Bargain Basement Hegemony

Why cheap proxy wars and endless interventionism still cost too much. Here we consider a more holistic case for limiting American military adventures and proxy wars abroad.

In 1781, the captain of the British slave ship Zong, Luke Collingwood, deliberately ordered that over 130 enslaved Africans be thrown overboard because the ship was running low on water. Under the rules of marine insurance at the time, the loss of enslaved people due to illness during the voyage could not be claimed. But if the enslaved were "jettisoned" to save the ship, they could be written off as an insurable loss. So the ship’s owners could file a claim and be reimbursed for the value of the lost "cargo."

The Zong case highlights the chilling logic of actuarial assessment applied to human lives under slavery. Collingwood made calculations about the economic value of killing them that did not include their worth as humans. Instead, he reduced real people to financial risk units.

Something similar can be said about American interventionism.

Consider this from the formidable Tim Clancy:

Rarely in US history has so little been spent to gain so much in degrading the military power of a strategic competitor as supporting Ukraine vs. Russia has.

This isn't to discount the sacrifices Ukraine has had to bear, but from a US perspective, this has got to be one of the most effective interventions of all time in a cost vs. benefit analysis.

Clancy is no doubt a brilliant military and counterterrorism analyst. The following chart supports his thesis, which, to be fair, is just a social media post.

Let’s pass over the absence of all the destabilizing Obama-era interventions that created woeful externalities for the Middle East and Europe. The analysis isn’t exactly wrong. It’s just narrowly construed. Indeed, I believe Clancy when he writes that he doesn’t want to “discount the sacrifices Ukraine has had to bear,” though the chart makes no mention of Ukrainian dead, Russian dead, or the up-ratcheting of existential risk. I worry such analyses are emblematic of US foreign policy rationales in the wake of the costly Afghanistan and Iraq quagmires.

As of this writing, the Ukraine war is one of attrition. It is also not yet over. But even if you think our proxy war in Ukraine is a bargain by standards that assume the US is and should remain the global hegemon, this type of analysis suffers from a series of problems when considered more holistically.

• It lends superficial support to the idea that the United States should remain the global hegemon indefinitely.

• It implies that distant interventions worldwide are justified so long as narrow cost-benefit analyses are a bargain.

• It glosses over the human costs of war.

• It fails to include existential risks into the analysis.

• It assumes there were no better alternatives to degrading Russia’s capabilities as a military competitor, even if doing so has been a relative bargain.

• It doesn’t account for the United States's deepening fiscal problems and the electorate’s desire to retire America as world police.

Before we continue, I mentioned Clancy’s post not because he’s wrong. By the standards of the military-industrial complex and those of us compelled to fund it, the Ukraine proxy war is probably a bargain.

But such analyses reveal one of the myriad ways The Glob justifies its existence, not to mention its spurious actions. So, I am not so much arguing against Clancy’s original post as I am jumping off from it to question more broadly the role of the US hegemon in the world.

Do bargain interventions justify the US remaining the global hegemon?

This is not an easy question. The idealist in me says that the whole damn apparatus is unjust and illegitimate on numerous grounds, including the fact that war pimps are constantly reaching into our pockets to fund conflicts that make no sense—but profit them. I don’t like that “war is the health of the state” (and generally not the people), and that conflict is hell for those who must endure it.

Still, there is redneck wisdom something my dad once told me. He said, “if you ever find yourself in prison, go up to the biggest, baddest, meanest MF and call him darlin’.” In other words, the hegemon might mistreat you a little, but at least it’s on your side. Pragmatically speaking, terrorism is still a threat to Americans. It’s difficult to say whether the full GWOT was worth the candle, but we need protection. We must also admit the CCP remains a significant threat. There’s no zipping to a future free of bellicose military adversaries. So, as much as we might imagine a more idealistic future, we have to stay grounded in the here and now.

Still, many US adversaries are bellicose due to American interventionism, not peace through strength. Such includes Russia. The bear has indeed meddled by proxy in the US’s Middle East adventures, just as the US has interfered in Russia’s affairs. It’s ongoing tit for tat. But why? Since the Soviet collapse, America has proven ungracious and untrustworthy in victory. After all, a diplomatic and generous declaration of the war’s end might imply that certain multilateral institutions had outlived their usefulness. Remember Shirky’s law: “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” That includes NATO.

