As we’ve recently debated here in the United States, government entities established to discern for the public what is truth and what is misinformation are a monumentally bad idea. That is particularly so since they will invariably attack opinions that differ from an incumbent government’s point of view, or which that government deems unhelpful to its policy aims. Government “truth bureaus” are simply incompatible with the very idea of a free society and liberal democracy.

As if to provide a compelling example of this in real time, the Ukrainian government’s “Center for Countering Disinformation”—established by President Zelensky in 2021—has this month released a blacklist of scholars, policymakers, and others whom it accuses of “promoting Russian propaganda.” (See also.) Among them is our colleague Doug Bandow.

It’s absolutely wrong for Bandow’s prolific output on Ukraine, Russia, and the current war to be labeled disinformation or “Russian propaganda.” Bandow has been writing for years about how continued movement towards bringing Ukraine into NATO’s security orbit was not in the interests of the United States, and—by heightening Putin’s perception of threats close to Russia’s borders—risked a serious Russian reaction. Furthermore, he and many others have cautioned against deepening U.S. involvement in the conflict, given the significant risk of sparking a broader conflagration: especially a war between the United States and Russia or increased risk of a nuclear exchange.

Cato and its scholars have condemned, in the strongest possible terms, Russia’s aggression in Ukraine as well as President Putin’s two decades war against freedom and liberalism in Russia. But it’s simply wrong to conflate an argument that the policy of NATO enlargement impacted Putin’s security calculus with the idea that doing so excuses his war in Ukraine. And while Ukraine has a clear interest in deeper U.S. and NATO engagement in its defense, advocating for a sensible U.S. foreign policy that limits risk to American safety and security doesn’t place one on the side of Russia in the conflict.

Ukraine is entitled to its own laws and institutions—liberal or illiberal. It has been invaded by its larger neighbor and looks likely to lose some of its territory to that aggression. Devastation has been brought down upon its cities and people. That it is not holding fast to liberal ideas and values under such circumstances shouldn’t surprise libertarians.

But this kind of action—the establishment of ill-advised truth and disinformation bureaus, and the unfair smearing of eminent scholars—does nothing to burnish Ukraine’s reputation as an aspiring liberal democracy. Nor is it likely to help its war effort. Accordingly, Kyiv should retract its charges of disinformation and apologize for having leveled them.

Ahead of his trip to the Middle East, President Joe Biden wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post explaining his reasons for traveling to the region—specifically, Saudi Arabia. The President is going to ask Saudi Arabia for help with oil prices and, in exchange, possibly resume sales of offensive weapons to Riyadh that he halted early in his administration. Unfortunately, the reality is that such a decision would prove costly.

Biden notes that his tough approach to Saudi Arabia—including revealing the intelligence report on the Khashoggi murder, issuing new sanctions on those involved in Khashoggi’s killing, and rejecting 76 visas for Saudis involved in harassing dissidents abroad—is working. The President continues writing that these moves have “reversed the blank-check policy” the country inherited from the Trump administration.

One would assume that, if this toughness is working, the United States would see a regime sharing U.S. security interests while also showing basic human rights considerations. Saudi Arabia fails on both counts. From a security standpoint, Riyadh continues its involvement in Yemen and refuses to work alongside Washington to diplomatically stop the Ukraine crisis.

Biden only briefly hand-waves at human rights considerations in Saudi Arabia. He notes that “there are many who disagree with my decision to travel to Saudi Arabia,” but clarifies that his “views on human rights are clear and longstanding” and that his job is to “keep our country strong and secure.”

Biden’s views on human rights have been anything but clear. While condemning Iran for its numerous human rights violations, the President has remained silent on those in Saudi Arabia. If human rights in the country have improved, then Biden’s strategy is perhaps working. The problem is that this is not the case.

