Why Should We Care About Foreign Wars?
The Ripple Effects of International Conflict: A Matter of Concern or Indifference?
During a conversation with a friend several months ago, we found ourselves entangled in a discussion that often finds itself eclipsed by our routine discourse: the significance of international conflicts. I pondered why we, as Americans, should pay heed to the ongoing strife between Russia and Ukraine. His response illuminated a fresh perspective.
We recently had a long phone conversation about Russian history. He mentioned that almost every conflict, regardless of location, has a cascading impact that may eventually trickle down to us, and our future may be tethered to these events. He sent me the video above and after watching it, it made me view this current war differently. I began to think about other world conflicts that occurred in the past that I wasn't paying attention to at the time but eventually couldn't avoid.
We often feel detached from incidents occurring miles away, assuming their impact doesn't stretch as far as us. But as my friend highlighted, the fallout from such distant events can eventually shape our lives in ways we don't initially foresee.
As we are in the middle of another potential cascading conflict with the Russia-Ukraine war, we might not feel the immediate repercussions, but the long-term implications could be profound. Russia is a major global energy supplier, and any conflict involving the country can disrupt global energy prices, affecting the U.S. Heightened geopolitical tensions could lead to cyber warfare, potentially influencing businesses and individuals in America.
We live a world more interconnected than ever and any disturbance in one part of the world can spark a chain reaction impacting all of us, even if the effect isn't immediately visible. But our concern should extend beyond potential global impacts. The atrocities of war spare no one, and turning a blind eye to such crises can reflect our collective indifference. There exists a moral and ethical obligation to care about the lives of fellow humans, regardless of their geographical location.
Do you think it's important to be concerned about events that might not currently affect you directly, or should individuals only pay attention when they and their families are directly impacted?
In our role as global citizens, how can we stay involved in international affairs and develop effective strategies to address new crises?
What are your thoughts?
Clayton is the founder and publisher of the social and political commentary newsletter Think Things Through and the host of the Think Things Through Podcast.
As the friend who sent our host Clayton the video above, I'm here to say that my findings indicate the nature of Kremlin geopolitical strategy quite clearly: the aims of the invasion of Ukraine are of a piece with Moscow strategy going back decades, which is to discredit and eventually dismantle the Untied (not a typo) States in its self-assigned role as the sole remaining world 'superpower.'
The problem facing Americans with this strategy is that the DC elite itself has been continually complicit, since the 1991 Desert Storm live-fire exercise in superpower posturing, in making it plain for all to see that the DC establishment is too ignorant, arrogant, badly-led and terminally indecisive to be left in charge of anything anywhere else in the world. In this sense, America foreign policy itself has served for generations to prove the Kremlin's point better than the Kremlin itself could ever achieve.
And I agree with the Kremlin, but only in that abstract sense that the United States never has had any business dictating policy to the rest of the world, and that in so doing, the American government has long been continually treating the interests of the American people as insignificant and expendable.
This 'superpower' pretense has only aided and abetted America's self-cultivated 'enemies', because this has for so long been why the DC establishment chooses its enemies and sets out to assist them in becoming threats to American security.
A 'superpower' needs combat veterans with blood on their hands (and it hardly matters whose blood in what country) in order to sustain the potential to make future veterans have blood on theirs in turn, and it needs unwinnable conflicts to blame on any other instigator than American foreign policy itself, so that Americans will not mind so much public treasure being continually squandered on unwinnable international conflicts in which the American people never had any legitimate stake to begin with.
The only real hope of preserving the American body politic, and thus our Constitution as the foundation of all law and our personal liberties it was written and ratified to uphold, is for America to get out of the 'superpower' trade altogether, meaning a comprehensive and immediate closure of all military bases and facilities anywhere in the world outside the USA, the withdrawal from all arrangements and understandings with spurious, hopelessly corrupt and intentionally ineffectual bodies such as the UN, EU and NATO (and many, many others), and to focus solely and specifically on protecting the interests and security of THE AMERICAN PEOPLE, to the absolute exclusion of all other considerations.
'Foreign policy' needs to be limited to training embassy staff on how to set the table for receiving various foreign dignitaries and functionaries, so that they may be politely reminded that the United States of America has no compelling interest in the affairs of any other state in the world, and that they need to stop begging us for help every time they are incapable of managing their own affairs.
The Kremlin may not win this war in Ukraine, but its larger aim of dismantling American credibility and 'leadership' in international affairs is already well on its way to being achieved. Like all useful idiots caught in the web of Muscovian intrigues and hypnotized into inflicting most of the requisite harms upon their own interests themselves, the American political elite has been quite satisfactorily playing into the Kremlin's hands for a long time already.
If you're paying attention, it isn't hard at all to see that this 'superpower' travesty has never been in the interests of the American people and never will be.
If you're not, you really do have only yourself to blame for that.