Steve Sailer’s prescient September 2001 article, “What Will Happen in Afghanistan,” was published just eight days after President Bush’s joint resolution authorizing the use of force, and just over a week before the bombs of Operation Enduring Freedom began to drop.
In the piece, Sailer cites Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King, specifically the Sean Connery and Michael Caine movie adaptation.
Both the article and the movie make for frustrating consumption, being 24 and 48 years old, respectively. Sailer’s assertion is that after the destruction of Osama Bin Laden and/or his network, the U.S. should steer clear of nation-building. He cites the experiences of the protagonists(?) Daniel Dravot and Peachy Carnehan as exemplars.
“I’ve an educated taste in whiskey and women, waistcoats, and bills of fare, but I’ve had few chances to exercise it lately. Because them that governs spend all their time making up new laws to stop men like you and me from getting anywhere. And whose loss is it? Why England’s, of course.”
– Peachy Carnehan, reflecting on a new governing class
The above quote, from early in the film, stands out, especially as our modern political debate wrestles with swingeing cuts to bureaucracy and the toll said apparatchiks take on the instincts of men, patriotic and cultural, as if the two are separable.
Now toss in the temper tantrums of those who wish to see Volodymyr Zelensky, a man himself who would be king, treated like royalty in America’s Oval Office and think to yourself if you want the nation to endure another Afghan-style debacle or as King Daniel in the movie says, “A nation I shall make of it, with an anthem and a flag.”
If you haven’t already, watch the film.
‘STAND WITH UKRAINE OR ELSE!’
We’re always told we should “stand with Ukraine,” but we’re rarely (not never) told why. The adage that we should necessarily side with a liberal “democracy” (elections, when?) is farcical, given how the Western world has propped up dictators and terror factions and has scarcely showered itself in glory in recent decades in the context of classical liberalism (free speech) and democratic values (stolen, canceled, or defrauded elections).
From lawfare to outright cheating, the finger-wagging that once convinced an entire hemisphere to cheer on the dropping of billions of dollars of bombs in the desert for the short-term aid of the defense industry and the long-term aid of the Taliban no longer works. So no, we don’t always need to side with the so-called victim, and that presupposes we view Ukraine as a victimized Western liberal democracy in the first instance. We do not.
When I visited the Maidan protests in 2014, it was abundantly obvious the fight was the salient of an expansionist bureaucracy (the European Union) more than anything else. Ideology played almost no part, political philosophy was out the window. This was a good old-fashioned power game, a Eurasian civil war for resources and, dare I say, lebensraum. That’s not to defend Putin’s response but rather to contextualize it.
I can think of no other rational reply to the European Union, NATO, and the CIA literally parking their tanks on Russia’s lawn, which should not be considered an endorsement, rather than an “I told you so” from those of us who have been warning about this escalating war for over a decade.
APPEASEMENT AND MISUNDERSTANDING.
The only other excuse we are given is “anti-appeasement,” which is perhaps the most poignant argument in favor of Ukraine. This strikes especially hard with Europeans, whether in London or Warsaw. A continent still reeling from the ravages of the First and Second World Wars is rational in its polemophobia.
Europe, as President Trump and his cadre have been pointing out for years, is disturbingly ill-equipped to fight a real ground war. For all of Sir Keir Starmer’s bluster about boots on the ground, Britain has but a handful of operable tanks, none of which are suited to the Eurasian theater.
But while anti-appeasement resonates, arguably the most important part of the conflict resolution here is driving a wedge between Russia and China (sorry again, Ukraine, but we’re just not that into you). Europe sees this more like the last century’s major wars. America sees it more like the Cold War. Zelensky had a point in the Oval Office when he said, “you have nice ocean,” but lost the room with the follow-up, “you will feel it in the future.”
THE TRUMP-VANCE DOCTRINE.
This line made Trump and Vance so irate because their resolution doesn’t involve a decades-long conflict—a ‘white Iraq’, as I wrote for Newsweek in 2022. It involves a fundamental shift in global power dynamics that ends with China on the back foot and Russia squarely more interested in the West than the East. Ukraine is actually too small for the Trump-Vance doctrine. America’s appetite (see Greenland, Canada, etc) is greater today, but requires no blood sacrifice nor billion-dollar bombs to sate.
This is all against the backdrop of a prope mortem Putin and an impending opportunity for Russians to see Americans as their friends and allies rather than their natural enemies.
The neoconservatives, neoliberals, and globalists should be pleased, if they held true to their public pronouncements about democracy promotion, Westernization, and even regime change in Russia. Those are an almost certainty in the coming decade if America plays its cards right.
But they’re not cheering Trump and Vance’s efforts because, quite simply, they were always more interested in war than peace, conflict over resolution, and cash piles from their lobbyists in Arlington, McClean, and Chantilly, Virginia.
It feels almost trite, at this point, to write it. But it is true. The elites want war. As surely as the pro-life lobby found reasons to nitpick against President Trump during the GOP primary, fearing an end to a decades-long gravy train, the defense industry is now jerking its knees, triggered by the only horror that could ever force them to wince: peace.
N.B. It is worth recognizing that Europe’s response to Trump’s “pay your own fair share” demand has been, “How dare you tell us to pay our own fair share! We will now pay our own fair share!”
