The Awfulness of War Can’t Be Avoided

In Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part II, the Earl of Warwick warns the king of an impending revolt, which is one of those

main chance of things
As yet not come to life, who in their seeds
And weak beginning lie intreasured

The ailing but canny king rises to the occasion:

Are these things then necessities?
Then let us meet them like necessities.

A brutal war ensues, in which Henry saves his kingdom.

King Henry’s response is a piece of wisdom well suited to a moment when clamoring or nervous politicians, addled demonstrators, and would-be anarchists or revolutionaries have scarcely anything sensible at all to say about the wars of our time.

The case of Israel against Hamas, and specifically the question of a potential invasion of Rafah, Gaza, is particularly striking. Freezing the conflict before the destruction of Hamas as an effective military organization (as a political movement, it may last a very long time) has no prospect of delivering anything remotely like peace. Insisting that the Israelis find a humane way of destroying an enemy, without collateral damage, is absurd when that force is deeply and cunningly dug in and fortified, and indeed prefers for political reasons to see its own civilians suffer. If such an alternative existed, surely someone would have described it for the rest of us.

The fact—the necessity, as King Henry might have put it—is that although any force engaging in urban warfare has a responsibility to limit civilian casualties, city fighting is ruinous. The residents of Mosul, Fallujah, or for that matter of Aachen in 1944, would agree.

[Elliot Ackerman: A knife fight in a phone booth]

Halting the war now, leaving Hamas still standing, is a surefire way to breed more wars. Doing so would encourage Hamas to fulfill its promise of launching many more October 7–style attacks. It would also embolden Iran, which has already gotten away with firing massive volleys of long-range missiles at Israeli cities; Hezbollah, which has ignored a deal requiring it to withdraw behind the Litani River and is waging a low-level war across the Lebanon frontier; and the Houthis, who have been taking potshots at merchant shipping.

The effectiveness of antimissile defenses has shielded governments from treating necessities like necessities. Indeed, it has in some measure obscured the existential nature of the long-running Israel-Hamas war. Western leaders have preferred not to take seriously the eliminationist rhetoric of Hamas, Iran, and their various proxies, just as they preferred not to take Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric denying the existence of a legitimate Ukraine seriously.

The vacuous commitment of Western leaders to stand with Ukraine “for as long as it takes” allows them to avoid defining that awkward word, it. Creeping talk of cease-fires—in which the Ukrainians evince no interest—substitutes for providing Ukraine with the means to win. More hard thinking of a Henrician kind would make clear that a cease-fire would produce only a demoralized Ukraine, a triumphal Russia, a blow to Western prestige—and, in the end, a renewed Russian war of conquest. It would also force other states in the path of Russia’s ruthless imperial ambitions to choose between accommodation and nuclear proliferation.

[Read: The war is not going well for Ukraine]

In both cases, there is in Western circles a desire to avoid confronting the awfulness of real war—not war waged in far-off lands for obscure purposes, but war waged to save or destroy nations, wars launched with massacre and the promise of more massacre in the event of victory by the side that started them.

There is a deeper civilizational malady here, the kind that manifests in magical thinking about political choice. It was audible in the calls for defunding the police, which did not pause to consider that crime rates might rise when officers cease to keep the streets safe; in the claims that gargantuan deficits would not lead to inflation; and in the assertion that you can keep children completely safe from risks of COVID without paying a penalty in their mental health.

Part of the transition to adulthood lies in accepting that actions have consequences, that money spent on one thing is not available for another, that not all stories have happy endings, that not all good things are compatible. Maturity is, above all, the recognition that reality is reality, and that when it conflicts with your wishes and desires, it always wins.

If a substantial number of members of Congress, on both sides of the aisle, act like spoiled teenagers, it is because few penalties exist for adult legislators acting like brats. Indeed, many of their constituents prefer it so. Under such circumstances, it should come as no surprise that student protesters complain when their university fails to feed them even as they occupy its buildings and muscle the janitors, or insist on wearing masks so that, unlike Martin Luther King Jr. or Henry David Thoreau, they do not have to take responsibility for civil disobedience. While there have been some notably adult responses to student unrest—University of Florida President Ben Sasse stands out in his insistence that students are not children and should not be treated as such—for the most part university presidents have flattered and appeased students rather than reproved them, even as some of those students have called for the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state.

The world has a distinctly 1930s feel to it. Western leaders have offered stirring or at least forceful rhetoric in response to multiple crises. But when it comes to deeds rather than words, the record is less compelling. During the Cold War, countries spent 4 or 5 percent of their GDP on defense, and the United States got as high as 8 percent. Today, even the United States is below 3 percent. There is a broad political consensus that China is a growing threat, that Iran is a violent menace, and that Russia is an imperial revanchist state. Yet no one is seriously calling for the kind of sacrifices that are needed to meet the crisis, such as raising taxes to reverse the shrinkage of the United States Navy or create the kind of industrial base that could sustain the American military should worse come to worst.

With some notable exceptions, Europe is even more lost in its world of wishful thinking than the U.S. is. France’s Emmanuel Macron may talk of stationing Western forces in Ukraine, but unless his and other governments introduce large-scale conscription and create the industries required to sustain armies, they will not have much by way of land forces to do it. Great Britain, a traditional defense stalwart, will struggle to meet a target of 2.5 percent of GDP spent on defense by 2030—as its forces have shrunk to levels not seen, in some cases, since Victorian times.

Thucydides, of whom Shakespeare’s King Henry would have approved, famously said that war is a rough master, a violent teacher. In peace and prosperity, he said, states and individuals do not find themselves “suddenly confronted with imperious necessity.” At a time when war flickers on the borders of a generally peaceful and generally prosperous and generally immature West, we would do well to heed his wisdom, and that of the tired but resolute Shakespearean king.