Making Good Decisions
[The conflict between Russia and Ukraine is ongoing and the situation is likely to have changed since this article was finalized on the 24th of February.]
For the first time in decades, we are witnessing war on mainland Europe. Biden has issued economic sanctions on two Russia-backed territories in eastern Ukraine, in response to rising tension with Putin. This is quite an unusual turn of events. The West has, since the Cold War, provided a safe haven to its citizens. War has been sequestered far away from citizens of the first world, while political leaders have become increasingly insulated from the effects of war. Consequently, they seem more willing to engage in long-term warfare, despite the consequences this has on society at large. The question we might then ask: how can we make decision-makers feel the effects of war?
What has changed?
At one point, it was normal for kings and chiefs to literally fight side by side with soldiers in a war. Even as recently as the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, leaders like George Washington and Napoleon were in the action. The motivations behind traditional wars were varied: they allowed states to acquire control of territory or resources, to gain power, to get rich, and to change leadership. The Peloponnesian War took Athens from the dominant Greek city state to a subject of Sparta. The Crusades carried huge financial costs and were largely motivated by religious differences. The English Civil War and French Revolution resulted in revolutionary regime changes, as both nations abandoned belief in the ‘divine right of kings’.
The real change started during the Cold War. The US and USSR managed to avoid open conflict by engaging in proxy wars instead. Proxy wars are initiated by major global powers which do not become directly involved in open conflict. The Soviet-Afghan War is a good example: the US backed the Mujahideen against the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. With the end of the draft in America, as the world has gotten smaller, war has gotten more distant. Wars tend not to happen in America, Western Europe, China, Russia, and places like that. The Russo-Ukrainian conflict is an exception. That’s why its attracting so much attention.
As Samuel Huntington predicted, ideology has become the driving force behind post-Cold War conflicts. War is no longer fought for traditional reasons. Ideological wars blur the lines between victory and defeat, while exaggerating the lines between us and them. In the West, the Soviet Union was the enemy, whether they did anything to provoke the US or not. As the Soviets weakened and fell, they were replaced with other enemies.
The number of nation-states has risen dramatically over the twentieth century, and the bureaucratic machinery within these states has become more complex. This has altered the nature of modern warfare. The fighting itself has been relegated to an activity almost exclusively for soldiers, while political leaders sit in comfortable offices making life or death decisions from afar. Still, in early twentieth century democracies at least the leaders faced consequences for fighting wars. A leader who lost a war was almost guaranteed to lose power. And no elected leader could even enter a war without assurances that the war would be popular. The same cannot be said now.
What are the consequences?
First, this change skews the decision-making process for starting and ending wars. Since we are now fighting ideologies, we will always have an enemy. Since wars don’t happen here (in the territories of the Great Powers), they aren’t likely to be political liabilities. They only show up on the news. Your children and your neighbors typically aren’t doing the fighting; professionals who volunteered for the risk are the people dying. This is a recipe for forever wars, which is what we are experiencing right now.
A second, and perhaps more pertinent, problem arises, namely, that war has become inconsequential to the people in power. This is because these forever wars are not winnable and have little effect on the home front. The 2003 invasion of Iraq is the best example of this. Bush faked evidence of Iraq’s nuclear program to enter the war and killed thousands of people. His fraud was exposed, yet he easily won reelection and never faced a single consequence for any of it. Iraq was the most obvious, but the same pattern holds in all of America’s post-9/11 wars. It doesn’t matter that the wars are unjustified. It doesn’t matter if America loses. The “evil” is still out there, and America keeps fighting it. It’s not just America, though. The British were involved in the Iraq invasion. Russia has fought against the old Soviet states (and is threatening Ukraine right now). China has its proxies. Israel has Palestine.
Third, war has become the status quo. It used to be even a winning effort was costly. That’s not so anymore. War is a good way for the rich and powerful to become even more rich and powerful. It has become almost impossible for most of us to tell a good cause from a bad cause at this point. The military industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower warned about is now firmly in charge of military spending in the US. A healthy majority of congress from both parties receives large contributions from military suppliers. A tremendous number of jobs are created by these same people. Well known think tanks are funded by the same people. No one becomes a senior military officer without being in favor of military spending and when they retire, jobs are waiting for them on the civilian side of the equation. Without a constant “threat”, even these people have trouble justifying spending billions. People suggesting a change are easily discredited because they are outside the entire military establishment.
Are there any solutions?
Real solutions are unlikely in the short term, but there are some things we could try. For starters, government can try to find ways to make the regular citizens of nations feel the costs of war, wherever the actual fighting happens. This could be financial costs by creating a military tax from which all military operations are funded. People would notice if they knew how much they were paying to support an invasion. Look at Social Security. It is one of America’s most popular social programs in practice, but it’s also one that people constantly complain about. This is because it is a separate line item when taxes are being taken out of paychecks. Things might change if people grumbled about troop deployments as much as they grumbled about retirement protection.
They could also restart conscription. Instead of the army mostly being made up of the poor and marginalized, anyone and everyone’s kids may die in battle. That would get people’s attention. The last American president to really feel the consequences of war was Lyndon Johnson. It was the draft that made the Vietnam War so unpopular and started the massive protests. It’s also probably not a coincidence that the last two presidents to end wars were George HW Bush and Joe Biden. Bush served in World War II and Biden’s son served in Iraq. They felt a connection to the soldiers that no other recent presidents have.
International bodies like the UN, World Court, and IMF could help if they could impose consequences on the aggressors in a war. The problem is that the UN has no real power over any of the permanent Security Council members, the US is constantly undermining the World Court, and the IMF needs these countries for its funding. But if we did come up with an international entity with teeth, it would help.
Ultimately, any long-term solutions will need to be through considerable public unrest. The powerful are too secure in their power. The people have to be the ones to change that. Commenting on the Mexican-American War (1846 – 1848), Henry David Thoreau said the following: “If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood.” More than a bit tricky to avoid paying taxes in modern society. But we can’t take any options off the table, or war will be a constant noise in the background of all of our lives.