I’ve always been a staunch Pat Buchananite (and later Ron Paulian) non-interventionist when it comes to foreign conflict. During the 90s, I abhorred Bill Clinton’s adventurism in places like Bosnia and Somalia. Black Hawk Down is a great movie, but those American military personnel should never have been placed in harm’s way in the first place. It might seem hard for younger viewers to imagine this, but George W. Bush campaigned on what he called a “humble foreign policy” and “no nation building” ahead of the 2000 election. That was sweet music to my ears as a first-time presidential voter that year, and I enthusiastically voted for Bush.
You can say, “well, 9/11 changed things,” but 9/11 had nothing to do with the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Iraq’s government, despite the Bush administration attempting to link the two in order to sell the American people on the war. The reasons for launching a war against Iraq were proven to be, at best, a horrible intelligence failure, and at worst outright lies. Now just about everybody, including most of those responsible for the war, acknowledge it was a mistake, and one that left hundreds of thousands dead, the area destabilized, and under greater Iranian influence. You can say, “okay, but we had to invade Afghanistan.” How did that work out? We ultimately captured and killed bin Laden in Pakistan, eventually left Afghanistan in disgrace after 20 years of pouring blood and treasure into what has been called “the graveyard of empires,” and the very party that was in control in Afghanistan before we invaded is now again in power. We spent two decades sending young Americans to die for absolutely nothing, not to mention the vast civilian deaths.
U.S. foreign policy elites can’t stop interfering all over the world. In 2014, we didn’t like the pro-Russian government of Ukraine, so our government lent support to the pro-Western Maidan revolution. The result of meddling by both the U.S. and Russia was the start of eight years of civil war in Eastern Ukraine. Russia, and Russia alone, bears the blame and the responsibility for starting the current war in 2022 by invading Ukraine, but a lot of parties, including the U.S., the U.K., the E.U., Ukraine, and (oh, yes) Russia, have a share of the blame for creating the conditions that led to the current war.
Since 2022, Russia has grabbed a large swath of Eastern Ukraine and has painfully eked out additional territorial gains, while Ukraine has successfully prevented Russia from taking additional oblasts and has even successfully invaded and taken some territory in Russia. And what has all of this cost? Billions of dollars and at least hundreds of thousands of deaths from both sides. Not to mention the loss of limbs, homes, and entire cities.
Now, in the abstract, of course, I agree that it’s wrong when one country invades another. (Even when the U.S. invaded Iraq.) But as an American, I can’t think of a good reason why I should particularly care whether Kyiv or Moscow controls Eastern Ukraine. These two people groups and nations have a complicated history going back centuries in which this territory has changed hands many times. The current borders are ten years younger than I am. Western Ukraine is heavily Ukrainian nationalist and culturally, linguistically, and ethnically Ukrainian. Eastern Ukraine has large minority populations that are ethnically, culturally, and linguistically Russian.
I don’t condone or support Russia’s actions, but it’s simply not my fight, and not in the interest of the American people for billions more dollars to be poured into that country. And in fact, it’s quite counter to the interests of the American people. Pro-interventionists point to all of the money flowing into American arms manufacturers because of this war, but I have a low view of that industry because it consistently lobbies for more war. And why shouldn’t it? It doesn’t make money from peace. Meanwhile, we’ve depleted our own supplies of artillery shells because we’ve sent our stockpiles to Ukraine, meaning our own readiness to protect the American people has been degraded.
More importantly, the U.S.-backed war on Russia’s border has brought the world closer to nuclear annihilation than at any point in my lifetime, and I lived through the last decade of the Cold War. Most people don’t think about what that would actually be like, but it would be the end of civilization as we know it. It would mean the deaths of hundreds of millions of people in a single day, and many more over the months to come due to starvation and radiation poisoning. It might set humanity back 1,000 years.
