A Useless Sacrifice
Firm opposition to war and a realist lens can help us analyze the conflicts of the past and present, as well as America’s imperial role in the world.
War is awful.
We should always speak out against war and advocate for peace. There are some cases where going to war may be justified, but these cases are extremely rare.
Wars are rarely just a fight between the “good guy” and the “bad guy” like they are depicted in superhero movies. They also rarely just start out of the blue. War typically follows years of bullying, bad deals, and broken promises. The country that feels most cheated or threatened will draw first blood, but will go down in history as the aggressor, even when both sides may be culpable.
In March, Jocko Willik said something on his podcast that I will never forget:
The nature of war is death. And wrapped around that question of when we should go to war, if you apply those standards, the willingness to kill not just the enemy but innocents as well, and the willingness to die, to sacrifice our nation’s children in the meat grinder of modern war, you would think if you apply those standards it would seem like war would never be justified. And I can tell you that most people who have been to combat…would agree with that statement.
Because wars typically involve only two sides, those of us observing may feel inclined to pick between one side or the other. We then might feel the need to support the actions of our preferred team and demonize the opponent.
Reality is much more complex than this binary view of the world. There may be deep-seated cultural tension seething between the two warring factions. There may be boundary disputes that go back hundreds of years.
Instead of glorifying one side and demonizing the other, we need to try to understand the motives of each side so that we can help warring factions come to peaceful resolutions and avoid future conflicts.
As nations grow stronger, some inevitably meddle in foreign affairs. This has been the case with the United States, particularly in the past century. American foreign policy has entailed intervening in foreign conflicts all in the name of spreading democracy and protecting American interests.
Americans are used to believing that nearly all their wars were justified, that freedom comes at a price. I certainly thought this way for most of my life. But history is not so black and white.
Yes, there were evil regimes that we fought and defeated. But we also cannot excuse the atrocities that have been committed in the name of spreading peace and democracy. We cannot forget all the evil that has been done, all supposedly for our security. And we ought to challenge the philosophy that underpins the justification for patrolling the world as its de facto police force.
The questions surrounding America’s role in the world is the grounded in the classic isolationist vs. interventionist debate. If a foreign country abuses its people, at what point do we intervene with force? Do we have a duty to protect the rights of others outside our jurisdiction? Will aggressive intervention only serve to make things worse? Are there non-violent measures we can take to resolve foreign conflicts? Is isolationism or interventionism more beneficial in the long run?
Answers to these questions are not always easy. We can look to history for some lessons learned, but we cannot change the past. History is not a series of what-ifs. It is a sequence of events that can never be changed.
What we can influence is the future. There are several wars today that need to end as soon as possible. One would think that everyone would be on board with this. Instead, year after year, we hear friends, neighbors, and colleagues beating the war drums, voicing their support for “military aid” and denouncing anti-war voices as propagandists for the enemy.
We need to cut to the heart of the infectious ideas that have seeped into the minds of many, that war is somehow good, that it is okay to bomb foreigners who do not share our values, that we need to protect American interests through violence.
War is evil. War is a last resort. War is almost never justified.
Adopting this attitude in a country that has been shaped by war is not easy. It may require reevaluating your views on the “just” wars of the past. It may even require acknowledging that some declarations of war that you thought were justified may have actually been the wrong decision.
It is easy to look back on losses or stalemates and determine that those wars were bad ideas. Vietnam and Iraq were clearly wasteful mistakes. Hindsight is 20/20. What is much more difficult is to look back at past victories and question whether in those cases we should have gone to war in the first place.
Just asking questions will draw the ire of the interventionists. You will be accused of treason, of supporting authoritarian foreign regimes, of condoning acts of evil, or of spreading propaganda. But that should not be a deterrent from scrutinizing past actions. We need to ask how war could have been avoided in the past and acknowledge where mistakes were made. Doing so does not make us unpatriotic. Instead, trying to learn lessons of the past can help us understand how we can avoid war in the future.
And that is a goal worth striving for.