“Give war a chance,” the maverick strategist Edward Luttwak implored at the tail end of the Clinton administration. The quest for durable peace, he thought, was habitually interrupted by those liberal do-gooders who refused to let wars “burn themselves out.”
Spool forward some 25 years and war is being given a whole lot of chances, from Israel’s onslaught on Gaza and Lebanon to weaponized famine in Sudan to the long, grinding war in Ukraine. Amid this devastation, Western leaders have in the past years showed a unified front, largely supporting Ukraine and Israel and ignoring Sudan. But a new dynamic has underpinned this informal coalition: the growing penchant for war — and the tolerance of its costs — among the Western liberal-left establishment once lampooned by Mr. Luttwak.
When did the left become so comfortable with war? We need to ask this question with some urgency — not least because Donald Trump repeatedly played on fears of global war in his election campaign before promising to “stop wars” in his victory speech. The standard explanation is that terrorists and an axis of autocracies are threatening the world order, and Western leaders — whatever their political affiliation — must act. Certainly, the world looks more dangerous than it has for a long time. But this does not fully explain the way that the Biden administration has so single-mindedly been arming Ukraine and Israel while also letting allies in the Persian Gulf wage a devastating proxy war in Sudan. Nor does it quite explain the enthusiasm for the remilitarization of Europe coming from liberal commentators, Nordic social democrats and German greens alike, who will now be looking worriedly across the Atlantic.
Two other explanations stand out. First, history has shown that governments and bureaucracies tend to become addicted to a war footing, with failure sucking them in further — think of America’s war on terror, or Vietnam. War encourages a perverse cycle of escalation in which huge financial and political gains accrue for governments and the military-industrial complex while the costs tend to be borne by weaker parties — before they start to come home in some shape or form.
We’ve called this bipartisan pattern “wreckonomics” and have found it especially present in wars or conflicts with costs that Western politicians can largely outsource — from fighting terrorism, drugs and smugglers to quasi-colonial interventions during the Cold War. Traditionally, the political right has been the dominant actor in these forays, including Richard Nixon’s war on drugs and George W. Bush’s war on terror. That last effort proved a savior for the military-industrial complex while inflicting relatively limited American fatalities as instability, terrorism attacks and mass displacement accumulated elsewhere. Today, the war in Ukraine is once again offering a supercycle of vastly increased military spending, this time without the risk of any Western combat deaths.
There’s an important difference between invading Iraq and Afghanistan, on the one hand, and defending Ukraine against Russian invasion on the other. Yet where war involves a skewed distribution of costs and gains, it tends to incentivize further escalation. Notably, Western leaders, such as Britain’s Keir Starmer, France’s Emmanuel Macron and NATO’s former head Jens Stoltenberg, have suggested that the Ukraine war is winnable, without having a clear road map beyond sending more weapons — to the point of potentially allowing long-range Storm Shadow missiles to be fired into Russia itself.
The second and crucial factor is that moral righteousness blinds us to the costs of war and the faults of friends. Until quite recently, that fire tended to burn strongest on the right, while center-left governments in the United States and Europe have frequently offered some kind of “lesser evil” to temper the worst costs of war. Consider Tony Blair’s claim that he could tame the war on terror by joining it, or left-leaning politicians’ habit of playing catch-up with the right on border security. The end result has still in many cases involved more military solutions. Barack Obama, for instance, distanced himself from Mr. Bush’s war on terror when he was president, but he waged what some called “drone wars” while failing to bring military spending below Cold War levels. In the political marketplace, liberals have tended to be insecure consumers of the war fix rather than its principal peddlers.
That has been changing. In the past years, the sense of righteousness that has so often infused right-wing war fever has been increasingly evident on the left, with a moral crusade to defend democracy and fight existential threats becoming a crucial part of its case for power. Though this tendency did not start with the U.S. election of 2016, Mr. Trump gave it a very significant boost in America.
The Democrats’ defeat was partly explained by accounts of Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin conspiring to undermine democracy, and later, the Jan. 6 riot in Washington added further urgency to the fight for democracy. During the pandemic, liberals saw themselves as being on the right side of history in an existential fight against a virus and the populist authoritarians who were recklessly ignoring it.