Think about it. In the 1960s, President Kennedy was willing to go to nuclear war over the USSR threatening to put nukes in Cuba. My dad and my grandfather built a bomb shelter in their backyard, as did millions of fathers and sons. It was that serious. Washington DC is over 1,000 miles from Cuba. Moscow is less than 300 miles from the Ukrainian border over which Ukraine-launched American high-tech weapons are being sent to Russian targets. Those facts don’t excuse Russia’s invasion or continued war in the slightest, but you cannot seriously assess a global conflict if you’re not willing to try to understand the other side’s perspective.
I hear pro-interventionists say things like, “We can’t live in fear of nuclear war.” Well, it’s easy to say that, but the entire world lived in fear of nuclear war during the entire Cold War. There were times when nuclear war nearly broke out accidentally between the U.S. and Russia due to human errors. I believe it’s only by the hand of Almighty God that we were spared that. Moreover, the fear of nuclear war was one of the main deterrents that kept the Cold War from becoming a hot war. You don’t have to like the leverage that a vast nuclear arsenal gives to Russia, but that kind of leverage is why nations want to get nuclear weapons in the first place.
Remember in Terminator 2 when the Terminator is explaining to young John Connor how the war between Skynet and humanity started? Skynet kicked off a preemptive nuclear strike from the United States against Russia. It didn’t do it because Russia was the enemy. It did it because it knew that Russia would immediately retaliate. The mutually assured destruction would aid Skynet in its goal of winning a war against all humanity. Even the dopey Hollywood writers were aware of the reality of American and Russian nuclear doctrine, but lots of people on social media think the threat of nuclear war is “no big deal.”
“Why attack Russia? Aren’t they our friends now?” This is what John Connor said in shock after the Terminator described Skynet attacking the Russians. You have to remember that Terminator 2 was released a few months before the fall of the Soviet Union. But even by the summer of 1991, tensions had weakened enough that a line like that could appear in a movie and not cause controversy.
That’s certainly what those of us on the Buchananite right expected would happen after the USSR broke up. It was a new chance for peaceful relations. Friendship. NATO’s original purpose, to deter Soviet expansion, was at an end. But NATO didn’t end. In fact, it kept expanding eastward. We stayed meddling in European affairs, and we continued a militarily provocative posture toward Russia.
Had the U.S. not backed Kyiv through words, money, and arms, it’s entirely possible that peace talks, which were underway shortly after the war began in 2022, might have resulted in far less loss of life for both sides, and far less territorial loss for Ukraine. Instead, it’s droned on for three years. Zelensky today said the end of the war is far away. The American and Russian-backed civil war lasted for eight years before Russia invaded Ukraine. Five, eight, or ten more years of war in Eastern Ukraine would continue to decimate the Ukrainian population. I have no interest in subsidizing more death and life-changing injuries. I have no interest in subsidizing more Ukrainian civilians getting kidnapped by military press gangs and sent to the front with little training. It’s time to do what JFK did: ratchet down tensions by negotiating. Let both sides get something that they want and forge a path to peace.
Let me address one final common objection: “We have to stop Putin now or Poland and Germany are next.” Every geopolitical foe throughout my entire life has been compared to Hitler by those who advocate U.S. involvement in opposing those geopolitical foes. So in the current context, Putin is Hitler, Russia is Nazi Germany, and anyone advocating for peace is a modern-day Neville Chamberlain. This analogy is employed because it packs a rhetorical punch, but it’s lazy and unintelligent. Hitler had taken Poland, Austria, and France within eighteen months. In roughly three years, Putin has only managed to take maybe 20% of Ukraine. Additionally, continent-spanning wars are incredibly expensive. Even if Putin wanted to reconstitute the Soviet Union, and there’s absolutely no evidence that he wants to, he couldn’t afford the attempt. Russia’s GDP is roughly equivalent to Texas’s GDP.
If Ukraine wants to go on fighting, they don’t need my permission. If Western Europe wants to go to war against Russia on Ukraine’s behalf, they don’t need my permission. But the United States should cut off the welfare. This is not our war. And the sooner we pull the plug, the higher the likelihood that both sides will hammer out a cease-fire deal.
This originally appeared on Being Right.
