The freshly elected President Barack Obama probably never imagined that he would be delivering his Nobel Peace Prize lecture by defending war. But there he was, in December 2009, doing just that.
“I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the considerable controversy that your generous decision has generated,” he said. “[P]erhaps the most profound issue surrounding my receipt of this prize is the fact that I am the Commander-in-Chief of the military of a nation in the midst of two wars.”
Obama told his audience that he is mindful of what “Martin Luther King Jr. said in this same ceremony years ago: ‘Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones.'” But he then reminded them that as president, “I cannot be guided by [Gandhi’s and King’s] examples alone. I face the world as it is.”
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell set out the idea that thought could be controlled by language with three strategies: the diminution of vocabulary to limit the range of thought, contractions or acronyms to limit the focus of words by eliminating connotations, and euphemisms to make bad things seem good. The paradoxical euphemism “War is Peace” was prominently displayed across the face of the Ministry of Truth.
That dystopian improbability has become the mantra of the war in Ukraine today. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, on June 20, told his audience, “It may seem like a paradox, but the path to peace is more weapons to Ukraine.” A few months earlier, Stoltenberg had told another audience that “Weapons, in fact, are the way to peace.”
America’s top diplomats have, more subtly, made the same point. It is sometimes expressed as the necessity for more weapons and more advanced and sophisticated weapons to sufficiently weaken and threaten Russia to drive them to the negotiating table. Or as White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan recently said, “Our job is to put Ukraine in a strong position on the battlefield so that they are in a strong position at the negotiating table” before adding that, with the consideration of granting Ukraine permission to use Western long-range missiles to fire deeper into Russia, the Joe Biden administration is having “a conversation that puts all of the pieces together.”
The Orwellian language of “war is peace” is most prominently on display today in Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s “Ukrainian Victory Plan.” The plan is described by Zelensky as a “bridge to strengthening Ukraine” in order to “contribute to more productive future diplomatic meetings with Russia.” The plan is to escalate the war with long-range strikes into Russian territory with missiles supplied by NATO countries as a path to peace and diplomacy: war is peace. The plan, Zelensky explained in a CNN interview, is to “strengthen [Ukraine] before peace summit to be in a strong position because diplomatic decisions or solutions, they’re good when you’re strong.” Ukraine has to be “very strong” to be “ready for strong diplomacy.”
A week later, Zelensky told his ABC interviewer, “I think that we are closer to the peace than we think. We are closer to the end of the war. We just have to be very strong, very strong.” By escalating the war, we come closer to peace. “That’s why we’re asking our friends, our allies, to strengthen us. It’s very important.” Zelensky then said that it is only from a “strong position” that Ukraine can “push Putin to stop the war.”
The help that Zelensky is asking from his friends and allies that will put Ukraine in that strong position is long-range missile systems complete with “the freedom to use [them] without restrictions.” That is the latest in a long line of increasingly escalatory requests made by Ukraine and, eventually, granted by the United States and its partners. Maybe it will sufficiently strengthen Ukraine on the battlefield to “push Putin to stop the war,” and maybe it won’t. Prior rungs up the escalatory ladder, including long-range HIMARS and ATACMS missiles, Patriot air defense systems, Abrams tanks and F-16 fighter jets, all promised to do that but failed.
America’s diplomats at the State Department have argued in favor of escalating war as an instrument of diplomacy. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said that “from day one…as what Russia is doing has changed, as the battlefield has changed, we’ve adapted…And I can tell you that as we go forward, we will do exactly what we have already done, which is we will adjust, we’ll adapt as necessary, including with regard to the means that are at Ukraine’s disposal to effectively defend against the Russian aggression.”
But the Pentagon and the intelligence community have been less certain that the benefits of this escalation outweigh the risks. The Pentagon’s position is that “long-range strikes into Russia would not turn the tide of the war in Ukraine’s favor” because no one thing will. And they agree with the intelligence community that 90% of Ukraine’s selected targets have been moved out of range. Even if the targets were within range of the long-range missiles, Ukraine does not have enough missiles, and the United States doesn’t have enough to give them.
But, even if NATO assisted long-range strikes into Russia did strengthen Ukraine and turn the tide of the war, there is no certainty in the calculation that that would “push Putin to stop the war.” It is at least as likely to push Putin to escalate the war. If the territory of Russia is existentially threatened and Russia risks losing a war and having to accept NATO expanding into Ukraine and onto its border, Russia could possibly be pushed to execute the war with greater force.
Whether Western guided long-range missile strikes deep into Russia have the effect Zelensky desires or whether they don’t, all sides agree that this war will end in negotiations. So far, neither the escalatory ladder of Western weapons nor Ukraine’s invasion into the Kursk region of Russia have put Ukraine into a stronger position. The Kursk offensive increasingly seems to have put them into a weaker one. War may bring peace, but it may also bring more war on the road to peace. And, either way, that peace is likely to look the same. It is likely to look the same as it looked after only weeks of fighting before the West discouraged a peace plan that was close to being agreed upon in Istanbul that would have ended the war with a sovereign Ukraine in control of all of its pre-war territory and a Russia satisfied by guarantees that Ukraine would not join NATO.
Russia is a large country with a large number of targets. They have many more long-range missiles than Ukraine and are capable of shooting down many of the few that Ukraine does have. Permission to strike deeper inside Russia is unlikely to persuade Russia to give up its stated goals of protecting ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine and securing a written promise that Ukraine won’t join NATO. Escalate with long-range missiles or don’t escalate with long-range missiles: either road leads to diplomacy and the same likely outcome. But the escalatory road leads to escalation and more suffering on the road to the same diplomatic destination. Orwell intended Nineteen Eighty-Four as a warning, not as a blueprint.
