: How are you going to give the Palestinian people a decent life, with decent democratic rights, on land, to which they have a recognized to sovereign claim? How are you going to break the cycle of despair that you created, in which terrorism seems like their best option? When the US occupied Iraq, we immediately and deliberately set out to build an Iraqi democracy, with a plan to exit when that was accomplished, which we duly did. It was a messy and bloody business, as ought to have been obvious in advance, and was obvious to some, but now the Iraqis are better off than they were before, and fairly friendly to the US. Go thou and do likewise. Instead, Israel dominates the Palestinians without giving them rights and democracy, and lets terrorists represent them in negotiations.
Israel does not have the moral high ground, and because we’re allied with Israel, neither do we. We do mostly have the moral high ground in Ukraine, but consider news like this:
"Ukraine's parliament voted overwhelmingly Thursday to advance legislation seen as effectively banning the Ukrainian Orthodox Church over its ties to Moscow, despite the church's insistence that it is fully independent and supportive of Ukraine's fight against Russian invaders.
"The Verkhovna Rada, or parliament, voted 267-15 on the measure, which requires further voting before it gets finalized and reaches the desk of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The legislation would prohibit the activities of religious organizations "that are affiliated with the centers of influence of a religious organization, the management center of which is located outside of Ukraine in a state that carries out armed aggression against Ukraine.”
"That is seen as directly targeting the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, one of two rival Orthodox bodies in the country, where a majority of citizens identify as Orthodox.
"The UOC has historically been affiliated with the Moscow Patriarchate. It declared its full independence from Moscow in May 2022, three months after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and has repeatedly declared its loyalty and called on members to fight for Ukraine. Its leader, Metropolitan Onufry, said earlier this month that it's the “sacred duty” of every believer to defend Ukraine." (The articles from October 20th but the bill has since passed.)
A sacred duty of every believer to defend Ukraine? Wow, that's one patriotic church! Would any church in America be so coercively pro-military service? And yet somehow it's not enough.
I don’t know how enforcement will play, but prima facie this law looks to be a severe violation of religious freedom, in a country that the US is strongly supporting.
What are we going to do to push back against that? Maybe there will be some formal protest, but that seems very insufficient. We could, of course, cut military aid, or make a conditional on a revocation of the law. But it really wouldn't be fitting to bully an unjustly invaded country in the midst of a desperate struggle for national survival.
And our support for Ukraine is mostly self-interested anyway, since Russian imperialism has been the chief threat to Eastern Europe for centuries, and to the whole free West for decades now. It would be nice if Russia hadn't turned fascist and aggressive, but given that it has, it's extremely advantageous for us to merely equip Ukrainians to kill Russians, instead of making our boys risk their lives to do it ourselves. So we don't have much leverage.
Now suppose we could tell Ukraine: "Look, we can't have a US ally crushing religious freedom, but we also understand your concerns that the formerly Moscow-affiliated Ukrainian Orthodox Church might be harboring enemy sympathizers, and that you can't afford that right now. Let's make a deal. If you help us to purify our coalition of religious persecution by revoking this law, we'll arrange for some NATO troops to be stationed in the country as a kind of firebreak against the Russian invasion going too far. You still need to do the fighting to recover the occupied territories, but NATO can be the guarantor that the front line moves only one way. If we have to fight the Russians, so be it. But we don't really think they want to take us on, or that they'll succeed if they do. This seems like a great way to start integrating you into NATO. Would that make you feel safe enough to restore religious liberty for the formerly Moscow-affiliated church?"
That's the sort of move that would help us gain the moral high ground in Cold War II, and also, by the way, prevent it from becoming World War III. Now, there's a kind of futility about proposing detailed crisis response from obscurity. Even leading writers, pundits at the New York Times or National Review, are usually wasting their time when they get too prescriptive. For that matter, even heads of state don't get their way in such matters. Things happen in more messy and multilateral ways.
The real point is that my "NATO firebreak" strategy is one of a hundred good options that would become available if we had a lot more guts. We can't really get the moral high ground, because we don't have enough leverage vis-a-vis our flawed friends, because we're not willing, ourselves, to fight, but only to supply arms from a distance.
How US Foreign Policy is Corrupted by Excessive Casualty Aversion
To do more good in the world, America needs to have more of an appetite for fighting.
Actually, let me make that stronger. To avoid steadily adding to the large burden of injustice which already lies on our national conscience, America needs to do more of our own fighting and not trap or bribe foreign proxies into doing it for us.