Between 2010 through 2019, the Human Freedom Index—published by the Cato Institute and Fraser Institute—finds that Saudi Arabia’s human freedom ranking decreased five spots. Per this index, between 2017 and 2019, the only country to have lower degrees of freedom of expression than Saudi Arabia every single year is Syria, with Bahrain also scoring lower in 2016 and 2015. Additionally, between 2015 and 2019, Syria is the only country that scores lower than Saudi Arabia in freedom of association, assembly, and civil society every year except in 2018, in which Bahrain also shows lower levels of freedom of association than Saudi Arabia

Making matters worse, one of Biden’s concessions will be a resumption of offensive weapons sales to Saudi Arabia. Riyadh has used U.S. weapons to target and kill innocent Yemeni civilians while protecting its homeland since the Houthis took over Sanaa in 2009. As I note in my recent op-ed for the New York Daily News:

A recent report details the exact level of U.S. commitment. The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project data suggests that the U.S. has armed the Saudi coalition in Yemen since 2009 and shows no signs of leaving. The United States continues to train the Saudi coalition on how to use American weaponry. The U.S. has participated in joint exercises with at least 80% of Saudi air squadrons in Yemen. Making matters worse, at least four of these trainings took place on American soil.

Washington has delivered an astounding number of weapons to Saudi Arabia since 2009, with over $23 billion in weapons delivered and Congress notified of over $140 billion worth. In essence, the United States has been sending weapons for Riyadh to use since this conflict began seven years ago, the end of the ongoing conflict is nowhere in sight, and Saudi Arabia’s human freedom is no better than it was when the conflict began.

Appeasing Saudi Arabia is a losing strategy that will only force Washington to further engage in a war that does not benefit U.S. interests while supporting an oppressive, authoritarian regime.

In 2017, Saudi Arabia quite literally rolled out the red carpet for Trump when he visited the country. One should ask if Biden will receive the same courtesy. Rather than learning from history, Biden seems convinced that the policies from the Obama and Trump administrations will finally work now that he is the one negotiating the deal.

Instead of Biden “reversing the blank-check policy,” the President’s attitude towards Saudi Arabia reeks with the same arrogance as his predecessors’.

On July 5, 2022, members of the House introduced amendments to the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which are now viewable online. Out of the 1,172 amendments, 25 deal with restricting U.S. weapons sales abroad. These amendments can be broken down in three ways: creation and enforcement of new reporting requirements; protection and implementation of human rights measures in the U.S. arms sales process; and reducing dispersion of weapons away from the intended recipient.

Reporting requirements are an easy way for Congress to start reform without needing to debate politically charged issues. For example, the 2022 NDAA introduced legislation to require audits of foreign security forces receiving U.S. assistance, force human rights reporting for security aid to Colombia, demand oversight reports on private security contractors receiving U.S. aid, and force reporting on U.S.-funding of United Nations peacekeepers. In essence, this type of legislation is easy to pass in the NDAA, generally enjoys bipartisan support, does not upset the leaders of political parties, and adds bureaucracy to institutions that do not normally affect Americans.

In the 2023 NDAA amendments, there is legislation that would force more reporting on the impact of U.S. arms exports and foreign operations on global human rights, review the Department of Defense’s strategy for deterring misuse of U.S. security assistance, require additional notifications for weapons transfers to Central America’s Northern Triangle and direct commercial sales to all nations, and oversee budget authorizations that the U.S. government uses to fight covert wars.

Overall, the reporting requirements related to arms transfers in the 2023 NDAA will certainly add work for the Departments of State, Defense, and Commerce, but in doing so, they could improve human rights practices in those countries.

In addition to improvements to reporting requirements, the 2023 NDAA includes amendments that restrict arms sales by evaluating the impact of U.S. weapons on global human rights and how to prevent continued abuses. Such amendments are historically difficult to pass because members of Congress receive money from U.S. weapons manufacturers, do not want to restrict President Joe Biden’s authority, or both. The amendments to the 2023 NDAA would restrict specific countries from receiving U.S. weapons, especially Saudi Arabia. Beyond that, other amendments restrict transfer of weapons to unsupervised recipients, require greater vetting on human rights violators and units that will receive U.S. weapons, improve training on proper use of security assistance, and force the U.S. government to assess the potential for war crimes and other human rights violations in the arms transfer process – from notification of sale to delivery of the weapons.

