You’re Not Free If You’re Dead: The Case Against Giving Ukraine F-16s

I found this uncaptioned photo on the website of the War Resisters League. My Russian friend Nikita says the words express “the old slogan, ‘Peace to the world,’ playing on the fact that ‘peace’ and ‘world’ are the same word” in both Russian and Ukrainian.

May 26, 2023. You’re walking down the street, and you see a big man beating a small man. What do you do? Call the cops? Yell at the big man to stop? Punch him? Grab him in a stranglehold? You should do something, but you don’t want to make a bad situation worse--or get yourself hurt. Who knows, maybe the small man did something bad and deserves a beating. You look away and walk on, trying not to think about it.

And that brings me to the war in Ukraine, which began when Russia invaded on February 24, 2022. The U.S. has helped Ukraine by giving it tanks, missiles, anti-aircraft guns, mines, howitzers, drones and other weapons worth tens of billions of dollars. The U.S. now plans to send F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine.

Should the U.S. help Ukraine in this way? If not, what should we do? Give Ukraine more help? Less? No help at all? This war has tied me up in knots. I’m writing this column to untangle my thoughts.

THE END-OF-WAR RULE

I’ve been adamantly antiwar since I learned about The Bomb as a kid. My reaction was: Are you fucking kidding me? Or words to that effect. In The End of War, I argue that abolishing war and even the threat of war between nations should be a moral imperative, a goal we all should seek. In the meantime, we still live in a heavily armed world.  What should we do when large-scale violence erupts?

If you are an absolute pacifist, you oppose sending weapons to Ukraine, because you oppose all violence, Ukrainian as well as Russian. I’m not an absolute pacifist, because I think violence is sometimes justified and even morally necessary to stop greater violence--that is, to save lives. Nor am I an isolationist, who doesn’t give a shit if faraway people slaughter each other. I give a shit.

But when, exactly, should we intervene with force, and how? All too often, we face dilemmas in which all our options seem bad. Morally, we feel compelled to do something, but military intervention might make things worse; more people might get killed. You’re damned if you intervene, damned if you don’t.

In The End of War, I propose resolving these dilemmas with the end-of-war rule: Choose the course you honestly think will save the most lives--and take us closer to a world without war. There will always be guesswork involved in applying the end-of-war rule, because violent interventions have unpredictable consequences.

Sending U.S. troops into Iraq two decades ago was a mistake, as even George Bush now sort of admits. Over the past 60 years, U.S. military interventions have also gone awry in Vietnam, Cambodia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Iran, Somalia, Afghanistan, Libya—you get the idea.

The lesson is that violence usually breeds more violence; hence we should carry out military interventions only as a last resort. Also--and this is a crucial point, to which I will return—every time we drop bombs and fire missiles, we give other nations, like Russia, an excuse to do the same. Ending war gets harder.

THE CASE FOR SENDING TANKS

You can nonetheless make the case that giving Ukraine F-16s satisfies the end-of-war rule. Morally, the situation is clearcut: Russia’s thuggish dictator launched an old-fashioned war of conquest against his neighbor, a young, aspiring democracy. Without aid from the U.S. and other countries, Ukraine’s forces would probably have been quickly overwhelmed.

Emboldened by this success, Putin might have invaded other countries that belonged to the old Soviet empire. And if Russian aggression had gone unopposed, other states might have been tempted to launch their own wars of conquest. China, for example, might have invaded Taiwan.

Another reason for defending Ukraine is democratic-peace theory, which says that democracies—although they often fight non-democracies--rarely if ever fight each other. If Ukraine remains democratic, that’s one less country for the U.S. and other democracies to worry about. We must help Ukraine defeat Russia, journalists Anne Applebaum and Jeffrey Goldberg argue this month in The Atlantic, to preserve “freedom,” “democracy” and the “rule of law” worldwide.

FREEDOM AND OTHER CASUALTIES

So maybe sending F-16s to Ukraine is the right thing to do, because it will help make the world more peaceful. But let me push back against this claim.

First, war makes a mockery of the goals for which it is ostensibly fought, like “freedom.” Shortly after Russia’s invasion, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky declared martial law, seized control of the media and banned political parties that rival Zelensky’s. Able-bodied men 18-60 years old are prohibited from leaving Ukraine and must register for military service. Men who refuse to fight for religious or other reasons have been imprisoned.

Ukraine, if it defeats Russia, might become a fully functioning democracy. But that will be too late for Ukrainians killed in the war. Estimates of Ukrainian casualties vary widely, but according to one recent report, 20,000 Ukrainian soldiers and 42,000 civilians have been killed so far. You’re not free if you’re dead.

In their Atlantic essay, Applebaum and Goldberg downplay fears that Russia, facing defeat, might launch a nuclear strike against Ukraine or its allies. Surely Putin would not act so foolishly, Applebaum and Goldberg imply, given that Biden has broadly hinted that he would respond with a devastating counterattack.

Applebaum and Goldberg might be right about Putin, who strikes me as a cold, calculating bully rather than suicidal maniac, but you never know. Nuclear war would definitely count as making a bad situation worse. To repeat: If you’re dead, you’re not free.

WHAT ABOUT NONVIOLENT RESISTANCE?

If you question giving weapons to Ukraine, you are accused of being pro-Putin, pro-fascism, anti-democracy, anti-freedom and so on. You are compared to appeasers of Hitler. The assumption is that surrender is the only alternative to armed resistance.