Right-wing wreckonomics has tended to drum up existential threats against the nation, such as migration, terrorism and drugs. A different kind of existential angst — focused on rising authoritarianism, global emergencies and vulnerable groups — has typically animated liberal righteousness. When this means protecting democracy or victims of violence, for instance, it has an obvious good side. But center-left leaders have increasingly been harnessing these protective instincts to the war machine while shutting down spaces for frankly debating the costs incurred in cranking it up.
Over Ukraine, Mr. Starmer, then leader of the British opposition, told his lawmakers that anyone assigning blame to NATO for the war would be kicked out of the Labour Party. Legitimate questions around the causes of conflict or concerns around military escalation — including nuclear war — have been routinely dismissed in ways that brook no dissent. We have seen a wide array of critics accused of apologism, misinformation or not caring about democracy, from the realist scholar John Mearsheimer to the populist British leader Nigel Farage and Pope Francis. Amid such accusations, the danger of groupthink has grown.
A similar shutting down of debate has been underplaying the costs of war in the Middle East. Amid evidence of multiple war crimes, criticism of Israel’s devastating military campaign has been suppressed under liberal or center-left governments — whether in German political debates, on U.S. campuses or in French streets. The Biden administration and key European allies have been providing arms and military support to Israel as the Palestinian death toll has risen past 43,000, according to the Gazan health ministry. And public debate has been practically nonexistent over the Biden administration’s warm support for the United Arab Emirates, which was recently rewarded with “major defense partner” status and praised as an ally against terrorism despite credible evidence it has been arming the Rapid Support Forces rampaging through Sudan. (The United Arab Emirates has denied this.) Rather than going away, the righteous legacy of the war on terror is still adding fuel to the fire in these catastrophes.
If liberals cannot honestly discuss these devastating human costs, who will?
Worryingly, it is hard-right politicians who are selectively trying on the peace mantle. So we have JD Vance standing in as one of America’s most visible Ukraine war skeptics; in Europe, criticism comes mainly from outfits such as the populist Reform U.K. party and the far-right Alternative for Germany. Meanwhile, the upstart Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance in Germany has offered a rare left-wing challenge to the Ukraine war consensus. Although condemned by liberals, the party’s growing popularity is a warning to Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s collapsing coalition of greens, liberals and social democrats.
To be clear: Mr. Putin’s aggression is wreaking havoc, and the costs of not confronting it are considerable. But it remains striking that it has fallen to a motley band of challengers to highlight the kinds of major problems that only intensify when righteousness feeds enthusiasm for war: Costs end up coming home, conflicts develop a life of their own, bureaucracies bloat, and the risks of escalation and mission creep grow.
Meanwhile, right-wing politicians haven’t precisely abandoned their war fix. Rather, they are more cynically picking their battles and selectively stoking the fires. Republicans have wholeheartedly supported Israel’s actions while Mr. Trump has once again been bringing war rhetoric home with talk of a migrant “invasion” and the “enemy from within.”
Paradoxically, the outcome of the U.S. election may open up space for a rethink. Politicians must now find a way to address serious crises and genuine threats without ignoring the steep costs of one-dimensional war fixes. The appeal of an “antiwar” message from the hard right on Ukraine should make center-left parties — and not just the Democrats — pause for breath. Given their history, center-left parties in particular should be well placed to think and speak clearly about paths to peace that do not involve waging unwinnable wars indefinitely. Failing to confront those with a vested interest in militarism, they have left the door open for the right’s calculating mix of war and peace. Framing the choice as one between all-out war and capitulation is unhelpful, and framing peace advocates as conspiracists or traitors is an Orwellian turn that only digs us deeper into the mire.
When liberals compete to give war a chance — and when speaking the unspeakable comes down to fringe and hard-right politicians — we are in serious trouble. Unless we can open up political space for dissent and confront the true costs of conflict, wars will not burn themselves out. They will simply burn.
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