Can even Trump get something right?

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The Western Mail carried a story earlier this week (which I can’t find online, but basically seems to be a fairly minor edit of this story from three weeks ago) about the problem of desertion facing the Ukrainian armed forces. We knew, of course, that the Russian armed forces were suffering from desertion as well as draft avoidance in the light of the serious level of casualties, but the media in ‘the west’ have seemingly been reluctant to report that the same issue is impacting the Ukrainian armed forces. Whilst it’s credible that Russian problems have been greater than those faced by Ukraine, it’s reasonable to suspect that the gap might not be as large as a less-than-entirely-unbiased media might have us believe. And the fact that Ukraine is suffering its own problem with a high level of desertion should come as no surprise.

It raises a much bigger – and more general – question as to whether the sort of large scale ground war for which the generals and some politicians keep telling us we should be preparing will ever be possible in the future in the same way as it was in the past. The report tells us that the US has been urging Ukraine “to draft more troops, and allow for the conscription of those as young as 18”, since the current minimum age for conscription is 25. Leaving to one side the moral issue of whether anyone should be urging a country to send even more of its people, and at an even younger age, into a vicious and bloody war where many of them will be killed or injured, I found myself wondering how realistic it is in the modern world to expect that people, particularly young people, will willingly comply with an order to go out and kill ‘for their country’. We’re not in the first half of the twentieth century when information flows could be easily controlled, and where jingoism was a fairly normal phenomenon. People – even in dictatorships like Russia – have much easier access to information about what’s happening. Pro patria mori has never been particularly dulce or decorum whatever the politicians might tell us, and that was precisely the point which Wilfred Owen was making more than a century ago. Mass conscription for a major war in the twenty-first century is likely to be problematic for any country which attempts it, with resistance running very high.

Trump has said that he will end the war on day 1 of his renewed presidency. I struggle to understand his drivers. He says it is to stop the killing, which would be a noble enough aim; but coming from a man who has no previous record of concern for anyone other than himself, it doesn’t immediately strike me as being likely. After himself, those about whom he most seems to care are other billionaires, but we know that capitalist billionaires are amongst those who most benefit from war through their investments in the arms industry. It might simply be, for Trump, a case of not spending US money to support another country. That would certainly seem to fit with his ‘America First’ outlook, even if it shows a certain ignorance of the relationship between US government spending on armaments and the overall value of shares on the New York Stock Exchange, which seems to be Trump’s only metric of economic success.

However, whatever his rationale is (to the extent that he has one at all) his conclusion that the immediate priority should be to stop the fighting and killing is difficult to disagree with. And since Ukraine does not have – and without a massive injection of military manpower and firepower from friends and allies is unlikely ever to have – sufficient forces to recapture all its lost territory, an end to the fighting necessarily implies a redrawing of boundaries, on at least a temporary basis. Expecting Ukraine to cede vast swathes of territory in order to buy peace is neither fair nor just, but in the absence of any other basis for agreeing a peace deal, it is surely no worse than the current US position of telling Ukraine to simply conscript more young people who can be ‘expended’ in an ongoing war with no obviously better outcome in sight. There aren’t many boundaries in the world which aren’t the result of a war, a treaty following a war, or arbitrary lines drawn on a map by colonial masters. 

‘Might is right’ is a lousy basis on which to run a planet, but unless and until we collectively find a better way, it’s the basis on which almost all of the world’s current boundaries exist. Supporting the idea that a free and independent country should cede territory to one autocratic bully at the behest of another autocratic bully is uncomfortable, to say the least; but encouraging Ukraine to fight to the last Ukrainian would feel even less comfortable. The devil will, of course, lie in the detail and in the mechanisms for ensuring the integrity of any new boundaries. But on the principle, even Trump might be able to get something right, even if not based entirely on rational analysis or concern for fellow humans.