The great besetting sin of US foreign policy is certainly not imperialism, as some very foolishly think. Empires are good and bad, they have their virtues and their faults, and their relative unpopularity today vastly exceeds anything that could be remotely justified by an actual cost-benefit analysis of institutions involving the extension of political authority over foreign peoples. The British Empire was, on balance, a force for good. The Russian Empire was not, but even the Russians were a civilizing force in central Asia. Aversion to imperialism as such is rather naive, yet it's part of who we are, and there's no escaping it. I won't advocate that the US pursue formal imperialism and establish lasting political control over foreign lands, though I have no doubt that there are a lot of foreign lands that would benefit if we did. But I don't think we're psychologically capable of it. The national ideology rules it out, and our national ideology of democracy and freedom, too, is, on balance, a force for good, even though it's often naive.
Nor has America ever been guilty of excessive militarism, or a penchant for aggressive war. That has been a common vice of mankind for most of history. If you read some history of the late 19th century, it's appalling how widespread was a lazy-minded assumption, notably among Germans but others as well, that some nations were just enemies and it was good to kill them. World War I was the bitter fruit of that grim delusion. It's desperately important to realize that the normal morality of respecting people's rights, especially the right to life, applies to foreigners, too. And it's bad to conscript young men against their will and your fights that they may or may not believe in, and force them to kill and be killed in large numbers. There may be causes important enough to make this a necessary evil, but we should be very reluctant to draw that conclusion, and never for mere realpolitik or a patriotic lust for national aggrandizement. Don't kill for nationalism!
But now the error is all the other way. We’re in no danger of erring by being too eager to fight. We err by being too reluctant.
The damage done by excessive casualty aversion was most vividly displayed in the 1998 Kosovo War. Like the 2003 liberation of Iraq, only more so, that intervention lacked UN sanction. In 2003, there were UN resolutions that could be plausibly interpreted as justifying the invasion. In 1998, there were none. Yugoslavia had been disintegrating and had a track record of ethnic cleansing, so when it decided to draw the line at Kosovo, suppressing an emergent rebellion with some of its habitual tactics, there was fear of witnessing yet another genocide on European soil. Many solemn promises of "Never again" had helped people cope with their horror at the Holocaust. What could be done? Whatever happened would more or less transgress international law, which seems to side with national sovereignty and against foreign intervention.
NATO's intervention had the merit of being humanitarian and disinterested. Stopping genocide was clearly NATO’s only motive. But it was fatally vitiated by excessive casualty aversion. Aerial bombing of Yugoslavia was not at all what the situation called for. NATO ground troops in Kosovo to separate the combatants and maintain order until Yugoslavia had a decent regime is what would have met the need. Instead, NATO fell into alignment Kosovo Liberation Army, an unsuitable ally. The KLA’s victory predictably led to ethnic cleansing of Serbs and other non-Albanians from Kosovo, largely negating the moral claims on which NATO’s war had been launched. And the Kosovar victory and the expulsion of many Serbs left reintegration of Kosovo into Serbia as an implausible future for the province, and thereby punched a baneful hole in the beneficent principle that had been so valiantly vindicated in the 1991 Iraq War: that there should be no changes of international frontiers through the use of force.
Russia was paying close attention, and its 2008 aggression against Georgia appears to have been retaliation for the West's belated recognition of Kosovo's independence earlier that same year. Russia’s justifications for its intervention in Georgia mimicked those NATO had used in Kosovo, though Russia was clearly far less sincere and disinterested.
So why didn't NATO do the right thing in Kosovo? Why did it mess things up so badly? Of course the reason was that aerial bombardment didn't really risk the lives of any NATO soldiers. Starting from a just cause, NATO strayed from the path of justice through its excessive casualty aversion. Its humanitarian motives were invalidated by its cowardly military procedure, and while it may really have prevented a genocide, it killed too many innocents and created a muddle of dangerous precedents.
We're making a similar mistake in Ukraine today, tainting a just cause by failing to discipline a flawed ally because we’re too casualty averse. We don't have enough leverage to hold Ukrainians to the standards of democracy and respect for religious freedom that we ought to, because we're not willing to fight. We’re only to supply them with arms to kill Russians, thereby mitigating the risk of Russian imperialism that we face. You can see how this might backfire. Western liberal ideals have universal appeal, but are frequently discredited through our own hypocrisy. What are Russians supposed to conclude when the West preaches religious freedom but then does nothing when its heavily subsidized Ukrainian ally crushes the religious freedom of their co-religionists?
The wicked arithmetic of excessive casualty aversion is clearest in Kosovo. Not one NATO military serviceman died, but nearly 500 Serb civilians did, many of them nowhere near the battle front. And the outcome was far less satisfactory than a more casualty-tolerant strategy could have achieved. It's less clear in Ukraine because part of the theory is that by not sending troops, we are reducing the risk of nuclear war, with its horrific civilian toll.
