The Death of Deterrence, or How To Lose A War Without Firing A Shot
From Raymond Aron’s Peace and War (1966):
In 1938 France tried to deter Hitler from attacking Czechoslovakia: Hitler was not impressed, and Frenchmen and Englishmen preferred Czech capitulation to the risk of having to carry out their commitments, i.e., their threat. In 1939 Great Britian took the initiative of signing a mutual assistance treaty with Poland in the hope of deterring Hitler by the striking demonstration of a resolution which could no longer be doubted. England did not go back on her word: by signing the pact with Poland, she had burned her ship and left herself no other choice, in case of a German aggression against Poland, than that between dishonor and war. The choice was war.1Aron, Raymond, Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations (Howard, Richard & Fox, Annette Baker, translators), New York: Doubleday, 1966, 405.
As this brief summary reminds us, so much in political history depends on idiosyncratic human variables, especially on the willingness of those men seeking to deter tyrannical aggression to back up their veiled threats with specific promises that the enemy recognizes as both serious and tangible. Specifically, as Aron shows by comparing the abandonment of Czechoslovakia to the mutual assistance treaty with Poland, deterrence with teeth requires: (a) the decision to commit oneself to a path of deterrence the abandonment of which would entail not only personal but national dishonor, (b) the possession, in one who makes such a commitment, of the will necessary to leave no doubt in the mind of the aggressor that this commitment was indeed made in full consciousness of the fact that to abandon it would be dishonorable, and (c) the proven moral substance necessary to leave no doubt in the heart of the aggressor that in one’s own mind dishonor is not an option.
Transcribe this pithy insight into the terms of today’s confrontation, such as it is, between Putin’s aggression in Europe and America’s “deterrence” under Trump, and you can immediately see that the world is in a heap of trouble.
Not only is Trump unable to appreciate the seriousness of the aggression in the first place, but he has consistently shown a desire to insert himself into the conflict not only without any sort of honor-based commitment to Ukraine, but rather, on the contrary, with a greed-and-ignorance-infested insistence that Ukraine owes America its precious resources as retroactive payment for assistance already given — as though having vastly diminished Russia’s military power at the price of thousands of Ukrainian lives and much of the country’s infrastructure constituted some sort of free ride requiring economic correction. In short, given the stakes and the obvious U.S. interests in thwarting and weakening Putin’s Russia, if there is a free rider here, it is clearly America, by a long shot, all the more so given that Ukraine’s circumstances would be considerably better right now, and Putin’s vastly worse, had American leadership, from Obama’s to Trump’s to Biden’s and now Trump’s again, not been so weak-willed and passive (and in Trump’s case outright facilitating if not congratulatory) regarding Putin’s aggression in the region — but no one will ever ask her to pay up, and she wouldn’t have the dignity to do it even if asked.
Not only is Trump unwilling to commit himself, even rhetorically, morally, to the concept of Ukraine’s survival and territorial sovereignty, as any halfway adult leader would do under such circumstances merely as a matter of human decency and basic rationality, but on the contrary he is publicly calling Ukraine’s president a dictator, deriding him as unpopular and ineffectual, and squeezing him for his decimated country’s resources as a condition for America’s not handing his entire country over to Putin — effectively operating a protection money racket against a country that has proved itself a thousand times braver and more resilient than the fat, ludicrous United States of America, and against a leader a million times more manly and serious than the reality television coward Trump, who has outsourced his domestic policy to a dope-smoking billionaire profiteer, and his foreign policy to a Russian dictator whose shoes he seemingly cannot stop himself from shining.
And not only is Trump unwilling to make any such honor-based commitment to the defense of a country that has already sacrificed so much for three years based largely on big promises and half-baked-and-too-late assistance from America, but even if he ever were willing to mouth the right words, everyone — and his leash-holder Putin most of all — knows that Trump would have no compunction about breaking that commitment the moment his own convenience (i.e., fear or perceived material advantage) suggested doing so. Not only are all questions of honor and dishonor beyond the ken of Donald Trump, and not only does everyone on Earth know this, but in fact as has been patently obvious throughout his public life, and never more so than during his political career, there is no personal moral element in his thinking whatsoever, but only cynical angles, inartful deals, and false bravado in the name of masking his pre-emptive surrender to anyone he perceives as truly dangerous to himself.
Not only would Trump sell his country to the enemy in a heartbeat to preserve his own twisted sense of advantage and reputation, but in truth he has already done so to a large degree, and is currently in the process of eagerly finishing the job. That seventy million Americans are too intellectually lazy and tribally mesmerized to see what he is doing, let alone to admit their own essential role in enabling this shameful surrender, merely proves — and I say this sadly, since some people I used to know and many more who used to enjoy my writing are among those seventy million — that the lack of honor in America today is a far more fundamental problem than a narrow-minded Trump hater would prefer to believe.
