Sometimes, our public figures seem aware that they are engaged in an all-sermon, no-sacrifice politics.
C onservatives are used to condemning politicians for making promises of government largesse and expenditure without ever thinking through the public’s willingness to pay for it. But, when it comes to foreign policy, the same mistake is even more tempting and more ruinous to make. The politician aggrandizes himself by making fantastic moral promises, but he never really gauges whether the public is willing to make the moral commitments — give the attention, bear the risks, pay the opportunity costs, and lay down blood and treasure — to make those promises credible.
Sometimes, our public figures seem aware that they are engaged in an all-sermon, no-sacrifice politics. “I don’t know how this will end if you give Ukraine defensive capability,” Senator Lindsey Graham explained, “but I know this: I will feel better because when my nation was needed to stand up to the garbage and to stand by freedom, I stood by freedom. . . . They [the Ukrainians] may die, they may lose, but I’ll tell you what . . . if somebody doesn’t push back better, we’re all gonna lose.”
Not exactly the most rousing speech, only because it was conscious of the fact that Americans were never likely to be invested enough in Ukraine’s fortunes to make the decisive contribution of blood and treasure. Graham is embracing the dynamic. He wants all the credit for “standing up to the garbage” but doesn’t even pretend to know whether the policy he is advocating would achieve political independence of Ukraine from Russia or would further endanger the Ukrainians.
In a way, an older class of neoconservatives was preferable to this. At an infamous 2006 meeting of the Philadelphia Society, the online sparring of pro–Iraq War neoconservatives and anti-war paleoconservatives was taken into the ballrooms and luncheons. A keynote speech by Andrew Bacevich, in the anti-war camp, chastised the other side for utopianism. At lunch the next day, representing the opposite camp, Max Boot said that America needed to make a 75-year commitment to Iraq, the kind of commitment it has made to Korea and Germany. A young conservative from Harvard stood up and said, “You want Americans in Iraq until I’m 97 years old?” Half the room burst into a roar of laughter. I was among those laughing. I think Boot said a lot of utopian things in this time period, but on reflection, this wasn’t one of them. We were laughing at its unrealism about the American people and their patience for this project. Maybe some were laughing thinking he had been tricked into saying out loud what would be unpopular but understood. But Boot was at that moment being realistic about Iraq and what kind of commitment might be needed if your goal was regional transformation.
Our political class, and too often the public itself, wants the glow of moral affirmation without the grind of moral follow-through. The real work of politics — barter, compromise, incremental progress — comes to seem grubby and unworthy next to the purity of moral abstraction.
Take a survey of moral policy writing and see how often people are chastised for giving up on some great moral crusade, by someone else who has never lifted a cross to his shoulders and doesn’t possess the footwear to march to Jerusalem.
What we are witnessing in these early days of negotiations between Russia, Ukraine, and the United States is the moral climbdown. Our political class fed Ukraine and itself false promises — that Russia would just let Ukraine drift away, that in a prolonged conflict, the country that was just “a gas station with nukes” would be easily destabilized and perhaps subjected to internal regime change. Anyone who asked the hard questions before this conflict was dismissed as a moral cretin, by a political class that has revealed itself, in the end, as neither moral nor serious.