By placing the issue as an amendment in the NDAA, individual congresspersons are at least forcing a discussion on human rights issues in the weapons sales process. However, much of this legislation may not pass.

Finally, the 2023 NDAA proposed amendments would restrict weapons sales by helping the U.S government avoid dispersion of its transferred weapons to unwanted recipients in two ways. First, by authorizing additional funds of up to $20 million for fiscal year 2023 and each year after to improve end‐​use monitoring of weapons transfers. This means the U.S. government will continue to track weapons after they are delivered and make sure they are in the hands of the intended recipient. The second way is by removing the Trump‐​era rule that placed the Commerce Department in charge of some firearms sales assessments instead of the State Department. This rule led to weapons in Categories I‑III in the U.S. Munitions List being regulated by the Commerce Department instead of the State Department, including the sale of semi‐​automatic firearms, small‐​arms ammunition, shotguns, non‐​lethal grenades and projectiles, optical‐​sighting devices, firearm production equipment, and other small arms and light weapons. This leads these weapons to being subject to a less strict review process and increasing potential gun violence in Latin America, less rigorous end‐​use monitoring of U.S. weapons in Afghanistan, and rewarding governments that have dispersed weapons to U.S. adversaries. Thus, this amendment would move risk assessment of these firearms back into the State Department’s purview and reduce these negative consequences.

Below is a list of all of the restrictive arms sales legislation proposed by House members in the 2023 NDAA. While there are eleven less amendments restricting sales than last year, if passed, most of these amendments would have a small, but not insignificant impact on assessing risk in weapons sales.

The following is an excerpt from an article I wrote on China’s nuclear modernization activities and their strategic implications. CBNW magazine published the article on their website in late May 2022.

The nuclear aspect of US-China superpower competition is garnering increased attention. China’s longstanding nuclear modernization effort leapt into the headlines in 2021 with the discovery of three under-construction silo fields that could host up to 120 silos apiece. The Chinese also successfully tested a hypersonic fractional orbital bombardment system. What nuclear modernization steps is China taking and what are the strategic implications for the United States?

Answering the first part of that question is relatively easy, but it is harder to accurately predict the nuclear strategy that China’s larger and more sophisticated arsenal will implement. What is certain is the nuclear aspect of US-China competition is growing in importance.

A larger and more advanced Chinese nuclear arsenal does not automatically mean that the Americans can no longer deter first use by China. Analysts should beware threat inflation – and think calmly and carefully about ways to prevent competition from devolving into outright conflict. China’s changing nuclear arsenal will complicate this effort, but it does not make it a lost cause.

The rest of the article can be found on the CBNW website: https://​cbnw​.co​.uk/​c​h​i​n​a​-​l​e​a​n​-​a​n​d​-​e​f​f​e​c​tive/. 

Politico’s Andrew Desiderio highlights a statement from Senator Bob Menendez (D‑NJ), who has long been one of the most hawkish Democrats on Iran and opposed the JCPOA when it was signed:

Iran now has enough enriched uranium to produce a nuclear weapon. This latest milestone returns us to a familiar question: At what point will the Administration acknowledge that Iran’s nuclear advances make a return to the 2015 JCPOA not in the United States’ strategic interest?… it is time for a comprehensive strategy to address Iran and the threats it poses—Iran as it is, not the Iran we might hope for.

Let’s look at Iran’s nuclear advances and see if we can figure out what’s going on.

Below are three charts showing Iran’s nuclear advances since 2018. The first looks at enriched uranium—defining low-enriched uranium as under 5% enrichment, then one showing enrichment up to 20%, then the last one showing the (much riskier) 60% enriched uranium. This is IAEA Board Report data, with my (appalling) visualization:

Next we can look at Iran’s installed advanced centrifuges since 2017:

Finally, here is one highlighting in particular the advances in Iran’s holdings of medium-enriched uranium (mislabeled here as “high-enriched”):

So it’s quite clear that Iran has dramatically ramped up its nuclear activities, far beyond the constraints imposed on it by the JCPOA. Of course, the United States unilaterally left the nuclear agreement in May 2018.