Note: the Europeans have been reluctant free-riders, but free-riders nevertheless.

The US electorate has become war-weary and immune to emotional blackmail. While our cupboards go bare, our military has become bloated, ennervated, unprincipled, PC, and corrupt—and is running low on both recruits and munitions. One can argue at least that US authorities must begin to constrain their interventionism by picking their battles. Get lean. Stay focused. Don’t overextend. That means authorities must restrain their militaristic impulses, and invest far more heavily in consistent diplomatic relations, not vague references to continuing the post-war international order with imperialist tentacles.

Even if helping Ukraine kill a bunch of Russians and take out tanks was done relatively on the cheap, by whose lights is it worth it? Worth what? A reboot of the Cold War with a nuclear-armed power? We have to accept that the US’s continuous expanding NATO since 1991, placing Aegis missiles in Romania and Poland, shredding IBM treaties, and orchestrating coups right next door to Russia means that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was terrible, but not exactly *unprovoked.*

Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea occurred after the US-led coup against Ukrainian president Yanukovych—and was undoubtedly a response to it. From the bird’s-eye POV of strategic realism, imagine being a country surrounded by nations who keep joining an organization whose mission has always been to threaten you—and its membership has doubled since the end of the Cold War. In Putin, I don’t see so much an imperialist as a cornered animal.

Putin’s Russia has been untrustworthy, but so has the American Hegemon. If we can take a moment to be unblinkered by jingoism, we must acknowledge that both powers have routinely broken the bases of trust.

Is narrow cost-benefit analysis enough?

As I suggest above, we must do a much better job accounting for the human costs of war. It’s not entirely clear how many young men—Russian and Ukrainian—have been conscripted and died in that war. More than a million? How many families were destroyed? How many husbands, sons, fathers, and brothers perished? How many wives, daughters, mothers, and sisters have grieved?

The clinical detachment of cost-benefit analysis doesn’t just omit crucial historical context. It frames matters in a way that causes us to regard reluctant soldiers as faraway, cold, and disposable chess pieces. Call it the convenient Othering of Distance. When you combine the Othering of Distance with a modern David and Goliath narrative, you get a rhetorical combination that is reductionist and morally specious—though effective, at least for a time.

But Ukrainians and Russians are people too. People who work in The Glob argue such considerations are far too weepy and not relevant to the hard work of foreign policy, which is a disgusting anarchy. They suggest we all look away while they do their jobs, because we “can’t handle the truth.” But the cold, calculus of globalized sociopathy inflames passions abroad—minting new enemies. This, of course, is fine by the war profiteers. But it should not be acceptable to us.

But Russia invaded poor sovereign Ukraine!, says the peanut gallery, as if Putin’s motivations had been mere blood-thirst and imperial ambition—and nothing at all to do with the US-led NATO trying to keep its mission creepin’ and its bread buttered after 1991.

Notwithstanding the death toll, those who support these interventions insist that any such analysis can be proved by appealing to the Chamberlain Cliche. In other words, we must topple dictators because *Hitler*!

Putin : Ukraine :: Hitler : Poland

If Chamberlain had responded immediately with strength, WWII could have been avoided. Ergo, to prevent a world war, we must always intervene early. Casualty counts, though high in the near term, will prevent even more casualties if we let the Baddie get his way.

America’s interventions in Libya, Egypt, and Syria—as well as its indirect involvement in Iran, Yemen, and Somalia—raise serious concerns. The same applies to past actions in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. These too were justified using cost/benefit plus the specter of appeasement. But what resulted? Each conflict made for waves of anti-American sentiment, and/or bred future generations of enemies. Regional instability in the Middle East sent refugees streaming into Europe, amplifying stubbornly persistent cultural tensions. Through it all, innocent lives were lost—muted with the euphemism, collateral damage. Even if your IR training prompts you to ignore moral considerations, it doesn’t do that for our enemies.

It’s funny/not funny that the pretext for the second Iraq War had been not only WMDs, but The Chamberlain Cliche, as well. Yet that war was enormously costly and destabilizing. There were no Churchillians in ticker-tape parades, even if protestors didn’t kick shellshocked soldiers while they were down, as they did after Vietnam. Even if we think using Ukraine as a proxy to degrade Russia is a bargain relative to past interventions like Iraq, ex post cost-benefit analysis is 20/20 hindsight. It’s never guaranteed a subsequent intervention will be a bargain for anyone but The Glob.

