This commentary is by Scott Thompson, who served in the U.S. Foreign Service from 1980 to 2007 and now observes the world from a safe distance in Calais.
Anti-establishment voices, chiefly but not solely on the Republican side, made a midterm campaign issue over the cost of U.S. military aid to Ukraine. This amounts to about $18.9 billion over the eight months since Russian forces invaded.
By way of a very rough comparison, as of a year ago the Republican-initiated Global War on Terror is estimated to have cost about $8 trillion over its 20 years. Take an eight-month slice of that cost, subtract the non-military portion, and it still amounts to more than 10 times what we are spending on Ukraine.
And no U.S. soldiers are fighting on Ukrainian battlefields and coming home dead or maimed in body and soul. For those caught up in it, war is a horror. But as American interventions go, Ukraine is a bargain.
With Ukraine, we feel the outrage of unprovoked aggression. We hail its right to self-defense. We salute its people’s courage and fierce drive for independence. In short, in Ukraine we see a reflection of our past and better selves.
And all we have to do to stay true to them is provide Ukraine the material and skills necessary to protect its people and to prevail in a fair fight against the invader: a just war if there ever was one.
But don’t underestimate Washington’s ability to fumble a golden opportunity handed to us on a silver platter by a lead-footed foe.
During Halloween week, a choir of voices, this time from the foreign-policy establishment leaning Democratic, rose to call for a quick negotiated end to the war. On Nov. 1 from Vox/NPR, on Nov. 2 from The New York Times, then on Nov. 3 from Newsweek — by which point the pattern was clear enough to show where the thoughts were clustering.
A number of these voices belong to people I knew when I was working on Balkan affairs and in Ukraine during the 1990s. They are accomplished diplomats whose long, dedicated service I honor. Yet I fear they succumb to an occupational hazard of our profession: overestimating what diplomacy can do.
The classic example, which invariably serves as the establishment’s model for premature negotiation, is the 1995 Dayton Agreement over Bosnia and Herzegovina. The triumphalist account of this episode in “To End a War” (1999) celebrates what the past 27 years have exposed in the meantime as gross diplomatic malpractice.
The Dayton Agreement froze the Bosnian conflict just as our interests had turned the corner and were gaining ground, but well before they had come to fruition. Dayton neither solved Bosnia’s underlying problems nor provided a workable mechanism for doing so. Bosnia and Herzegovina essentially became a ward of the international community.
For more than a quarter-century it has been stuck in a dismal, costly limbo that teeters perpetually on the brink of renewed war.
It turns out that we did to Bosnia with diplomacy what the Kremlin would later do to Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 by force of arms: split the country along ethnic-territorial lines, shatter any possibility of forging a common national purpose, and forestall the full flowering of a democratic state.
We blighted their future and called it peace. Imagine if France had chosen to force on the American colonies a negotiated settlement with Britain in 1777 instead of going heavily into debt to help our ancestors win independence in 1783.
Or picture how the world might look now if the U.S. had decided to impose on the British a deal with Nazi Germany in 1940 instead of providing over $31.4 billion in Lend-Lease aid (worth at least $350 billion today), then going on to contribute massively to the allies’ victory in 1945.
It’s not that Russia or Putin per se must lose in Ukraine. It’s the authoritarian principle they embody that must lose. And this authoritarian principle must lose not only in Ukraine, but also right here at home.
Once upon a time, when America arguably was great, the U.S. championed the principle of a higher law of nations to constrain the blinkered recklessness of governments. We committed ourselves to projects like the United Nations and envisioned a world ordered by law, not dominated by overweening wealth or force. We were more apt to identify our interests with those of people everywhere.
But we have since lost our compass, it seems, and become more like those who vie against us.
There is no such thing as a local crisis anymore. Higher prices at the grocery store, illegal migrants at our southern border, upheaval in Haiti, floods in Pakistan, war in Tigray, mass oppression of Uighurs in China — every local crisis can be understood as an instance of interlocking problems facing us on a planetary scale.
Only when the law-of-all gains the upper hand over the power-of-some might our global human community stand a chance of surviving their onslaught.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Scott Thompson: When war must be fought out.