WaPo’s Concocted Reasons for Fighting Wars That do not Benefit Ordinary Americans

At the Washington Post, Marc Thiessen recently authored "This is the ‘America First’ case for supporting Ukraine." I strenuously disagree with his "facts" and reasoning throughout, but his final five "reasons" are especially bizarre. None of these five reasons justifies U.S. involvement in the Ukraine war. Most glaringly, none of these reasons consider a meaningful cost-benefit analysis from the perspective of ordinary Americans. Further, his "reasons" lead to the bizarre conclusion that the U.S. should instigate and prolong numerous unjust wars that fail to serve the interests of ordinary Americans, a major issue conspicuously ignored by Thiessen. Here are his "reasons" (6-10) for continuing with our warmongering 6-10:

6. "A proving ground for new weapons."

This is a valid reason for indiscriminately going to war!  Yes, indeed.

7. "Arming Ukraine is revitalizing our defense industrial base."

Yes, we need to make sure that weapons manufacturers can afford to pay big salaries to management and to their lobbyists.

8. "The Russian invasion has strengthened U.S. alliances."

Not true if you poll people outside of the readership of U.S. corporate media. And if only there were other better ways to strengthen U.S. alliances other than killing people and blowing up their cities . . .

Further, consider attitudes of people outside of Western countries:

Almost a year after Russia’s war against Ukraine started, it has united the west, according to a 15-country survey – but exposed a widening gulf with the rest of the world that is defining the contours of a future global order.

The study, by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) thinktank, surveyed opinions in nine EU member states, including France, Germany and Poland, and in Britain and the US, as well as China, Russia, India and Turkey.

It revealed sharp geographical differences in attitudes to the war, democracy and the global balance of power, the authors said, suggesting Russia’s aggression may be a historic turning point marking the emergence of a “post-western” world order.

“The paradox of the Ukraine war is that the west is both more united, and less influential in the world, than ever before,” said Mark Leonard, the thinktank’s director and a co-author of the report, based on polling carried out last month.

Timothy Garton Ash, a professor of European studies at Oxford University, who also worked on the study, called the findings “extremely sobering”.

Consider this graph, which strongly clashes with the prevailing narrative of U.S. elites:

9. "Victory helps prevent nuclear proliferation."

Do you know what else would prevent future nuclear proliferation? Starting a nuclear war. As Joe Biden admitted on October 6, 2022:

In remarks at a reception for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Biden said it was the first time since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis that there has been a "direct threat" of nuclear weapons’ being used, "if, in fact, things continue down the path they are going.”

“We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” he said, offering his bluntest comments about the use of nuclear weapons since Russia invaded Ukraine in February.

Biden admitted that he engaged in this stunningly reckless behavior months before recent days, when  decided to send Abrams tanks and F16's to Ukraine. What could possibly go wrong with this?

10. "Victory in Ukraine is achievable."

Didn't we hear this same claim, year after year, in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya? Thiessen presents no factual basis for believing that this specious claim is any more true in the case of Ukraine.

It seems that Thiessen's article was penned by a lobbyist for the military-industrial complex, but it seems like Thiessen would not be the kind of person who would be so incredibly unreflective. For instance, Thiessen wrote candidly about the Durham Report--the headline is "The Durham report is a damning indictment of the FBI — and the media."  I would now suggest that he soul-search Hillary Clinton campaign's lies about Russian collusion with Trump, something she did to enhance her personal political ambitions. What is the connection to Ukraine? I suggest this. There is a hatred of Russia simmering under the lack of a meaningful national discussion regarding the Ukraine War. That poisoning, I suspect, motivates unreflective articles of the sort Thiessen has just written about the Ukraine war.

For more on the many ways that the Ukraine War fails to serve the interests of ordinary Americans, see this episode of Glenn Greenwald's System Update: Does Endless Spending in Ukraine Cause Deprivations at Home?

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Jettison Your Tribal Politics!

I’ve repeatedly expressed my concern with the idea of a “political spectrum.  In their book, The Myth of Left and Right: How the Political Spectrum Misleads and Harms America Verlan Lewis and Hyrum Lewis argue that the notion of a “political spectrum” is the root of much of our political dysfunction. I agree and I would recommend reading their article at Heterodox Academy. Here are a few excerpts from their article:

For most of our history, Americans didn’t think in terms of a spectrum. They just saw (accurately) that America had a two-party system and that each of these parties stood for a bundle of unrelated positions. This all started to change after World War I when Americans imported the left-right model that had arisen in Europe during the French Revolution. Since then, the use of the spectrum has grown exponentially and actual policy has been obscured as Americans have become accustomed to placing every person, institution, or group somewhere on a left-right scale (with radicals on the far left, progressives and liberals on the center left, reactionaries on the far right, and conservatives on the center right). The political spectrum is, without question, the most common political paradigm in 21st-century America.