So, is narrow cost-benefit enough?

Not nearly. We have to consider those who are likely to die or have their lives destroyed. We have to consider the potential for regional or global destabilization. And we have to consider existential threats as interventions risk minting new terrorists or antagonizing nuclear powers. More generally, we must consider the possibility that intervention will be more expensive over time for all parties involved, as said parties find repeated game-theory suboptima. In other words, everyone could end up stuck in a cycle of bad decisions that make things worse for everyone.

That’s why such considerations must never operate solely from The Glob’s perspective, because they only lose out when everyone else wins.

A Brief Detour

Today, when I look at my social media feed, I see a mix of *I Stand With Ukraine* lemmings, Beltway Sociopaths with Very Important Jobs, confused libertarians with TDS, and a handful of Trump cultists who refuse to hold an opinion that isn’t Trump’s. I see two or three people who can look at the situation—aligning head, heart, and gut—then arrive at a conclusion that is not blind partisan allegiance, reflexive anti-Trump hate, simplistic cost-benefit analysis-cum-Chamberlain Cliche, cultishness, or the mass psychology of “luxury beliefs.”

When we start to tally distant peoples like we do experience levels, kill numbers, or vanquished enemy bots in video games, we have become the problem. Now, I don’t think that striving for world peace is in each and every case an unalloyed good. But peace is worth striving for and now is the time to strive for it.

We have to look beyond partisan blinkers to do so.

Imagine Nobel Peace Prize winner, Middle East destabilizer, and Russia antagonist Barack Obama were president right now. Suppose, with his gentle demeanor and soaring oratory, he tried to end the Ukraine conflict, oblige Europeans to take more responsibility for their security, derisk nuclear war, and find a way for the US to recoup taxpayer losses. Would partisans on Team Blue be for or against him? Would Team Red be for or against him?

Likewise, imagine if Donald Trump, with his characteristic boorishness and meanie words, had initiated all the color revolutions, coups, broken missile treaties, expanded proxy wars and was trying—with his new administration—to expand violence in the region and threaten to dominate Moscow by expanding NATO further, ratcheting up the nuclear standoff, and telling us what a great deal it was for the taxpayer to degrade Russian defenses by putting a whole generation of Ukrainian men in a meatgrinder.

Would Team Blue be for or against him? Would Team Red be for or against him?

We currently live in a bizarro world in which the only consistent non-partisan players seem to be The Glob—clearly benefitting from power and largesse to maintain the US hegemony come what may—and the likes of Code Pink, who is committed to peace over war, notwithstanding party affiliation or personality cult.

The electorate needs to be less partisan, and more discerning.

How can authorities do a better job accounting for risks?

One of the most irresponsible things about US foreign policy concerning Russia has been American authorities’ willingness to ratchet up the risk of nuclear war. Something similar can be said about our inconsistent policies with respect to the Iranian mullahs, who—though a truly detestable enemy—would almost certainly have little compunction if they thought they could nuke the Great Satan and create a nation of martyrs. Tit-for-tat violence offers a perverse sense of meaning to certain people. And let’s face it: Radical Islam makes people crazy. Yet The Glob has been meddling in the Middle East for half my life. That’s good business. But is it good policy?

Calculating risk is hard. At the very least, we should ask how close our interventions take us to midnight on the Doomsday Clock. With Russia as a nuclear-armed adversary, we should not be lured into the idea that indefinite war with them is justifiable because it’s cheap and easy. And we had best not take our eyes off the CCP, which not only has a powerful military, but a nuclear arsenal.

What could the US have done otherwise?

On February 9, 1990, Secretary of State James Baker famously told Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would move "not one inch eastward" during discussions about German reunification—a sentiment echoed by German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Since then, 16 countries have joined NATO. Five share a land border with Russia, and one—Sweden—is right across the Baltic Sea.

