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War Fatigue Is Not an Option
As noted yesterday, this week marks the 1st anniversary of the Ukraine war. Before admitting to Ukraine fatigue, Daniel Henninger suggests that readers first need to put war “fatigue” in context.
Vietnam, with 24/7 nightly coverage, helped erode public support for the Vietnam War. With today’s never-ceasing coverage of the Russia/Ukraine conflict, it’s easy to put the war in the same category as mass murders, the weather, derailments, and even Superbowl, confesses Mr. Henninger, at least until football’s opening kickoff.
Is this really “our” war? Eerily, one year later (although not universally accepted by RCY), that answer seems to be forthcoming, according to Mr. Henninger.
It has become clear in the past several weeks that the tectonic plates of global power are shifting. The autocratic alliance of China, Russia and Iran is signaling it’s no longer content to accept an indefinite standoff of competing ideologies and commercial interests as the status quo. They have decided to make Ukraine a singular test, which they believe the U.S., Europe and Asia’s democracies will fail.
The New Axis of Power
Mr. Henninger is quick to note that he is not predicting WWIII. Certainly not as war is conventionally understood.
This new alliance—two significant nuclear powers and Iran on the brink of becoming one—seems to recognize that the self-destruction of nuclear war means they have to win on a series of conventional fronts, such as Ukraine, Taiwan or the Baltics
Unchecked Xenophobia
Reports of Chinese leader Xi Jinping plans to visit Moscow this spring have led to speculation that China wants us to believe that Mr. Xi will use the visit to push Vladimir Putin toward a peace settlement. Mr. Henninger thinks otherwise:
More credible is the assertion by the U.S. and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization that China may be about to send lethal war materiel to Russia, joining Iran as an active equipper of Mr. Putin’s long war.
Messrs. Xi and Putin have been explicit in citing the restoration of nationalistic and territorial glory as justification for their jacked-up militarism. The West, properly understood as the world’s determinedly free peoples, has spent much of the past several centuries defeating messianic nationalists content to spill buckets of blood beyond their borders. History’s greatest killer is unchecked xenophobia.
Moscow and Beijing may be betting that their “will to win can eventually cause American and European leadership to break.”
That “win” isn’t about merely defeating the Ukrainians. It’s about finally proving to the other nations these two have courted—in Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and in resource-rich Africa—that the time has arrived to join the world’s winners and pull back from the losers.
If several Republican presidential candidates as well as Germany and France look willing ultimately to abandon the Ukrainians, similar recalculations will be made in India, Australia, Japan and South Korea.
The U.S.’s strategic objective in Ukraine is to prevent Russia, China and Iran from being able to declare persuasively to the watching world that they are winning.
The U.S. is the only nation in the world that is “actively fighting to stop this alliance from winning.”
Ukraine merely wants the U.S. and Europe to send them the necessary instruments of war—not next summer, but now—with which, as the last year has proved, they will fight to the last man, woman and child. The Ukrainians have already written their blank check. (We would ask, on what bank?)
Our fatigue, cautions Mr. Henninger, is not an option.
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