Asked in November 2018 what the United States would do if Iran restarted its nuclear program in response, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared, “We’re confident the Iranians will not make that decision.”

The Iranians, in a way that was both predictable and predicted, did make that decision.

There was a great outcry at the time about the Trump administration’s decision to pull out of the deal. One leading Democratic Senator issued a statement arguing that

With this decision President Trump is risking U.S. national security, recklessly upending foundational partnerships with key U.S. allies in Europe and gambling with Israel’s security. Today’s withdrawal from the JCPOA makes it more likely Iran will restart its nuclear weapons program in the future.

That Senator? Bob Menendez.

The JCPOA wasn’t a perfect deal. It didn’t make the Iranian government into nice guys. But from a nonproliferation point of view, it was a blindingly clear success. Getting back into the exact the deal we signed in 2015 is impossible now. We’re going to wind up with something worse. Let’s not blame the deal we left for that fact.

President Joe Biden recently announced that he would send U.S. troops to “train and assist” Somali forces, which should reignite the debate over continued U.S. involvement in the “Global War on Terror.” Strictly speaking, despite former President Donald Trump’s withdraw of American military forces from Somalia in 2020, Washington has created proxy military forces in the country using section 10 U.S.C. §127e – otherwise known as 127 Echo in U.S. Code 10 or simply 127e. The 127e budgetary authority allows the government to create proxy forces abroad in place of deploying U.S. military forces. Yet 127e’s terms undercut both Congressional and public oversight, allowing Washington to continue the War on Terror, but with less regard for human rights concerns and potential blowback.

Amongst other things, 127e allows the United States to train troops in other nations but fight in Somalia, which authorizes Washington to maintain ongoing operations while claiming to have removed U.S. troops. This has been done three times under the Biden Administration. In this case, 127e allows the U.S. to continue the War on Terror from afar.

127e programs do not vet its trainee forces for human rights violations. Other U.S. legislation that regulates foreign forces’ human rights records, such as the Leahy Laws, are not applicable to 127e programs. By not considering human rights in the oversight process, Washington creates problems it should want to avoid, including armed groups using American-made weapons to commit mass murder or kill U.S. soldiers, whether intentionally or not. 

For example, U.S. weapons – provided despite preventative 2016 UN sanctions — killed at least 22 civilians in Somalia in a 2021 incident. While it is unclear if these weapons were provided under 127e authority, the group committing the crime – Puntland Security Force – has received U.S. training and weapons from Navy Seals and the CIA since the early 2000s. Similar incidents involving 127e trained forces have soured Somali public opinion on Washington for discounting civilian casualties, with some reports suggesting that the government likely knew and failed to report these casualties.

Somalia is not the only country to host 127e programs with drastic costs.

In Cameroon, Washington used this program to employ a military unit known for committing extrajudicial killings – the Rapid Intervention Battalion – without restraint. This group then murdered and tortured women and children at a base frequented by U.S. military personnel. Moreover, 127e provided funding for the group despite withheld planned security assistance.

Beyond that, because the quality of troops being trained is not subject to oversight by Congress and the American public, 127e programs create lackluster partners. This has led to the deaths of U.S. soldiers. On October 4, 2017, for example, ISIS-affiliated militants murdered four American and four Nigerien soldiers in Tongo Tongo, Niger. The American soldiers were left vulnerable in the village attempting to support a U.S. team of 127e trainers.

Previous Congressional attempts to reform the 127e authority have all failed. In the House’s version of the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), Representative Sara Jacobs (D‑CA) sponsored an amendment, later removed by the Senate, that would force 127e to incorporate human rights vetting before providing support and perform continuous inspections during the operations. This would not end the program, but would curtail its negative effects by reducing the possibility for human rights abuses related to 127e funding. Unsavory groups would receive less aid and U.S. involvement in the African theatre of the War on Terror could slowly start to end.

