The following quotation is pulled from Rod Dreher’s blog on The American Conservative site. It is from a reader of that site and its main import was to offer a corrective to some things Dreher had written about the current situation in American military circles. Only the first and last paragraphs from that respondent are being quoted here. The first, a rehearsal of respondent’s qualifications to speak to the main and secondary topics, sets the stage for the second paragraph, the one to which I wanted to respond. My response can be found after the quotation.
I'm an active-duty military officer who's served at home and across the world in division-level headquarters and higher, with special operations teams, and in the Pentagon. I'm not important or a policymaker, but am close enough to see what the world looks like from the top of the military hierarchy, and have been able to see what the military has been like over the past several years from the top, middle, and bottom
. . . .
If I can say one more thing, on a different but related topic, of our warmongering in Russia: I promise you everyone is aware of the nuclear risks. Vice leaves virtue with no good options, and Russia's actions leave us with none likewise. We can either leave Ukraine to its fate and allow the entire post-WWII settlement in international law to be cast aside and return to a world where wars of conquest are accepted, or risk further escalation. It's worth remembering that in 2014, with Crimea, we already tried option 1 and leaned on Ukraine to de-escalate and not provoke a wider war, and it clearly didn't work out as we'd hoped. Obviously reasonable minds can differ on this, and we might be wrong in our approach now, but no one is blase to the risks or blind to the situation. Everyone is honestly doing their best here. And to be honest, I'm kind of amazed that someone like you would encourage people to watch Tucker Carlson for the truth on this issue in particular, after the pretty scandalous way he hyped up the biolabs chimera, for all that on domestic politics Carlson had been an insightful voice."
For me the scariest part of what this individual says is when he starts his comments on the war in Ukraine with the catchy just-war oversimplification about vice leaving virtue with no good options. To think that someone who has operated at what appear to be fairly privileged levels in our military would talk in such a naive manner in relation to the situation unfolding in Ukraine is truly alarming. If this is a common way of thinking among those in his orbit, it shows a shocking lack of self reflection and near total absence of critical thinking skills. I say this because for me, someone perhaps slightly above the average-guy-on-the-street level in terms of insider knowledge, which entity in this conflict--the U.S./Ukraine alliance on one side, or Russia on the other--is on the side of vice and which represents virtue is not at all apparent. By "Russia's actions" I assume the simple fact that they staged a military invasion on their neighbor may be in view. But the invasion didn't happen in a vacuum: it was provoked by an action, or series of actions, starting at least as far back as 2008 when the Bush administration was advocating incorporation of Georgia and Ukraine into NATO--this following similar incorporations of the Baltic states in previous years, which in turn was preceded by other members of the former Warsaw Pact joining that alliance as early as 1999. The Warsaw Pact, as we all should know, was the Soviet Union's answer to NATO. The pact was effectively disbanded over 30 years ago with the collapse of the Soviet Union which, one would think, might lead to a similar fate for NATO. But NATO not only continued its existence as a military alliance, quietly abandoning its original mandate to thwart the spread of Communism further into Europe, but has persisted down to the present day, expanding more by the decade, presumably under the principle that a military alliance without an enemy, in order to sustain itself, will need to manufacture one. And what better way to manufacture an enemy than to engage in a lengthy series of provocations that aim to isolate the hoped-for enemy and to stoke conflict? If there is any sort of virtue in these actions they've escaped me completely. What about the U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014 that overthrew a democratically-elected leader who favored friendly relations with Russia, replacing him with the candidate Victoria Nuland, and presumably the government she was representing at the time, wanted in his stead? That we're courting nuclear annihilation and spouting naive just-war platitudes over this is nothing short of insanity. As to leaving Ukraine to its fate, the only reason the U.S. might have any obligation in that regard is because we share responsibility for putting that country into its current desperate situation through a series of wildly irresponsible actions that, in retrospect, were bound to lead to disaster. The fellow offering this input needs to realize that what for him might form some kind of obligation, namely to support U.S. foreign policy at all costs and to identify and defeat enemies, is no obligation at all to the vast majority of the U.S. population who do not and/or did not serve in the military. Those not under contract to the military are not bound to support this administration's foreign policy at all costs, and identifying, much less waging war, against enemies is no part of our vocation. Despite what the majority of the mass media seems to be doing now, we are not beholden to militaristic group-think and can choose our sources of information freely. We conduct our research and come to conclusions that, though perhaps not quite as well informed in some areas, may nonetheless be just as valid and even more compelling. Our catch phrase in response to these military sources is the law of instrument: to a man with a hammer in his hand, everything looks like a nail. Our job is to point out what is a real nail and to restrain the hammer wielders from recklessly laying waste to the world with their cudgels.