Russia asked to join NATO in 2000, along with a few less formal intimations after 1991. The US denied them. The US paid and led the entire time, while the Europeans rode along at a discount—so lavished their various welfare states. Is it because NATO and the Glob needed to keep around a monster to destroy? Had they been granted admission, Russia might have been far more likely to liberalize through trade with the West. Instead, the Glob decided open trade with China would liberalize and democratize the CCP. Yet this never happened. It might have been better to have Russia in NATO—dictator and all—as a buffer against China. Woulda, shoulda, coulda. Note that I’m not a big fan of “entangling alliances.” I am just pointing out The Glob’s strange contradictions.

Thus, not only were Putin’s military machinations not entirely unprovoked, as bloodthirsty US deep-state operatives like Victoria Nuland have claimed. Nuland would go on to poke the Russian bear herself when she helped orchestrate the 2014 pro-Western coup in Ukraine. The rest, as they say, is history.

Not to be left out of Ukrainian corruption, US officials laundered *aid* monies there. Some of that stash would accrue to the wildly successful artist and energy expert, Hunter Biden—and of course “The Big Guy.” That means while Barack Obama burnished his Nobel Peace Prize, he also stoked color revolutions in the neighborhood, next door to a nuclear power the US chose to isolate and cajole after the Cold War despite repeated calls to respect a red line.

Five years after the 2014 coup, Zelenskyy was given the Glob’s imprimatur. At some point, Zelenskyy had to become aware that the West was using him and his people as disposable heroes. Gratitude? It’s no wonder Zelenskyy was pissed off in the Oval Office: one suspects his ire was more about the fickle hegemon than Trump and Vance per se. Indeed, Western powers advised Zelenskyy to derail a 2022 agreement that would have made Ukraine neutral and spared a million lives. So let’s not confuse Zelenskyy’s desperation with petulance (Trumpkins), or Trump/Vance’s consternation with egoism and power tripping (Ladies of The View). Finally, let’s separate imperialism from the behavior of a cornered animal.

Before I invite handwringing about the very idea of making nice with a dictator, consider the US does this all too frequently: Fist-bumping Saudi princes comes to mind.

Does a broader discussion of debt militate against interventionism?

The US government is broke with national debt at $125% of GDP. Yet military spending gobbles up about 13 percent of the federal budget, which—staggeringly—takes up less than the debt service that has turned geometric. But it’s not just US debt we must worry about. It’s also opportunity costs, such as the myriad things wasteful military spending could have gone to—such as constructive over destructive investments. Cost-benefit analyses must be relativized to today’s economic health and debt levels, not just comparisons to past interventions.

Remember, according to Rob Henderson, luxury beliefs are "ideas and opinions that confer status on the affluent while often inflicting costs on the lower classes." He further elaborates that "a core feature of a luxury belief is that the believer is sheltered from the consequences of his or her belief." Whether it’s someone willing to “Stand with Ukraine” from the dangerous trenches of a university or nail salon, or the analyst crunching cost-benefit figures without calculating existential risk or human toll, continued support for a stalemate proxy war in Ukraine—where a generation of men have died—is probably a luxury belief masquerading as good policy.

Of course, even if the US keeps spending on military matters, every dollar spent degrading Russia is a dollar diverted from checking China. One might counter that degrading Russia also checks China. But ongoing proxy wars against Russia can only push Russia and its vast resources into CCP hands.

The US citizenry finds itself in the odd position of trying to find consistency in our foreign policy. Remember that after WWII, the US's basic role had been to protect the trade routes and sea lanes of globalization. It worked for decades. At Bretton Woods, the dollar became the world’s reserve currency and the Americans could afford to become world police, expanding the *liberal international order.* But things have changed. The US has exceeded its mandate too many times and begun mutating according to The Glob’s perverse incentives.

Furthermore, this is no longer a unipolar world.

We can reembrace what we once called peace through strength, where the US was capable and fierce but dispatched statesmen like George Schulz to plant seeds with other statesmen like Mikhail Gorbachev. (God help us, neither Trump nor Putin nor Zelenskyy is all that statesmanly.) But maybe the brutes can make peace. Nixon met Mao. JFK insisted on having a direct line to Kruschev, even after the latter tried to cross the red line of putting missiles in Cuba.

In the future, the US must figure out how to change the incentives such that The Glob has fewer perverse incentives to make war. We need to end the multi-decadal roid rage and get lean, mean, healthy and focused again. (In a future article, I will set out a bold but fragile strategy for how this could work.)