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Notes -
Oh right, see no evil, hear no evil...
Given that lives are on the line, a countries foreign interventions should ethically be of great concern, both for the lives of their own citizens but also foreign citizens. Even if you hold your own nationals as being more important, it would still be important to want to limit unnecessary foreign deaths where there are no strategic gains.
The idea that you would be happy just for innocent people to die, would put you in a pretty small set of people. Some people speak rhetorically in such a fashion but I question whether they would actually be able to kill an innocent person themselves if they knew there was no justification. As you point out, the key is not to know about it or to be in the fog of war.
If you're looking for relevant examples, think Iraq war. Lot's of innocent civilians dead, no strategic gains beyond regional chaos perhaps. This sort of thing is only possible when the truth is hidden. Otherwise people tend to understand that it's bad, because most of us value self-consistency and aren't psychopaths.
I don’t think it’s psychopathic to suggest that you not give inordinate attention to conflicts happening half a world away that don’t concern the vast majority of Americans except in the form of aesthetics. I think it honestly holds back lasting peace because a lot of the decisions are made in a grandstanding way with no thought to the possibility of securing a peace. If the world weren’t protesting and watching and following everything on social media, then there’d be a lot more reason to end things quickly. And point of fact, we are actually pretty selective about the conflicts we pay attention to and follow let alone protest. Nobody’s breaking into Grand Central Station over the plight of Uyghurs, Yemenis, or Armenians. Syria has had a decades long civil war, and again the mental space that conflict has on us is pretty small. Those conflicts exist, and others exist around the world, but again they’re not fixtures in our collective imaginations even if thousands die there.
And furthermore, there’s only so much a country can do about these conflicts. We cannot get involved in every single conflict as we have limited resources. We’d have to at some point be selective about who we back and why, and it makes more sense to base the decisions about who to back on what’s in our interests than on whether or not one party or another is posting tear jerky videos on Twitter.
Well I don't have a solution to the larger problem of national rivalries over various interests. And I admit that my tendency is also to gloss over these things as well.
But we are influenced by our goverments and media. This prevents us from seeing our agency in at least some matters. The Iraq war was a coterie of hawks who hoodwinked the US and UK into a war. If journalism had highlighted true facts and enquired more deeply, they could have, perhaps, been stared down.
It was also a war we were directly involved in. It was our troops, our bombs our leaders making the decisions. Yes, in that instance we could and should have done what we needed to to stop the war we started in a way that doesn’t destroy what remains of Iraq.
The problem with us getting involved in wars that we have no interest or stake in is that it artificially prolongs and deepens the strife because they know the west in general is there to play cop and stop things before they get too crazy. Hamas doesn’t think that attacking Israel is a potentially lethal move for them because they know that Biden will negotiate a “pause”, that the retaliation will be decried as genocide, and that they’ll get billions in aid and other middle eastern countries will resupply them with weapons as soon as the coast is clear. Israel has no fear of the consequences of their actions because they know that nuclear aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean is a warning to all the Arabs that the American empire and her Allies will bomb the shit out of them if they intervene. What this means is that the war continues to infinity because we prevent them from fighting to the conclusion, and thus creating whatever the final outcome of the war that’s been going on since 1948. Instead we have the war flare up every few years, fight it to the exact same stalemate we’ve been stuck at for 75 years and know that whatever happens in this round is ultimately meaningless as the ceasefire just means rearming and preparing for the next round of the forever war.
I can see what you mean, and agree with the drawn out nature of many wars, especially proxy wars. But Im not sure previous wars where fighting was less restrained necessarily resolved issues such as contested land, though might-is-right was certainly understood well by the loser in heavy defeats. But these memories stay until fortunes change presumably and then the chance to even the score presents itself. I'm thinking regions like the Balkans - I mean they had a decent war not so long ago, but it hasn't resolved the tensions.
I mean the thing for me is that those wars ended decisively with one victor who won strongly enough to prevent the losing party from being able to spin back up to relight the fuse and try to win again. In 1850, if two countries went to war, they fought until one capitulated to the other, and it was known by all parties that the matter was settled. If the Ukraine war had happened in 1903, then we’d probably find ourselves redrawing the map to reflect that Western Ukraine wasn’t able to control Donbas and Crimea. Instead, we’re still trying to keep the war going instead of having West Ukraine simply cede the territory and shore up defenses.
Because now we have a principle that you can't acquire territory by conquest. It means that some conflicts will be considered ongoing for a long time, but it's also supposed to mean that most countries don't even consider starting a war of conquest in the first place, because no one will recognize their gains, so we have many fewer wars of conquest.
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That seems true from my limited knowledge of war contexts. Yes I'd say we are at a new time in history in that we have many perspective takers neutral to this or that conflict that see various wars, beyond geopolitical reasons and parochial local forces, as being somewhat pointless. US foreign policy has this sense of arbitrariness, where every action is completely justifiable from some strategic perspective, even if just undermining the region or wanting to spoil a rivals influence. But when the accounting is done some period after, the reasoning drops away and the action is ceased, reverted, like a cat that gets tired of playing with some half-dead mouse. Meanwhile the massive loss of infrastructure and often civilian life plants the seed for further deprivation and violence down the track, this justifying the next intervention.
The consequence for perspective takers that are not linked to either side is that they can start to make connections from war, to other bad outcomes, such as an influx of immigrants into your country.
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