127e is a product of Washington’s refusal to leave the region and could, indeed, keep America involved in perpetuity. The longer the stay, the more security threats emerge, allowing programs like 127e to operate without oversight. 127e budget authority allows Washington to continue its “War on Terror” at low costs. Whether in Somalia, other parts of Africa, or elsewhere, 127e allows escalation in counterterrorism operations. Like the Greek story of Sisyphus being condemned to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity, unguarded funding for special counterterrorism operations leads to human rights abuses, deaths of American soldiers, and condemns the U.S. military to inescapable self-entanglement in unnecessary wars. Until the budgetary authority changes, Washington will continue the “forever wars.”

Since World War II, the United States has conducted extended wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Whether the Russian effort in Ukraine will be similarly extended has yet to be seen. However, should that come about, evidence about public opinion from America’s wars suggests lessons—and non-lessons—for assessing Russian opinion on the war in Ukraine.

The comparison suggests that, after a rally-round-the flag effect at the outset of the war, a decline of support is to be expected regardless of the effects of media coverage, antiwar demonstrations, censorship and propaganda efforts, or military happenings in the war. This will also result in an increasing willingness to accept failure or even debacle in the war and in a strong inclination not to attempt other such ventures. However, there is an important difference in the experiences, one that is potentially consequential: while the average American remained substantially untouched personally by the wars, that may well not hold for the average Russian.

Initial Support

Even discounting for the restrictions in civil liberties, initial Russian popular support for the war appears to have been quite high—probably around 70 or 75 percent. The same number roughly holds for the American wars except for the one in Afghanistan, conducted shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, where support at the outset was closer to 90 percent.

People tend to believe what they want to believe. In all cases, the strong initial support for all the wars was likely the result of a rally-round-the-flag effect in which the publics overwhelmingly wanted to believe that the actions of their governments were justified, wise, and necessary.

The strong initial support for the Ukraine invasion among the Russian public has routinely been attributed to the propaganda efforts of the Russian government and its controlled media. But those same forces have for years sought to convince Russians of the value of the Russian anti-covid vaccine, Sputnik. Yet resistance to that message has been extensive. And, indeed, if extensive and purposeful promotion could guarantee acceptance, we’d all be driving Edsels and drinking New Coke—legendary marketing failures in 1958 and 1985 by two of the (otherwise) most successful businesses in history: the Ford Motor Company and Coca-Cola.

The acceptance of misinformation in such matters is hardly unusual. At the outset of the war in Iraq, a majority of Americans, nudged on by the Republican administration, said they believed that Saddam Hussein was “personally involved” in the 9/11 attacks. And, although the nudging stopped, 30 to 40 percent held to that belief for more than seven years. Moreover, the public substantially bought the ideas that a loss in Afghanistan would lead to more 9/​11s, that al-Qaeda presented an existential threat to the United States and had infiltrated thousands of trained operatives into the country, that wars in Vietnam and Korea were necessary to prevent World War III, and that Saddam Hussein would come to “dominate” the Middle East with his remarkably inept army and/​or hand off weapons of mass destruction to congenial terrorists. Plausible counters to such assertions generated little headway.

The Decline of Support

The American data suggest that Russian support for the war in Ukraine will decline—rather sharply in the first months as reluctant supporters drop off and then more slowly as the remainder comes increasingly to consist of harder core supporters. And the most important element in this decline is the cumulation of casualties—and particularly of combat deaths—by their forces.

It should not be assumed, however, that poll respondents have much of a grasp on what the actual number of causalities or battle deaths is—and their guesses on the issue do not correlate very well with support or opposition to the war. Rather, people seem to make a rough cost-benefit calculation in which the value of the war as they see it is put up against the cost thus far in America lives.

In all of this, what has chiefly mattered for American public opinion is American losses, not those of the people defended. Although, the number of Iraqis who have died as a result of the U.S. invasion has reached into the hundreds of thousands, the only cumulative body count that truly matters for American public opinion, and the only one that is routinely reported, is the American one.

