I understand the urge toward action. I understand the impulse toward an aggressive response to injustice. I understand the desire to crush tyrants and protect innocents. I understand the immense pressure Ukrainian President Zelensky is putting on NATO and Western leaders to join militarily by agreeing to shoot down Russian jets flying over his country.
"Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelensky condemned the West for its continued refusal to enforce a no-fly zone over his country. ‘All the people who die will die because of you,' he said." - BBC
I understand all that, but I also understand the geo-political reality of doing those things. While they can certainly be defended from a moral standpoint, they always have unintended consequences – ramifications that all too often produce greater tragedy, spawn greater atrocity, and create more victims. This is the tragic reality of living in a fallen world.
That's why I was shocked to see the results of a recent Rasmussen poll that revealed 49% of Republicans, 53% of Democrats, and 44% of Independents support the United States joining a war in Europe to defend Ukraine.
To be clear, I think the United States should take an aggressive pro-Ukraine stance in the current conflict. And I don't just mean through powerful invective spoken at a State of the Union Address. I appreciate President Biden's strongly-worded sentiments, but let's not pretend his accusatory and impassioned tone translate to any concerted effort to end the crisis.
The fact that Russian oil continues to be purchased by our government, with the full knowledge that such payments are directly financing Putin's unjust and criminal war against a neighboring country, demonstrates how hollow Biden's warning that dictators must "pay a price for their aggression (lest) they cause more chaos" really was.
The U.S. and our NATO allies in Europe can effectively strangle the lifeblood out of Putin's war machine if we choose – and all of it can and should be done without escalating the conflict into a continental or, God forbid, global war.
Those saber-rattling and lobbing war-hungry rhetorical bombs in an apparent effort to push our country into yet another catastrophic episode of foreign adventurism in the name of "peace keeping" are demonstrating just how desensitized our entertainment culture has become towards actual war.
Of course I am aware that the U.S. has been actively involved in a state of near-perpetual armed conflict for the better part of a century now. As a result, we have become largely immune to its horror. We live in an era of smart bombs dropped down chimneys, cruise missiles launched from warships hundreds of miles away, and unmanned drones that inflict maximum damage to the enemy with a risk confined to the monetary and mechanical, not to the flesh and blood of our own warriors.
Consequently, for most of those Americans responding to the Rasmussen poll, their exposure to the reality of war is limited to Netflix documentaries, Call of Duty gaming, a couple Hollywood blockbusters, and their own courageous participation in the Great Hashtag Wars of the Twitterverse.
Even that shocking vulnerability we all felt in the dust clouds and smoldering wreckage of 9/11 was now over two decades ago. We have lived in what I fear is our own bubble of peace and security for so long that we exhibit a dangerous obliviousness to the specter of a legitimate World War III. Pushing our NATO alliance into armed conflict with a nuclear-armed Russia is a catastrophically foolish idea.
It was one of communist Russia's most ardent opponents, President Ronald Reagan himself, who cautioned, "Nuclear war is one that can never be won, and one that must never be fought."
We'd be wise to remember those words in our current hour.
