“Give war a chance,” the maverick strategist Edward Luttwak implored at the tail end of the Clinton administration. The quest for durable peace, he thought, was habitually interrupted by those liberal do-gooders who refused to let wars “burn themselves out.”
Spool forward some 25 years and war is being given a whole lot of chances, from Israel’s onslaught on Gaza and Lebanon to weaponized famine in Sudan to the long, grinding war in Ukraine. Amid this devastation, Western leaders have in the past years showed a unified front, largely supporting Ukraine and Israel and ignoring Sudan. But a new dynamic has underpinned this informal coalition: the growing penchant for war — and the tolerance of its costs — among the Western liberal-left establishment once lampooned by Mr. Luttwak.
When did the left become so comfortable with war? We need to ask this question with some urgency — not least because Donald Trump repeatedly played on fears of global war in his election campaign before promising to “stop wars” in his victory speech. The standard explanation is that terrorists and an axis of autocracies are threatening the world order, and Western leaders — whatever their political affiliation — must act. Certainly, the world looks more dangerous than it has for a long time. But this does not fully explain the way that the Biden administration has so single-mindedly been arming Ukraine and Israel while also letting allies in the Persian Gulf wage a devastating proxy war in Sudan. Nor does it quite explain the enthusiasm for the remilitarization of Europe coming from liberal commentators, Nordic social democrats and German greens alike, who will now be looking worriedly across the Atlantic.
When liberals compete to give war a chance — and when speaking the unspeakable comes down to fringe and hard-right politicians — we are in serious trouble. Unless we can open up political space for dissent and confront the true costs of conflict, wars will not burn themselves out. They will simply burn.
posted by f.sheikh