It has been a while since the United States won a war. It looks as though we are about to lose yet another one – the war in Ukraine. This is a proxy war justified as an effort to “weaken and isolate” Russia. Our strategic defeat in this effort now leaves us with three unpalatable alternatives. We can continue to support Ukraine as Russia grinds it to bits and reduces it further in size and population. We can escalate the war, as French President Emmanuel Macron has advocated, despite the Russian threat to answer us with counter-escalation, possibly to the nuclear level. Or we can face up to failure and save what we can of Ukraine by negotiating with Russia. I know which of these choices I would prefer, and I suspect you do too. And, however this unwise and unnecessary war ends, we need to ensure that there are no more like it in future.
They say that a mistake is only a mistake if you don’t learn from it. Our country has recently made a lot of mistakes in its foreign policies. Sadly, we don’t seem to be learning much of anything from this experience. We have instead invented something uniquely American called a “forever war.” Such wars routinely fail. Still, we keep launching them.
I want to speak to you this evening about why we do this, why we shouldn’t, and how we can stop doing it. My focus will be the forever war with Russia in Ukraine.
Forever wars can take many forms. They can be economic or technological, like the one the Trump administration kicked off against China and that the Biden administration has enthusiastically doubled down on. They can be military, like our twenty-three year “global war on terrorism.” That has taken us into combat in over eighty countries, killed over 900,000 people, and cost us an estimated $8 trillion. Forever wars need not be direct, as our proxy war in Ukraine illustrates. They can even be covert, as our multiple barely concealed interventions in Syria demonstrate.
Hellbound and Down 