- Wednesday, April 13, 2022

Rich Lowry recently rebuked “neo-isolationists” for their insistence on restraint from Washington toward the war in Ukraine. The editor-in-chief of National Review thinks it is an error and, indeed, a sin to draw comparisons between the foreign policy establishment’s behavior today and its mood in the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

While Mr. Lowry astutely notes that Iraq and Ukraine are different countries, the hubris of the establishment that marched America into that blunder remains the same and dangerous as ever. That is the point Mr. Lowry glosses over, either because he cannot or does not want to see it. 

According to Mr. Lowry, the neo-isolationists are naive at best and cowardly at worst. He argues against them that “ramping up material support to the Ukrainians and further sanctions on the Russians” is not “tantamount to starting World War III.” Although President Joe Biden might be a dove by nature, as Mr. Lowry suggests, that doesn’t change the fact that his administration is looking for any excuse to increase U.S. involvement in the conflict at the expense of civilians, thanks to the hawks on staff. For example, Victoria Nuland, Mr. Biden’s under secretary of state for political affairs, previously served as the principal deputy foreign policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney and played an influential role in the Iraq War. Mr. Lowry never really engages with or thinks through the opposition’s points before dismissing them and mounting the moral high horse.

First, providing unlimited amounts of “material support” in the form of weapons increases the likelihood that Russia will view the U.S. as a combatant, raising the risk to Americans of a war that has nothing to do with them. It is also a policy of turning Ukraine into a bloody civilian insurgency for Russia. Washington tried that once before when, in the 1980s, it backed Islamists against the Soviets, who later launched a global jihad as Al-Qaeda. 

Second, sanctions have a virtually unbroken record of backfiring. There is plenty of evidence that Washington’s sanctions have already galvanized Russian society against the West. In the U.S., inflation data released Tuesday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics also shows prices rose 8.5% in March compared to a year ago, the biggest annual increase since December 1981, driven up in particular by sanctions against Russian energy and other commodities. Americans face all-time high gas prices, and the world is looking down the barrel of a food shortage. Is this just the cost of deterring Russian aggression? Not according to Chair of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley. That becomes clear when reading between the lines of his remarks on April 5.

“The objective of the sanctions is to impose significant costs if he invaded, those significant costs, the sanctions in combination with the export controls, are breaking the back of the Russian economy as we speak,” Gen. Milley said before the House Armed Services Committee. In other words, the establishment never intended to avoid a war in Ukraine but rather wanted to use Ukraine as a proxy for its own ends. This is a bit like shoving a man in front of an oncoming train and then punishing the passengers and passersby to bankrupt the railway company.

In the end, Mr. Lowry concedes that though the establishment made mistakes in Iraq, it’s important not to scrap the “moral discernment in foreign affairs” behind that intervention. Therefore, our involvement in Ukraine is a continuation of morally discerned policy. The unspoken assumption is that criticizing the government too harshly is to commit an immoral act or even side with our nation’s enemies. That is an absurd and, ironically, statist position for the editor of a limited government conservatism magazine to take. William F. Buckley, the father of National Review and a neo-isolationist late-comer, would agree.

Mr. Buckley admitted that Iraq was a disaster even as the bombs fell. “If I knew then what I know now about what kind of situation we would be in, I would have opposed the war,” he said in a 2004 interview with The New York Times. The year before, National Review ran a 6,500-word cover article by David Frum denouncing critics of the war as unpatriotic. The publication had to considerably qualify Mr. Frum’s allegations in a subsequent issue. Mr. Buckley withdrew his support from the war a year later and returned, in Christopher Hitchens’ words, to “rightist isolationism.” For good reason.

According to Brown University’s Costs of War project, 7,000 service members died in the wars that followed 9/11, but a staggering 30,000 subsequently died by suicide. Civilians accounted for the largest share of all who died in those wars, at more than 360,000. Some estimates are much higher. What did Americans get out of Iraq, at least? The threat of groups like ISIS and other extremists who filled the power vacuum left by the same hawks guiding our approach to the Russo-Ukraine War was slowed only in their pace by a war-weary public. Mr. Lowry asks Americans to trust the same establishment that botched Iraq and only recently botched a drone strike in Afghanistan, killing 10 civilians.

Mr. Lowry reduces the America First position to demanding Ukrainians “submit” to “foreign overlords.” It is an exceedingly simplistic characterization divorced from the situation on the ground. One wonders what Ukrainian troops, fresh out of ammunition, surrendering in besieged cities like Mariupol, would say when asked by Mr. Lowry why they’ve apparently chosen to side with the neo-isolationists. Some of these soldiers say they feel burned and abandoned by their own government. Maybe they haven’t read Mr. Lowry’s inspirational words, or perhaps the realities of war and history are more complicated than they can convey.

• Pedro L. Gonzalez is the associate editor at Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

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