The central problem with this model is that it’s inaccurate for the simple reason that there’s more than one issue in politics and a spectrum can, by definition, measure only one issue. There are a multitude of distinct, unrelated political policies under consideration today (e.g., abortion, income taxes, affirmative action, drug control, gun control, health care spending, the minimum wage, military intervention, etc.), and yet our predominant political model presumes that there is just one.

So if there is more than one issue in politics, why do Americans use a unidimensional political spectrum to describe politics? Generally, it’s because they are convinced that there is one essential issue that underlies and binds all others, such as “change,” and therefore the political spectrum accurately models where someone stands in relation to this essence

We contend that this is exactly backward. There is no essential issue underlying all others—abortion and tax rates really are distinct and unrelated policies—and socialization, not essence, explains the correlation between them. People first anchor into a tribe (because of peers, family, or a single issue they feel strongly about), adopt the positions of the tribe as a matter of socialization, and only then reverse engineer a story about how all the positions of their tribe are united by some essential principle (e.g., progressivism or conservatism) . . . Left-right ideology is the fiction we use to justify and mask our tribal attachments.

. . .  Would it be useful for medical doctors to model all illnesses, treatments, and patients on a spectrum? Obviously not because medicine is multidimensional and trying to model all medical issues using a single dimension would do great harm. The same is true of politics. Doctors get along just fine by talking about specific illnesses and treatments (lung cancer, fractured tibia, bronchial infection, chemotherapy, bone setting, antibiotics), and political discourse would be much more productive if we simply talked about specific political problems and policies (crime, poverty, inflation, gun control, welfare spending, interest-rate tightening).

Yes, all models are simplifications of reality, but those models must also be accurate such that they improve rather than hinder our understanding of the matter in question. A bad model is actually worse than no model at all (as the four humors theory of disease makes clear), and the political spectrum is a bad model. It is a tool of misinformation, false association, and hostility.

. . .  Talking in terms of a spectrum serves no informational function, but it does serve to elevate the temperature of debate and make the public really angry about the “commies” or “fascists” on the other side.

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The Insane U.S. Foreign Policy Regarding Ukraine that Has Needlessly Brought the World to the Brink of Nuclear Annihilation

I have encountered many people who have strong opinions about the Ukraine War. Their opinions go something like this:

Putin is Bad. He is Evil Like Hitler. Putin invaded Ukraine. He must be pushed back out. Or else he will invade other countries, just like Hitler did.
No, these are not 8-year olds. They are middle aged adults. They proudly admit to me that they know next to nothing about pre-2022 Ukraine.

Now consider this succinct history of the conflict offered by comedian Dave Smith during an discussion with Joe Rogan:

[T]he list of people with in the government within the national security apparatus, who completely opposed NATO expansion is really impressive and long. There's a lot of really wise people within the government who were completely against NATO expansion in the 90s. When it first started, at least three Secretaries of Defense, Robert McNamara, Robert Gates, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama's Secretary of Defense, William Perry, who was Bill Clinton, Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Defense at the time. They all opposed [NATO expansion] in the strongest possible language, and all explicitly for the reason that this will provoke a conflict with Russia.

They were like George Kennan, who was the founder of the containment strategy, the old school cold warrior. There's this great interview he gave with Thomas Friedman from the New York Times, you can find it online. And it's in the 90s when they're doing the first round of NATO expansion. And he is furious. His anger comes through the page when you're reading it, because he's like, What are you guys doing? We won the Cold War. We won. And now you're picking a fight with Russia?. And this isn't Vladimir Putin's Russia. This was Boris Yeltsin and these aren't the Soviets. These aren't the communists. These are the heroes who overthrew them. Why are we picking a fight with them? [Kennan] was a cold warrior. He was like, You're throwing away my life's work. And he said, and this was a really a crazy prediction, really ominous. He said, the people who are advocating expanding NATO are going to continue advocating expanding it and expanding and expanding it, and then there will be a Russian reaction. And then when there's the Russian reaction, they're going to say, see, that's proof that we have to keep expanding it. And damn, if he wasn't right. If he wasn't right about that.

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