There is nothing new about this phenomenon: Americans backed the wars in Korea and Vietnam because they saw them as vital to confronting the communist threat, and defending the South Koreans or the South Vietnamese was never thought of as an important goal. Due to the historic closeness of Russians and Ukrainians (“our brothers”), this effect may be different in the current war. However, it seems relevant to point out that, although fully 60 percent of the American public held the Iraqi people to be innocent of any blame for their leader’s policies, Americans have paid little attention to Iraqi deaths in the war.

The public did not weigh the stakes the same for every war. When support for the wars in Vietnam and Korea dropped below 50 percent, some 19,000 battle deaths had been suffered by the United States. In the war in Iraq, that level of support, using the same measure, was reached when around 1,500 had been killed. This lower tolerance for casualties is likely largely due to the fact that the American public placed far less value on the stakes in Iraq than it did on those in Korea and Vietnam which were seen to be vital elements in the Cold War. How such a calculation will play out for Russians today has yet to be determined.

Specific events in the war seem for the most part to have had little longterm impact on the downward trend. Thus, a drop in support in 2004 after the disclosure of prisoner abuses in Iraq by American soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison was mostly reversed in a few months. And the same thing happened when there was a notable upward shift in support after Saddam Hussein was captured: support soon fell back to where it had been before and then continued its generally downward course.

More generally, as the Saddam capture suggests, if people have decided the war is not worth it, improvements on the battlefield will not increase support for the war. There was such a perceived improvement at the time of the surge in Iraq between 2007 and 2008 when, for example, the percentage of people holding that the United States was making significant progress rose from 36 to 46 while the percentage concluding that it was winning the war rose from 21 to 37. Despite this, however, support for the war itself did not increase—there was no change in questions asking if the respondents favored the war, felt it had been worth the effort or the right decision or a mistake, or favored staying as long as it takes. Successful prosecution of a war, it appears, is unlikely to convert people who have already decided it was not worth the costs.

If the decline in support is primarily caused by increasing casualties as suffered by the invading forces, media and propaganda efforts and public antiwar demonstrations will be less significant. This effect likely holds for the Ukraine war as well.

No amount of censorship and biased reporting can suppress the two most important elements in the public’s decision calculus: the war is still going on and our people are dying in it. And that noisy public antiwar demonstrations often fail to convince and may be counterproductive is suggested by a comparison of the Korea and Vietnam Wars—costly anti-Communist wars on the fringes of Asia. Although there were few, if any, antiwar demonstrations during the war in Korea, support for that war eroded as it did during the Vietnam War in which antiwar protest was frequent and highly visible.

Even if an antiwar movement is successful in getting like-minded officials into office, this may not change the prosecution of the war very much. Refusing to repeat the mistakes of their counterparts in the Vietnam War, opponents of the Iraq War, rather than expressing themselves in often unruly public demonstrations, worked assiduously within the Democratic Party, and, in 2008, they were the cornerstone of the success of the only major presidential candidate in the field to have opposed the Iraq War, Barack Obama. But he proved to be quite a disappointment: he appointed to office no one who had publicly and clearly opposed the Iraq war before it was launched, left that war more or less on George W. Bush’s timetable, and handed the war in Afghanistan over to his successor.

The Consequences of the Decline of Support

Although declining support for the war may not generally lead to abandonment of the war, it may still have consequences.

For example, the decline helped impel changes in military tactics to reduce the rate of American casualties in all four of the wars, although this had no effect on support for the war despite predictions that decreasing casualty rates would generate an increase of support.

A second effect can be the creation of a politically permissive atmosphere for withdrawal and even for debacle. This can been seen in the public acquiescence in the abrupt and embarrassing collapse in Afghanistan last year. The public generally accepted the disaster and was not interested in sending troops to attempt to rectify it. And the collapse seems to have had little effect on President Joseph Biden’s political standing. The same phenomenon was seen in the acceptance of utter collapse of the U.S. position in Vietnam in 1975 which led to a Communist takeover there. In fact, the man who presided over that debacle, President Gerald Ford, actually tried to use the fiasco to his advantage in his reelection campaign the next year, arguing that “we are at peace. Not a single young American is fighting or dying on any foreign soil tonight.” Although there are no poll data, the Russian public seems to have accepted the Soviet debacle in Afghanistan under Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s, and, in all, the experience suggests that in time they would accept even a humiliating withdrawal from Ukraine in much the same way.

