Politics, war, and other related matters
The 1995 film, Crimson Tide, has come into alarming relevance with Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. It is the story of the crew of a ballistic missile submarine, the U.S.S. Alabama, who are sent on a deterrence patrol with the understanding that a renegade Russian leader may be readying an attack on the United States, requiring a nuclear pre-emptive strike. There is a great deal of depth in what on the surface looks like a retelling of The Caine Mutiny as produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and directed by Tony Scott, but one scene stands out for me at present.
During a moment in which war is just looming, rather than being a question of present debate, the officers of the submarine gather for dinner. Captain Ramsey, the old salt for whom an order to launch is purely a technical matter, assays the swagger and ideology of his temporary executive officer, Lt. Commander Hunter. At one point, Ramsey quotes—more or less—Carl von Clausewitz’s well known line that “war is a mere continuation of policy by other means.” Hunter, the Harvard-educated new kind of officer, observes that what Clausewitz meant was more complicated than those who recite him often think. Hunter finishes the scene with the assertion that “in the nuclear world, the true enemy is war itself.”
In terms of world war, this, so far, has seemed to be on the minds of the major powers. We have had many civil wars, police actions, “special military operations,” or whatever other description suits the dishonest mood of the moment. Many have died, and many more have had their lives thrown into chaos, but we have not repeated the titanic struggles of the Napoleonic Wars, World Wars I and II, and a few other conflicts. We have not had mass mobilizations of peoples and economies thrown into existential disputes among the most powerful nations that span the planet.
Instead, when such powers wished to test themselves against each other, they used proxies such as Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan while the developing world fought for decolonization, the dividing up of the pieces, and the spread of festering medieval religions—and for such things as electricity, clean drinking water, and schools, among the many other blessings of the modern—nuclear—world that they had been denied before. But no nation that has acquired nuclear weapons has felt free to use them after seeing their horrors in Japan. As an instrument of policy, they are only useful if they are never used.
Someone please pass the word to Vladimir Putin about this. What his criminal war in Ukraine reminds us, though, is that war itself is less and less a practical tool for governments in this age.
That may sound like the sort of pollyanaism of which so many of us were guilty in the 1990s when the Iron Curtain had come down, but the Twin Towers remained standing. But as Steven Pinker exhaustively shows in The Better Angels of Our Nature, there has been a strong trend over the course of human history toward diminished violence—both between individuals and between nations—and toward methods that carry out Churchill’s remark that “meeting jaw to jaw is better than war.” Pinker argues that the nuclear explanation—nukes are too dangerous—is not sufficient. In 2012, he was not writing with a new military crisis, a pandemic, and a resurgent fascism surrounding him. In the long term, he may be right that we as a species are becoming ever more tolerant in the interest of human flourishing, but in the present unpleasantness, we can only cling to the hope that some things remain too brutal to contemplate.
Still, the war in Ukraine does fit a pattern that the United States has found in Vietnam, Iraq, and a number of other nations: People do not like to be invaded. They do not like to have outsiders descend upon their countries and rearrange things, no matter how bad, to some external liking. And they will fight back, often successfully, against such intrusions.
And herein lies the point of this essay. The use of force is less and less successful as a tool for achieving distant goals. Ukraine wishes to continue to exist as an independent nation. That is immediate. An armed citizen who draws a carry piece to ward off an attacker wants to live on past the current incident. But sending in a military to change a regime without any popular support for the transition or to seize territory that a leader feels belongs to his own nation is no more acceptable these days than it would be for private persons to wander up and down their neighborhoods, firing off rounds to convince residents to move. No more acceptable and no more successful.
The Ukrainians may win this conflict—win defined as regaining their stolen land at great cost in lives and resources—and it is my wish that they do—and be paid huge reparations while being the cause of regime change in Russia. But the bigger point that they are making is that aggressive force on this world that we all share is an obsolescent tool. Might no longer makes right, and when the peaceful peoples combine, might does not even achieve its goals.
This may be the first time that I have ever subjected myself to an accusation of optimism, but so be it, if the failure of war as a means of political gain dies in the process.