The Real Cost of War

By Rome

Winners or losers, parties to a compromise peace, everyone pays for the war.

First of course, there is the human loss.  Lives, simply lives.  This cost is so immense, for the dead, for their families, for their friends, that we do not have a way to even measure it.  We call it the ultimate sacrifice.  I lack the wisdom to add further words.

Then the wounded, blinded, hobbled, handicapped.  Our imagination fails to embrace the variety and depth of these losses.  Trauma syndrome.  Alcoholism.  Emotionally disturbed.  The list again is beyond my simple knowledge.  But it hurts just to talk about it.

What about those subjected to torture?  Time spent as prisoners of war?  And the persons never found?

Of course, all of the above applies to civilians as well as military.  War does not discriminate. Everyone pays.

Children – frightened, orphaned, abducted, witnesses to horror, normalized to horror. Again, we can barely contemplate the depth of this cost.

Besides this vast human dimension is the economics of war.  I pretend no expertise.  The obvious destruction of cities, hospitals, roads, infrastructure.  The loss of planes, tanks, trucks, ships  --  billions of government expenses, which means years of taxpayer contributions literally up in smoke.  The loss of arable or otherwise usable land to mines.  Disruption of business.  Not to mention the expense of conducting the war  -- fuel, boots, bombs.  Of course, wars also give rise to innovation and benefit certain businesses or sectors.  For stronger minds to ponder:  Do these economic “benefits” justify the economic costs, let alone the human costs considered above?  Can economists devise a better way?

Other costs include environmental, cultural, and the criminal acts of soldiers (or others) unleashing violence on innocents.

And there is another cost, paid by all, which may be the greatest.

Before I address it, I would like to say that I am not a pacifist.  As a university freshman, I wrote an essay called “A Duty to Die”, in which I concluded, based on what seemed logical to me, that communities need defenders.  With few exceptions, a moral obligation to participate in such defence reaches out to everyone.  I subsequently completed four years of part-time training and volunteered for six years as a reserve officer in my country’s military.  I believe in defending my community against aggression.  My community extends far beyond the borders of my native state, and I volunteer, on a non-combatant basis, to support the wartime efforts of Ukraine.

I wish Ukrainians the greatest victory possible over their cruel aggressor.

But even in victory, or in an eventual peace, whatever form it takes, Ukrainians, Russians, and all of humanity, will pay an immense cost beyond those above.

I see the greatest cost of the war at two levels, one global and the other individual.

At the end of World War I, “never again” was the catchphrase to be learned by all.  Within 20 years, World War II had begun.  World War II gave rise to institutions, laws, and strategic postures meant to ensure no more war in Europe, at least not involving the great powers.  The Russo-Ukrainian War puts an end to that fantasy.  The cost is more than increased defence budgets among Ukraine’s European allies.  It is the end of a concept.  It is the end of a certain faith.  Just as the current US administration has demonstrated that laws and institutions cannot themselves restrain a president bent on overriding them, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine shows that treaties and institutions cannot ensure peace faced with a leader who disregards them.

We are brought back to a Hobbesian tenet:  Only power can restrain power.  We can no longer envision international relations as a rule-based system.  We are back in the jungle.  Political leaders, students, historians and theorists no longer have a choice.  Realpolitik has won.

Finally, it is at the individual level that I feel the greatest price is paid.  Among most Westerners, I fear the war will entrench a knee-jerk antipathy to anything Russian, if not to Russians themselves.  The attitudes to the war held by Russians, living in a vacuum of reliable information, is no doubt varied and hugely complex.  The desire to simplify and demonize may lead to generations of misunderstanding.

Will Ukrainians themselves fall prey to believing a stereotype of Russians?  Has a deep-seated hate been planted, or reinforced?  The hate of one people for another is a cost paid by both.

Outside the West, the world’s nations observe, or in some cases participate from the sidelines in, one more example of battlefield carnage in Europe.  The inability of the West to lead its Ukrainian ally to prevail, while supplying it sufficiently to prevent its collapse, is hardly an inspiring example of the leadership of Western democracies.  Just as the ancient Greeks imagined colossal fights between their gods, the world sees today’s superpowers treat international aggression and on-going war as a fact of life.  Pax Americana, to the extent it ever existed, is over.

So what is the cost of war, specifically the Russo-Ukrainian War?  The human losses, the physical destruction, these are the immediately obvious costs.  And they are horrendous.

More deeply, we have been returned to the jungle, where rules of fair play mean nothing.  The seeds of hate between peoples have again been sown.  And progress toward an expanding liberal world order has been halted.

These costs are real, and will be paid by all.