But Ukrainians could have resisted the Russian invasion and occupation nonviolently, following the playbook of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and political theorist Gene Sharp. After all, nonviolent protests and strikes in Poland and other former Soviet satellites helped bring about the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Last year, I invited political scientist Erica Chenoweth, an authority on nonviolent resistance, to speak via zoom to my school, Stevens Institute of Technology. In Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know and other writings, Chenoweth documents that nonviolent rebellions against oppressive regimes have historically produced better outcomes--meaning societies that are more stable and democratic and less violent and corrupt--than violent resistance.

During their talk to my school, Chenoweth acknowledged that nonviolent resistance has recently become less effective. Authoritarian states such as Russia, China and Iran, Chenoweth said, are using digital surveillance and other tools to crush opposition; leaders of non-democracies are apparently swapping tips on how to quell dissent.

But for several weeks after Russia’s invasion, Chenoweth pointed out, Ukrainian civilians engaged in effective nonviolent resistance. They lay down in front of Russian armored vehicles, poured sugar into the vehicles’ fuel tanks and harassed Russian soldiers, telling them to go back to Russia. These actions, Chenoweth said, harmed Russian morale, spurred desertions and slowed down the invasion.

Would nonviolent resistance alone have helped Ukraine expel Russia and win back its autonomy? Perhaps not, at least in the near-term. Russia has defied the economic sanctions of the U.S. and other countries, and it has crushed its own citizens’ opposition to the war by imprisoning protesters and censoring the media.

But my guess is that if Ukraine had stuck to nonviolent resistance, there would have been much less loss of life on both sides. You might not give a shit about Russians, who started this bloody war, but they’re human too: So far, 50,000 Russians have been killed, according to a recent estimate.

And over time, Ukraine’s nonviolent opposition to Russia’s invasion, plus pressure from other countries, and even from Russians themselves, might have helped Ukraine regain its independence. A bonus is that we wouldn’t risk nuclear war.

AMERICAN HYPOCRISY

My final concern has to do with American actions and intentions. To comply with the end-of-war rule, you must make a good-faith effort to save lives, in a manner that takes us closer to world peace. When the U.S. carries out military interventions, we invariably claim that our aims are “humanitarian”; we are helping people, not harming them.

Maybe in some cases that’s true. Maybe the U.S./NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in the 1990s saved more lives than it took. But maybe not. And the Biden administration strikes me as less interested in helping Ukraine than in hurting Russia. By supplying arms to Ukraine, the U.S. can wage a bloody proxy war against its old rival without risking American lives.

The U.S. also seems to be sending a message to other rivals, notably China, that their aggression will not go unopposed. The U.S. has reinforced this message by boosting its military budget to an all-time high, $877 billion; that is more than twice the combined spending of China ($292 billion) and Russia ($86 billion), according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. America’s global military empire, which includes an estimated 750 bases in 80 countries, dwarfs that of any other nation. We are also the world’s biggest weapons innovator, manufacturer and dealer.

Following the U.S. lead, other countries, including China, are building up their armed forces. Global military expenditures have soared above $2.2 trillion, an all-time high. When I envision a world without war, I do not have in mind heavily armed states daring each other to make a move. Deterrence works until it doesn’t.

Another point: American denunciations of Russia’s actions in Ukraine are grossly hypocritical, given the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and other post-9/11 military operations. These violent actions have resulted in the direct and indirect deaths of as many as 4.6 million people, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project. “Direct” deaths result from bombs and bullets; “indirect” deaths occur when civilians, deprived by war of food and shelter, die of malnutrition and exposure. Biden has gall accusing Putin of war crimes.

I bring up U.S. hypocrisy not to exonerate Russia but to point out the shameful gap between what the U.S. says and what it does. If the U.S. truly wants to be a moral leader, a promoter of peace, it must practice what it preaches.

MY PLAN FOR WORLD PEACE

And that brings me to my plan for world peace. The U.S. should call for an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine. At the same time, the U.S. should invite all nations, allies and adversaries alike, to join it in a great, global endeavor: creating a world in which war between nations has ended and even become inconceivable, as inconceivable as it is now between, say, the old adversaries France and Germany.

To show its good faith, the U.S. should cut its military budget in half (remember, it will still be bigger than China’s and Russia’s combined) and impose a moratorium on its arms research, production and sales (including sales to Ukraine). The U.S. should start brainstorming with other nuclear-armed nations on how to eradicate nuclear weapons safely, forever.

Most readers will dismiss this plan as nuts, a utopian pipe dream. But what is really nuts is for us to devote so much energy and ingenuity to mass slaughter when we face so many other urgent problems. I don’t have to tell you what our problems are, you know.

There will still be small-scale violence, like street fights and muggings, in a world without war. But my guess is that as nations demilitarize and the threat of war recedes, violence at all scales will decline. We’ll have more resources for creating societies that are healthier and better educated, more prosperous and just—and hence less prone to violence.

The crucial first step toward ending war is accepting that it is necessary. If we can agree on that, we’ll figure out the practical details. All of us, except war profiteers and wackos who get a kick out of killing, want to live in a world without war. Don’t we?

Further Reading:

The organizations World Beyond War and Costs of War provide excellent information on the costs of war and benefits of peace.

If you think war is innate and hence inevitable, check out Chimpanzees, War, and History: Are Men Born to Kill? by anthropologist Brian Ferguson, which will be published in June.

I’ve also benefitted from what my friends Robert Wright and Nikita Petrov have had to say about the war in Ukraine.