Third, the Ukraine war is unlikely to affect the decline of international war, one of the greatest achievements in modern history.

Until Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Europe had lived free from substantial international war for the longest period of time since the word “Europe” was invented some 2500 years ago. For the most part, the rest of the world has followed suit, and the use of war to settle international differences has almost completely vanished—although measures short of direct warfare continue to be employed including interventions in civil wars, applying economic sanctions, attempting covert regime change, poaching fish, and waging armed border disputes in remote areas.

Some are concerned that the Ukraine war might shatter this remarkable development. But it is far more likely that the aversion to such wars will continue, something strongly suggested by the facts that the war has almost universally been condemned and that other countries are unlikely to be inspired by the costly and messy example no matter how the war comes out

America’s wars mostly generated a strong public reluctance to repeating the experience. There were no repeats of the Korea or Vietnam wars, and the country seems to have embraced a kind of Iraq/​Afghanistan syndrome after its massive overreactions to 9/11. This phenomenon suggests that the Russian venture into Ukraine may well prove to be a one-off rather than a harbinger. As in the United States, the primary response will likely be: “let’s not do that again.”

A Potentially Important Difference: Direct Pain to the Public

Beyond those who fought the American wars and those close to them, the public never really had to pay a punishing price or tax for their wars. In contrast, Russians may well face severe economic pain and perhaps even collapse as a result of their invasion of Ukraine.

The chief architect of the war, President Vladimir Putin, argues that Russia will be able to suck up any economic hit. However, things were not looking that good for the Russian economy even before the war. A lengthy period of growth during this century was halted in 2014 and growth has been stagnant ever since. Some of this was caused by the reaction to Putin’s annexation of portions of Ukraine in 2014 which set off something like an economic doomsday machine. Because of its antics, Russia suffered a decline in the value of its currency, capital flight, a drop in its stock market, and a decline in foreign investment. And, perhaps most importantly, there was a very substantial drop in confidence by investors, buyers, and sellers throughout the world, alienating, in particular, the European Union which had long been Russia’s largest trading partner and direct investor. In addition, economic sanctions were visited on Russia by other states, and unrelated to the crisis, there was a severe drop in prices for oil on the international market, a development that was especially harmful to Russia: oil and gas sales fund about 36 percent of its annual budget. As a result, real disposable income fell by 15 percent between 2014 and 2017. while aspirational purchases like for homes and cars shifted to ones devoted to daily needs.

Because of this, economists, even before the Ukraine crisis, were suggesting that Russia’s prospect for growth over the next decade were “dim,” and the war there is likely to considerably exacerbate this situation, particularly if oil prices descend from their current highs. European customers have greatly increased their efforts to wean themselves from dependence on Russian natural gas and oil, and there has been a determined effort to apply punishing economic sanctions. Moreover, a great number of foreign, and particularly western, firms have abruptly withdrawn the Russian economy, and, as a simple matter of business, few are likely to return any time soon, particularly as long a Putin remains in office. This could be particularly costly because, as Barack Obama pointed out derisively, if undiplomatically, in his final news conference as president in 2016, “Their economy doesn’t produce anything that anybody wants to buy, except oil and gas and arms. They don’t innovate.”

Although nothing like this happened in any of the four American wars, the economic damage for Russia’s war is likely to be felt directly by the Russian people as currency becomes insecure, travel is restricted, jobs are lost, incomes fall, opportunities are snuffed out, shortages erupt, the quality of life plunges, corruption becomes ever worse, businesses fail, government coffers become empty, and talent is hemorrhaged. Russia may be able to ride out the shock, but there is a special potential for disaster as well.