I started this whole discussion seeing only one “bad guy” in this but I’m beginning to be skeptical that there is any real “winner” or however one wants to put it. At least it might be better still to find a way for all parties to walk away and look/feel like they’ve gained something. Is that off the table? Why? Why is there an inevitability that this has to go on and on? Is it only Putin’s intractability? I don’t see any winners in this continuing. Not Russia and not the U.S. and the Ukraine is only going to make it by holding out its hand for enormous sums of money. Instead of trading criminals for semi-famous basketball stars why don’t they start really talking behind the scenes about compromising, good-will gestures, opportunities for peace measures. Am I delusional? Has anyone even suggested this anywhere? Russia wants something. Is it really the glory of some former tsar? Really? Or is it something more modest? Maybe I’m naive but if so, then bombs away I guess.
The United States benefits economically from war and has, on and off, since the 1890s. War is how the US became the dominant global power. WWI saw it take over the role of central financial power from the UK, and WWII saw it become the central political and military power of the allies and the powers they conquered. The subsequent wars the US fought cost American lives, but helped build the American economy, which disproportionately relies on military spending for economic growth and technological advances. Provided there is no nuclear exchange in this war, the US can gain by selling elaborately expensive weapons systems all over Europe and by taking over portions of Russian energy exports to Europe, which it has already done with no little alacrity. The US has economic interests in prolonging this war, but no interests in Ukraine itself. Additionally, the US will expand its empire yet further, which all empires do. The risks are that the US overextends itself financially and provokes another war, and a more expansive one. Worst case scenario for the US would be to be to fight two wars against two powers at the same time. There will be those who insist the US can mobilize and do so again. That is untrue. If the US fights both Russia and China, it will lose. And wars against these powers do not necessarily need to be of the expeditionary, military sort, at least for the US. The US will not lose in the sense of Germany and Japan in that it will not be conquered, but it will lose primacy. Were US policymakers actually concerned with American Exceptionalism, then they would choose policies to manage decline over decades in a manner that will not bring with it widespread economic dislocation and an unnecessary relative economic decline. (The word relative is critical since the US will not be reduced to penury.) America is not exceptional.
Russia does want something. It has been clear for decades what that is: strategic security. NATO expansion threatens Russia. NATO expansion is intrinsically aggressive and provocative. This has been warned about since the 90s, and indeed, the more restrained approach initially taken by Bush I accounted for that. The Clinton years saw the end of that, and the US has acted aggressively since. Many people in the west are blind to that, either willfully or foolishly. Triumphalism and the crusader mentality - manifested in the drive to spread democracy and capitalism, and the assorted accoutrements that come with them - informs policy, and not just in Europe. The West put itself in a position where large scale war has returned to Europe, which of course is very common historically. Reducing the current situation to one man, hence relying on a variant of the great man theory, must at this point be viewed as an active, conscious choice of self-deception. When Putin dies, Russia will not, and the same concerns and conditions will exist.
Very few people actually want peace. Very few people will explicitly state they want war, of course, so instead they will offer other reasons why a political settlement should not be pursued. Rationales vary, including nebulous and flexible concepts like justice, but they all rely on continued war. Since my streets are safe from foreign bombs, I lose no sleep from the latest European war or any other war raging in other uncivilized parts of the world. But life sucks for Ukrainians.
