I will never forget the stories I heard on the
Ukrainian-Polish border one year ago: Newlyweds who separated hours after
saying their vows so the groom could return to the front. A tax preparer in
Boston who quit her job to return to Ukraine with suitcases full of medical
supplies. The wife of a border guard who made the three-hour round trip from
Lviv, Ukraine, to the
Polish border almost daily to drop off fleeing women and
children and pick up weapons and supplies.
اضافة اعلان
The one-year mark of this terrible war brings up a range of
emotions, including deep admiration for the Ukrainian people and dismay over
the unfolding Russian offensive. But another feeling comes up, too, that does
not get talked about enough: awe at the breathtaking waste of war.
How sad that human beings survived deadly waves of
COVID only to get right back into the business-as-usual of killing one other. It is
senseless to spend tens of billions of dollars on missiles, tanks, and other
aid, when more needs to be done to help communities adapt to rising oceans and
drying rivers. It is lunacy that farmers in a breadbasket of the world have
gone hungry hiding in bomb shelters. It is madness that President Vladimir
Putin of Russia declared Ukrainians to be part of his own people — right before
he sent his army into the country, where Russian soldiers have been accused of
raping and murdering civilians.
Governments gussy up war. They talk of victory because that
gives soldiers hope and the will to fight on. But in the end, war is death in a
muddy foxhole. It is an existential fight over a frozen field with no strategic
value. It is a generational grudge that begets new generational grudges. It is
an $11 billion, roughly 1,200-km pipeline laid across the Baltic Sea rendered
useless overnight. It is some of the largest steel plants in Europe unable to
produce or ship a single metal sheet. It is a charming seaside city emptied out
by bombings and siege.
When a country is fighting for its survival, as Ukraine is,
the ability to wage war is essential. Indeed, it can feel like the only thing
that really counts. But it is also true that our collective prosperity as human
beings depends upon the absence of war, which gives people the breathing room
they need to farm, to trade, to make scientific breakthroughs and art.
Peace and prosperityThe economic rewards reaped by not being at war can be hard
to quantify. But researchers report that peace is wildly profitable. The
Institute for Economics and Peace, a nonpartisan think tank, scores
peacefulness according to factors like “good relations with neighbors”,
corruption, free flow of information, and representative governance. Its recent
report shows that countries that saw improvements in peacefulness between 2009
and 2020 also saw gross domestic product per capita rise by an average of 3.1
percent per year. Countries where peacefulness deteriorated saw an increase of
just 0.4 percent per year.
Putin’s war in Ukraine makes us all poorer, hungrier and
more insecure. Although the world has avoided the mutually assured destruction
of nuclear war so far, it has not dodged the slow-moving bullet of mutually
assured economic degradation.
Real global incomes this year could be $2.8 trillion lower
because of the Russian invasion, according to a report by the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development. Ukrainian towns that have spent at least
a month on the front lines have seen their economic activity cut roughly in
half, estimates Yuri Zhukov, associate professor of political science at the
University of Michigan. He has been using light emissions as seen from space as
a proxy for economic activity in areas with heavy shelling.
China and Taiwan“At its heart, war is a fundamentally stupid enterprise,”
said Gerard DiPippo, a former
CIA analyst who now works for the Center for
Strategic and International Studies. “If all you care about is maximizing
economic output and security, you would almost never choose to start a war.”
DiPippo researches the impact of sanctions on Russia as well
as the likely economic fallout if China were to invade Taiwan. His assessment?
Even if
President Xi Jinping managed to retake the island, the price he would
have to pay in lost economic and diplomatic clout would render it a Pyrrhic
victory. The costs would be catastrophic, both for China and the US. According
to a 2016 study by the Rand Corp., a yearlong clash could curb China’s GDP by 25
percent to 35 percent, and US GDP by as much as 10 percent.
“China would have gained Taiwan but sacrificed its larger
ambition of becoming a global and comprehensive superpower,” DiPippo and a
co-author wrote for CSIS.
One hopes that the destruction in Ukraine will help convince
Chinese leaders that reunification with
Taiwan by force would be a
self-defeating policy. But countries blunder into disastrous military conflicts
all the time. Mutual arms buildups are one reason. Another is that leaders
chronically downplay their costs and undervalue the benefits of peace.
The cost of involvementThe American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are a case in
point. Those wars were treated as an emergency expense for a decade, and funded
outside the Pentagon base budget for the second decade, avoiding normal
financial oversight and scrutiny of the full costs, according to Linda Bilmes,
author of a forthcoming book on ghost budgets that paid for the Iraq and
Afghanistan wars.
With the war in Ukraine, the US is once again
underestimating the cost of our involvement, since replacing the weapons that
have been given to Ukraine will likely cost 10 percent to 30 percent more than
their current value on average, Bilmes says. To date, there has been no serious
attempt to estimate or budget for the long-term expense of this war.
Acknowledging the real cost of war — and the benefits of
peace — does not mean that we will lose our will to fight. To the contrary, an
honest accounting of what war is and what it costs is essential to victory over
the long run.
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