This
week’s speeches marking a year since the invasion of Ukraine have one
thing in common besides nauseating hyperbole. Most of them left actual
war aims to the imagination. Nobody, including the Ukrainians, has
declared a clear, realistic, and obtainable set of aims in what is one
of the most pointless wars in recent history.
The reason is obvious: this is not so much a war for an objective: land, power, prestige, etc. as it is a war against what are perceived to be the enemy’s objectives. The war, in other words, is all about containment. To wit,
Ukraine
acts to contain the fighting to ever-smaller portions of the east and
south of the country. And, of course, to contain its vulnerablity to
Russian interference generally.
Russia
acts to contain the ill effects of the war on Russia’s own economy and
political system. And, somehow at the same time, to contain the
perceived power of NATO, the EU, and the ‘West’ generally (Western
values, lifestyles, culture – in other words, Western stereotypes).
The
USA acts to contain Russian power so long as some influential Americans
are determined to cast Russian power and even Russian rhetoric as a
threat to American prestige. And, somehow at the same time, to contain
this war from spreading to other parts of Europe, and from requiring any
detectable sacrifice from the American people.
NATO acts to contain the onset and progression of senescence, something it’s been doing with some success since the late 1960s.
The
EU acts to contain the cost the war has inflicted on the European
economy; and to contain the tendency of the French, Germans, Poles, and
one or two other member states to conduct their own foreign policies.
China,
India, and others around the world act to contain any damage this war
may do to their interests but are otherwise glad to depict it as a sad,
intramural battle amongst Europeans and friends who are desperate to
keep on fighting the last war, and the one before that.
Whoever
thought containment died a generation ago mistook it for a
world-historical doctrine. It did not appear from nowhere after the
Second World War and then disappear with fall of the Berlin Wall. In
Russia and in other parts of Europe, the association of imperial power
with the advance of malodorous forces dates back several centuries. In
America, too, the impetus to circle the wagons, pull up the drawbridge,
quarantine the fevered, and a number of other containment-minded
metaphors, is as old as the Republic.
Who
is willing to die for ‘containment’? Sadly, too many people have
already died for this pernicious abstraction. The only honourable war
aim should be to kill it dead.