But why? Would Russia really be more willing to use nuclear weapons against the West, which can strike back, than against Ukraine, which cannot? If NATO declared its determination to fight to the Russian internationally recognized border, but no further, unless nuclear weapons were used, in which case the military objective would be the elimination of an independent Russian independence at all costs, would Russia really nuke its way into oblivion and permanent obloquy rather than accept life within its legal frontiers? How do we know? And how do we know that Russia won't go nuclear in response to escalating arms shipments to Ukraine? Do we really have good reason to think that NATO would increase the risk of nuclear war by sending troops in return for Ukrainian actions that de-escalate, such as eschewing attacks on Russian territory or granting more religious and language rights to ethnic Russians in Ukraine, relative to the alternative of ever increasing arms subsidies? I think avoidance of nuclear war is just an excuse to indulge our usual excessive casualty aversion, and let Ukrainians do the dying while we get the benefit of seeing Russian imperialism bloodied into oblivion.
Ukraine’s fight is our fight. Russian imperialism has been the historic nightmare of half the countries in NATO. A Ukrainian victory would make us safer. We ought to feel a little ashamed at letting this one valiant nation fight alone to shield the freedom of Europe, and join the fight for the sake of fairness and honor. A side-effect of that would be to give us more leverage and influence with Ukraine, so that we could align them more closely with the values that we know to be right, such as religious freedom.
A Foreign Policy Doctrine for Our Times: Be the World Policeman
I complained earlier about the lack of foreign policy doctrines nowadays. One reason we’re slow to fight is that our leaders have given up the habit of articulating and inspiring us about what to fight for. Having complained of that, I should probably try to be part of the solution and not the problem, by suggesting a foreign policy doctrine responsive to the times and worthy of America’s values. So let me put forward for consideration The World Policeman Doctrine.
World Policeman Doctrine: As the world’s most powerful democracy and long-time leader of the free world, at a time of rising bloodshed and chaos worldwide, America should seek to restore peace, order and international law by standing ready to oppose aggression anywhere in the world that it occurs, with military force, in harmony with the due process of the UN.
This doctrine might get the US into more wars, but that’s good because America is almost always, on balance, a force for good when it fights directly. America goes wrong either by not fighting, or by fighting indirectly, supplying arms or diplomatic support and approval to sordid allies. Its worst sins in the 20th century were, first of all, the isolationist abdication of world leadership after World War I, which set the world on track to World War II, and second, various covert operations of the CIA, like sponsoring the antidemocratic coups in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954 and Chile in 1973. The war in Vietnam is the exception that proves the rule, because American soldiers were fighting the Vietcong and communism, a worthy cause, but it was tainted by a CIA-backed coup in 1963, and the assassination of President Diem.
The phrase “world policeman” has generally been used pejoratively when describing US foreign policy. Some foreigners blame America for its arrogance in acting as a self-appointed world policeman, while Americans often grumble about the burdens of it. But a policeman’s role is really rather humble, for he doesn’t make the law but only enforces it. The role will be somewhat burdensome for America. As the wise Spider-Man motto puts it: “With great power comes great responsibility.” I won't claim that doing our best as world policeman will maximize the comfort and safety of the American people. Maximizing one's comfort and safety is a goal unworthy of free people. To deserve our heritage of freedom, we must aim higher. Our goal must be, first and foremost, to win the moral high ground, but never fighting except for the right, but never failing to fight when the right side is in need.
To live into the role of world policeman, we need more strength. More weapons. More soldiers. We might want to rethink our post-Vietnam allergic attitude to conscription. If the government makes us pay taxes in money, why shouldn't it also require, as the price of citizenship, that young men prepare and stand ready to fight for their country at need? Freedom of conscience is the best reason to deplore conscription: people shouldn’t be forced to fight in wars they think are wrong. But that has its limits, for often people support a war but just don’t want to risk their own lives for it, or perhaps don’t feel they a right to, because of family obligations, etc. Conscription can distribute the burden of fighting fairly, and ensure that the community is more proportionally represented.
Serving as volunteer world policeman would require deference to international law, if possible, but of course, the UN-led regime of international law has always been vitiated by the veto power of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, which makes it almost unthinkable that it would ever hold Russia militarily accountable for its aggression in Ukraine. The 2003 liberation of Iraq is an ambiguous case in point with respect to international law. It's certainly plausible to have opposed it then, and/or to regret it now, on the grounds that have enjoyed insufficient warrant from the UN. The way the Bush administration threatened to launch the war with or without UN authorization somewhat undermines the legitimacy even of UN Resolution 1441, the intent of which, in any case, seems to have been, for many nations that voted for it, to prevent rather than authorize war. The hope was that by reinforcing the threat of intervention, the international community could scare Saddam into full compliance with the inspections regime. The war certainly would have been more legitimate if another resolution, more explicitly authorizing military force, had been passed.
