Mark has penned a response to my observation that we should consider moving on from Ukraine for the time being. It is, in my opinion, neither in their nor our best interest to treat with one another when Ukraine isn’t ready to accept the high price of peace (one imposed on them by a vile aggressor, yes — one usually doesn’t make peace settlements with collegial neighbors). Furthermore, the price we’re paying to keep Russia’s offer on the table — pretending away Russia’s culpability — is too high. We can’t contribute anything of value without selling our souls, so I’d prefer we withdraw and see what Ukraine, Russia, and Europe can manage among themselves. However, according to Mark and those of a similar mind, a reset of American obligations in Ukraine is apparently the same as surrendering the world to communism and nascent America to Britain.

Mark writes:

Might I suggest that Luther look into the long twilight struggle — a struggle that lasted 45 years — that America waged against the monstrous tyranny of Soviet Communism? There were plenty of setbacks and defeats in that struggle too. There were times when it looked like America was outright going to lose.

I would remind Luther of the long, bloody, terrible years of the American Revolutionary War — could it have been benignly and rationally truncated? That war lasted seven full years from the firing of the first shots at Lexington and Concord. Would Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson have been lumped in as writers without “anything interesting to say in the English language” about such a conflict or about the arguments in favor of fighting on?

Mark is a Marine officer, and I a formerly enlisted sailor. The Marine’s disposition is to keep hitting, shooting, and mortaring the enemy until either the enemy or the Marine is dead. The waters of Iwo Jima and Okinawa are in the USMC’s blood, and one cannot fault them for thinking that any direction that denies them burying bayonets in the enemy’s guts is a failure.

Sailors differ. Our battlefields are omnidirectional. Further, we’re mechanics more than infantrymen. When a bolt starts to become cross-threaded (i.e., the bolt’s threads cut into the nut’s threads rather than synchronizing), a sailor backs off the bolt and tries again (because he knows the bolts have been on back order with supply for six months). A Marine wouldn’t bother backing off the bolt . . . he’d just grab a longer piece of pipe, put it over the wrench end, and turn the bolt until it and the nut are eternally mashed together. Ukraine is the bolt, if you were wondering.

What we’re doing at present isn’t working. There’s value in stepping back and reassessing where and when we can help, and what exactly we have to offer. In the meantime, Europe can try its hand at negotiating a peace deal and taking the lead in supplying the Ukrainian war machine.

The Cold War was not won in one place at one time. We accepted the standstill in Korea and reluctantly left the jungles of Vietnam to the communists. We did not conquer Cuba, though it acted like an outpost of the USSR for decades — so JFK’s inaugural address that Mark mentions (“Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty”) had a shelf life of a full three months?

One must find the place and time to push the teetering enemy over. The Revolutionary War, honestly an odd analogy, given that the U.S. initiated that conflict, saw a fighting style used that the Continental Army could maintain against a foe with peerless line infantry but who had manifold international obligations and was situated across the Atlantic Ocean. In other words, we knew that war on British terms would destroy us, so we chose another strategy. Ukraine is going toe to toe with Russia — it’s heroic, and it’s also extremely costly in men and matériel, and rather than change tactics, they demand more of everything to feed the front. To Mark’s point about Ukraine holding out long enough to win, where are the bodies coming from? The most finite resource in Ukraine’s arsenal takes 18 years, and in many cases, 37 years, to mature. A pause, even a damnable, no fair, horrible one, would give Ukraine some time to decide as a nation how much pain they’re willing to take.

The American Revolution was a singular event without equal. Ukraine is not the United States; it must decide for itself what it can tolerate.

I want Ukraine to win, and all of my interventionist peers claim the same, but it sure seems like they favor a righteous war rather than the right war at the right time.