Matt Taibbi urges that we give peace a chance, especially in light of the abysmal track record of America’s war hawks.

We spend a trillion dollars a year on war and none on nonviolence.…

The “domino theory” we used to justify invading Vietnam had roots in Munich conference nightmares of inevitable world domination.… Over the years we similarly invoked Hitler before attacking Iraq (which left Mesopotamia a borderless 8th-century outpost and spurred a horrific refugee problem) and Libya (which replaced a brutal dictator with no government at all), to say nothing of interventions big and small in Syria, Serbia, Iran, and other spots around the globe, often based on similarly dubious terrors about the peril of affronts to American “credibility.” Something like domino-theory fear was behind the post-1991 idea that we needed to meddle in Russian elections (to prevent the spread of communism anew) and push NATO as close to Russia’s borders as possible.…

When Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, the members of this militarist tribe weren’t sad. They were animated as hell and motivated suddenly to churn out Atlantic editorials celebrating the end of the malaise that for about ten minutes hovered over the cause of American power projection after Afghanistan’s collapse. They still suffer from the disease of modern American thought that endorses “regime change” as a solution to every real or imagined security threat, a reflex that, in case anyone forgot, has ended in tears every time it’s been tried in real life. They believe this is the only road out of the Russia-Ukraine mess. They’re welcome to that belief, but those of us who’d like to note their long track records of being not just wrong but insanely so should be able to express ourselves without being branded traitors. Yes, this time it really could be 1938. It could also be 1914, when a chain-reaction of lunatic escalations spun a localized conflict into a global conflagration costing millions of senseless deaths.…

All those disasters took place because both American and Russian societies are built on war as an organizing principle, and this is where John and Yoko were right: we should give peace a chance. We spend a trillion dollars a year on war and none on nonviolence. This problem is visible in Ukraine policy. People who aren’t trained in conflict resolution but are propagandized to believe in idiocies like the “surgical strike” or “acceptable losses” always think even the thorniest political problems have tactical solutions. They’re more likely to play chicken with nuclear annihilation, maybe by blowing up a pipeline, then risk looking weak via a cease-fire proposal.… Anyone who says this is an easy call has not thought this through, especially given our atrocious record when it comes to trying to to decrease international tension through the use of force. By any measure, we suck at it, and unlike previous wars, we can’t afford to screw this one up.

Either way, the hawks being in charge for so long, and beating the drum for campaigns like Russiagate, means there’s no longer a back channel to negotiate an end to what even the president is calling a new Cuban Missile Crisis. Even Biden is murmuring about maybe giving Putin an “off-ramp” to end this thing, but if pundits have their way, that will never happen. They’d prefer escalation, despite the fact that the next step is world war. These people are crazy, and we should be allowed to say so. Could peaceniks really do worse?