Beligerant Neglect

Monday, May 13, 2024

Beligereant Neglect

I doesn’t pay to ignore your enemies. But the leaders we’ve got don’t appear to have the spinal fortitude to show our enemies we aren’t to be trifled with. This neglect will likely only make them feel bolder or even drive them to fight us harder.

Writing for the UK think tank Chatham House, Keir Giles reports:

A British man has been charged over an arson plot targeting a Ukrainian business after allegedly being recruited to act for the mercenary Wagner Group.

The suspect will face trial under the UK’s new National Security Act, in the first case brought under new legislation to crack down on foreign agents. Four other men have also been charged in connection with the arson plot. 

Giles has a round-up of similar Russian staging efforts for political assassinations and sabotage throughout Europe—see the linked article. This tells us of the uncovered Russian efforts that have been blown wide enough open to be released for public consumption. Other active Russian efforts that our spies are tracking remain just as secret as the ones none of our good guys know anything about at all.

The point is that Russia under its present leadership behaves as if it were already at war with NATO, and it’s a hotter war than most of the actual Cold War. The problem, as usual, is that developed western countries are not pushing back effectively. Our leaders continue to pretend that we can opt out of conflicts if we choose.

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In Roy Baumeister’s 1998 book Evil, there’s a multifaceted description of how human cruelty and abuse become routine and habituated. One operative factor is social participation of bystanders. Bystanders like to think they aren’t participants, but they don’t have a choice—even if they think they’re hiding in a crowd.

If one person sees acts of cruelty and abuse, the observer may speak up and try to do something to stop it. Multiple witnesses to an act of cruelty and abuse may instead assume that someone else will speak up or do something, which results in inert bystanders who as a group collectively do nothing. They let the abuser get away with it.

First-time perpetrators of evil typically anticipate disapproval and, fearing intervention, suppress the urge to do harm where anyone might see. But once the first step of an abusive pattern is taken, things may escalate. The perpetrator loses his initial inhibition, having discovered the act of evil did not cause any of the imagined repercussions or reprisals. The next act of cruelty is easier because the inhibiting fear of others’ reactions have proven to be unfounded. In fact, from all appearances, no one was willing to step in at all. There was no intervention on behalf of the victim. Society apparently didn’t care. The cruelty escalates.

Group dynamics here have powerful effects in other ways, too, in the case of groups engaging in abuse themselves. They may have the effect of suppressing moderating voices among their members almost by accident rather than design. Members who do not want to engage in cruelty and violence decide not to speak out for fear of being seen as insufficiently dedicated to the others or to the cause. Baumeister points to several historic examples of this, beginning with the Terror phase of the French Revolution: None of the leaders wanted to be seen as moderate when it came to executing the enemies of the revolution. And thus the leadership became even more violent and radical, with the revolution consuming its own leaders one after another.

Back in the present, our Western, and specifically American, policy of hoping to ignore Russia’s evils is not much of a strategy. We are, in fact, encouraging the evil by refusing to do anything about it. Ours may be the best-intentioned actions of a power that would like to be pacifist. The combined NATO alliance may dream of relying on only the tools of diplomatic persuasion prized so long by Western European countries due to their own unwillingness to spend on their own defenses.

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The way these things tend to work, the enemies are testing our limits in terms of political willpower as well as the limits of our technologies. Enemy countries like Russia are seeking and finding our soft spots so as to concentrate their efforts in any future conflict. We are failing to show we are willing to do much about it.

It’s a failure of many members of NATO. But the United States earns the largest share of blame by simple virtue of having been the alliance’s founding country and its most powerful member.

In standing aside silently as Russia backed the Syrian dictator Assad, as Russia invaded Ukraine, as China set out to exterminate whole nations like the Tibetans and Uighurs, we have indicated repeatedly that there is no cost to doing Evil. We’ve seemed more worried about speaking up forcefully as hundreds, thousands, and then tens of thousands of civilians and bystanders were deported, tortured, and murdered. In standing silently by as our global opponents test our limits with their subversive activities, we continue to signal that there is not cost to their actions. We signal that we can’t bear the thought of confrontation. They will persist as long as we remain passive. We are shaping the enemies we will have to deal with in the future.

If we’re afraid of the old-fashioned sound of the term Evil, we should consider it in its ecumenical connotation of human cruelty and violence. Evil just happens to be a shorter term for the phenomenon: it is more to the point. The piles of corpses of innocents produced by the likes of the dictatorships in Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, and other, smaller states continue to grow. Yet we act as if we had no role to play. They have assigned us the role of the immobilized bystander—and we have accepted this role. They have grown used to and expect our feckless indifference.