America hasn’t fought many righteous wars.
In the 19th century the Civil War was righteous. Everything else was conquest. The “winning of the west” was a slow motion genocide. We took the Southwest from Mexico. We took the Philippines and Puerto Rico from Spain. We teach it as democracy, as freedom. It was empire.
World War II was righteous. In retrospect, I’m glad we fought in Korea.
Other than that? We have been involved in more coups, in more places, for worse reasons, than the British Empire ever thought of. Vietnam was not a righteous war. The Gulf War was not a righteous war. Neither was the Iraq War. Afghanistan began as a righteous mission then turned into a distinctly unrighteous war.
Americans have the blood of the world on our hands, and we deny that every day. The difference between the parties is that Republicans do it more systematically.
What makes a war righteous has little to do with its cause. Everyone will say their cause is right.
What makes a war righteous is whether you’re defending your existence or not. It’s whether you’re on offense of defense. It’s whether you can choose not to fight.
By that standard Ukraine is the first righteous war we’ve been involved with in this century.
If Russia stops fighting, Russia will still exist. If Ukraine stops fighting it will cease to exist.
That’s the standard.
People, and peoples, will do what they will. You may not like it, but everyone, even whole societies, make mistakes. Mistakes must be allowed to happen, subject to the soft pressure of money, migration, and another nation’s suicide.
American arms built an empire. But they didn’t bring peace. Peace will only come when we stop trying to make people like us, when we step back and use our soft power in support of what we often call our true values.
Just in my lifetime we’ve made a mess of things. We let the oil companies run roughshod over the globe, we killed hundreds of millions in Asia (in the name of what). Russia’s only argument against us is our own record on the world stage.
We can’t go to war in Ukraine. The Ukraine’s people decided to defend themselves, and we support that defense. That’s what makes theirs a righteous war.
But it’s not our war. We pretended to be on defense in Vietnam, in Kuwait, in Iraq and Afghanistan. We pretended in all those places where we destroyed democracy on behalf of leaders of our choosing. But history has a long memory.
We were wrong.
When the Ukranians win their freedom, don’t be self-righteous about it.
