I’m going to deal here with some arguments I’ve seen recently in a number of forums with regard to the war in Ukraine. While the war continues past a thousand days, and the heroic resistance during the battle of Kyiv and spectacular breakthroughs in Kherson and Kharkiv are displaced in public memory by other geopolitical events, some commentators in safe countries are giving voice to arguments about “the futility of war”, “risk of nuclear annihilation” and calling reasoned, careful analysts like Lawrence Freedman “warmongers”.
Most directly: these arguments take the view of “we must abandon the Ukrainians: I don’t care how many civilians the Russians torture if Putin adds chunks of their country to his empire, because on a wider scale the way war affects me/humanity/me as part of humanity is worse”.
We are crucial juncture in the war. Russia is performing as badly as it ever has: thousands of soldiers consumed for kilometers of worthless ground, sending [ineffectual] North Korean troops into the meat-grinder, inability to retake sovereign Russian territory in Kursk, a collapsing ruble and soaring inflation/interest rates, strategic disaster in Syria, losses of military infrastructure and senior generals even in Moscow, etc. But the risks for Ukraine are severe: further offenses in 2023 could not be sustained, 2024 has been playing defence, unreliable support from Western leaders/Trump is now a major risk1, and retaking deeply embedded positions in e.g. the Donbas is serious stretch. Putin does not want to make peace: in fact, he has locked himself into trying to wring more than the burnt-out parts of the Donbas he holds as some kind of payoff for his catastrophically ill-conceived war that has wrecked the Russian economy, decimated the working-age population and turned Russia into an international pariah.
So it’s interesting to see these sorts of arguments – which I’m going to call I’m All Right Jack Pacifism – are re-emerging. They were very visible in the first days of the war on places like Twitter – but the basic evolution of the war (the resilience of Ukraine, the embarrassing performance of Russia as a “Great Power”, the basic irrelevance of nuclear weapons even as “red lines” were crossed again and again) has made even those with an actual ideological preference for Putin switch to something more sophisticated.
So based on the facts on the ground and the history of the war, these views are rather crude. But rhetoric and sophism aside, I think there are actually deep philosophical contradictions in these IarJ pacifisms that are at least somewhat interesting to examine.