On the other hand, such fine scruples might make the friends of international law too hand-cuffed and incapable of action. Police procedure is always fraught with such difficulties. And compared with Russia's invasions of Ukraine and Georgia, or for that matter with NATO's intervention in Kosovo, the 2003 liberation of Iraq occurred deliberately and with a high degree of international law due process. It would be good to get back to where that was normal, and any departure from it a shocking and intolerable exception. We might consider supporting UN reforms that would make the international body more capable of decision and action, such as some mitigation of the veto power of the permanent Security Council members. We have already advocated expending the number of them to include Japan and India, which makes sense, but makes the veto problem worse.
The current global crisis also dramatically underlines the importance of democracy. That democracies don't make war on each other it's still probably the most important single fact in international relations, and at one level, the reason for the Russia-Ukraine war is that the Russian people wickedly allowed the country’s proto-democratic constitution of the 1990s to be subverted and ruined by a dictatorial usurper.
We should consider doubling down on democracy promotion, and maybe trying to articulate into international law a duty of revolution against dictatorial and aggressive regimes. What, after all, ought Russians to do right now? Surely the answer is that they ought to work to overthrow the Putin regime, by peaceful means if possible, perhaps by chivalrously violent means if necessary– and that inasmuch as they fail to do this, they share in the guilt of that regime. The Bible has a powerful lesson to offer here, for when Pharaoh held at the Israelite people in slavery, it was not only pharaoh personally, but the entire Egyptian people who were punished in the plagues, and that was right, for the Egyptian people were necessary accomplices in their ruler’s crimes, and shared in his guilt. But how are the Russian people supposed to know what their duty is, if more enlightened people do not tell them? Their brains addled by propaganda, and saddled with the corrupt legacy of a disastrous imperialist national habit, it must be very difficult for the Russian to realize what justice demands that he do. It would be good if it were inscribed into international law that when any regime perpetrates aggression, it creates a duty of revolution in its subjects, for the performance of which they will be duly held accountable in the course of time. But failing that, at least the United States itself could educate Russians about their duty of revolution. And yet living into the role of world policeman would require an articulation of the difference between democracy promotion through aid and trade and capacity building, etc., and military intervention, which for now should focus on stopping aggression and restoring order. The 2003 liberation of Iraq is a valuable precedent to have in the arsenal, but for now such muscular promotion of freedom probably needs to be put on the back burner. Maybe we can circle back to it after we’ve restored basic international law and the nonaggression principle.
If we want to play world policeman, we need to come to terms with some of our own hypocrisies. There’s a case for Crimea to stay attached to Ukraine, and there’s a case for Taiwan’s de facto independence to be recognized and converted into official sovereignty. But US principles should be consistent, and the US positions on Crimea and Taiwan are prima facie inconsistent: for self-determination in the case of Taiwan, against it in Crimea. It may be too much to hope for that Taiwan stays de facto independent and Crimea be restored to Ukrainian rule. But that combination of positions also lacks a basis in principle.
Making Peace Between Russia and Ukraine
The geostrategic big picture must be borne in mind, but for now, what I care about most is ending the war between Russia and Ukraine. That’s where the most dying is happening, and where the danger of escalation is greatest.
Deterrence is hard now because passions have flared up, and there’s so much death that needs to be justified. To make Russia pull back now, it’s more likely to require actual war rather than the mere threat of it. And yet during Cold War I, there was a phenomenon called brinksmanship, a term implying that the superpowers went right to the brink of war as part of their negotiations. With a fair bit of determined brinksmanship, wielding the threat of a huge NATO army to drive Russia out, it might still be possible to spook Russia into withdrawing little by little. But we can’t rely on mere “cheap talk.” To credibly threaten NATO military intervention, we would need to have built up forces and mobilized public opinion.
When the Putin regime falls, the West should pour economic aid into Russia to help it recover. In the first half of the 20th century, we learned this lesson well with respect to Germany. Germany was bitter after losing World War I, and a desire for revenge smoldered, but after World War II, Germany was soon forgiven and became integrated into the civilization and values of the West, benefiting from NATO membership and Marshall Plan aid and the rest of it. Similarly, the aftermath of Cold War I left Russia bitter, feeling abandoned and impoverished. If we get another chance, we should do our utmost to give Russia a chance to integrate into the West and Europe. Russians have long looked to Europe as to a leader, and when they become free again, we should help the Russian economy recover and then try to integrate Russia into the West.