In an Atlantic essay, Elliot Cohen argues, “The Awfulness of War Can’t Be Avoided.” After a setup involving Henry IV, Part II (he recently published a book subtitled Shakespeare on How Leaders Rise, Rule and Fall) he observes,
The fact—the necessity, as King Henry might have put it—is that although any force engaging in urban warfare has a responsibility to limit civilian casualties, city fighting is ruinous. The residents of Mosul, Fallujah, or for that matter of Aachen in 1944, would agree.
Halting the war now, leaving Hamas still standing, is a surefire way to breed more wars. Doing so would encourage Hamas to fulfill its promise of launching many more October 7–style attacks. It would also embolden Iran, which has already gotten away with firing massive volleys of long-range missiles at Israeli cities; Hezbollah, which has ignored a deal requiring it to withdraw behind the Litani River and is waging a low-level war across the Lebanon frontier; and the Houthis, who have been taking potshots at merchant shipping.
The effectiveness of antimissile defenses has shielded governments from treating necessities like necessities. Indeed, it has in some measure obscured the existential nature of the long-running Israel-Hamas war. Western leaders have preferred not to take seriously the eliminationist rhetoric of Hamas, Iran, and their various proxies, just as they preferred not to take Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric denying the existence of a legitimate Ukraine seriously.
While I’m largely in agreement, it’s worth noting that Iran’s missile attacks were almost surely planned with the expectation that Israel’s missile defenses would render them largely inert. As much a rogue actor as the regime in Teheran has been over the last 45 years, they have studiously kept their provocations below the threshold of all-out war.
The vacuous commitment of Western leaders to stand with Ukraine “for as long as it takes” allows them to avoid defining that awkward word, it. Creeping talk of cease-fires—in which the Ukrainians evince no interest—substitutes for providing Ukraine with the means to win. More hard thinking of a Henrician kind would make clear that a cease-fire would produce only a demoralized Ukraine, a triumphal Russia, a blow to Western prestige—and, in the end, a renewed Russian war of conquest. It would also force other states in the path of Russia’s ruthless imperial ambitions to choose between accommodation and nuclear proliferation.
Donald Trump managed to delay US aid to Ukraine but the Biden administration and mainstream Republicans seem ready to continue aiding Ukraine’s war effort indefinitely. That’s true of many of the NATO allies as well.
At the same time, while I support that policy, I understand the push for a cease-fire. The war is a humanitarian disaster and Ukraine is pushing for unachievable, maximalist goals. As much as I would love to see Ukrainian troops push out of its pre-2014 borders, it’s not going to happen. Accepting hard realities works both ways.
In both cases, there is in Western circles a desire to avoid confronting the awfulness of real war—not war waged in far-off lands for obscure purposes, but war waged to save or destroy nations, wars launched with massacre and the promise of more massacre in the event of victory by the side that started them.
Again, while Cohen and I support both Israeli and Ukrainian war aims, this strikes me as a straw man. It’s a keen awareness of the awfulness of these wars that have people calling for an end to fighting.
This phase of the Russo-Ukraine was is more than two years old now. We’re seven months into the Gaza war. In both cases, it’s rather apparent that the good guys have no plausible theory of victory. Even if the West were to accede to Ukrainian demands for materiel fully, it’s hard to see how they totally defeat the vastly larger Russian army. Nor is it obvious what Israel’s vision for a post-war better state of peace looks like; indeed, it’s not obvious they have given it much thought.
I don’t think any of the four combatants in these conflicts are yet at the point where a workable peace deal is possible. It’ll take more pain to get there. But I’m confident that, at some point, peace deals short of unconditional surrender will be reached in both instances.
After some shorts at Defund the Police, COVID shutdowns, and a dysfunctional Congress, Cohen gets back to his main theme:
The world has a distinctly 1930s feel to it. Western leaders have offered stirring or at least forceful rhetoric in response to multiple crises. But when it comes to deeds rather than words, the record is less compelling. During the Cold War, countries spent 4 or 5 percent of their GDP on defense, and the United States got as high as 8 percent. Today, even the United States is below 3 percent. There is a broad political consensus that China is a growing threat, that Iran is a violent menace, and that Russia is an imperial revanchist state. Yet no one is seriously calling for the kind of sacrifices that are needed to meet the crisis, such as raising taxes to reverse the shrinkage of the United States Navy or create the kind of industrial base that could sustain the American military should worse come to worst.
It’s hardly shocking that nations not at war behave differently than those at war. Still, the US Defense budget for FY2024 is $883.7 billion ($841.4 billion for DOD alone) and the FY2025 DOD request is $849.8 billion. That’s a lot!
Are a rising China, a revanchist Russia, and an increasingly aggressive Iran threats to US security interests? Yes. Are they a “crisis”? Probably not.
While both the Trump and Biden administrations characterize China as our pacing challenge, they’ve judged the threat to be emerging rather than present. Are we building fast enough to stay ahead of them? Probably. Are we going to remain so far superior as to make Chinese aggression unthinkable? Probably not.
With some notable exceptions, Europe is even more lost in its world of wishful thinking than the U.S. is. France’s Emmanuel Macron may talk of stationing Western forces in Ukraine, but unless his and other governments introduce large-scale conscription and create the industries required to sustain armies, they will not have much by way of land forces to do it. Great Britain, a traditional defense stalwart, will struggle to meet a target of 2.5 percent of GDP spent on defense by 2030—as its forces have shrunk to levels not seen, in some cases, since Victorian times.
While I don’t believe troop levels are a particularly useful point of comparison given the combat multipliers of technology, it’s simply undeniable that our European allies have, by and large, invested considerably less in military capability than we have. Because we see our security interests globally, we’ve seen the threats as more real. It took the wake-up call of the 2021 invasion of Ukraine to awaken Western Europe to the renewed Russian threat.
Thucydides, of whom Shakespeare’s King Henry would have approved, famously said that war is a rough master, a violent teacher. In peace and prosperity, he said, states and individuals do not find themselves “suddenly confronted with imperious necessity.” At a time when war flickers on the borders of a generally peaceful and generally prosperous and generally immature West, we would do well to heed his wisdom, and that of the tired but resolute Shakespearean king.
I honestly don’t know what to do with that. We’ve sent billions of dollars in aid and materiel to Ukraine and Israel. We’ve spending close to a trillion dollars a year on defense. We’ve spent the last several years rebuilding the force structures of each of our armed services around a future fight with China.
Could we be spending more? Taken the obvious shortfalls in our capacity to produce munitions more seriously? Probably. But we aren’t a politically united country these days, making getting behind major projects extremely difficult.
Cohen’s analogy to our 1930s posture may be prescient. It may take another Pearl Harbor to create a sense of necessity.
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: James Joyner
This content is courtesy of, and owned and copyrighted by, https://www.outsidethebeltway.com and its author. This content is made available by use of the public RSS feed offered by the host site and is used for educational purposes only. If you are the author or represent the host site and would like this content removed now and in the future, please contact USSANews.com using the email address in the Contact page found in the website menu.