Douglas Murray, the neoconservative writer, has launched an attack on the American right for its withdrawal of support from Ukraine. He accuses his targets of triviality, and of becoming bored with the war in Ukraine. He implies that they lack the moral disapproval of the Russian despotism that anyone who knows anything about it must feel. I suspect he is right about some Trump supporters. He may even be right about Trump himself. I have no way of knowing the president’s heart. But he is wrong about conservatives and war. And he is utterly wrong about me and a lot of other patriotic, Christian conservatives who have never desired war in Ukraine and do not regard it as idealistic, principled, or even necessary. We have grown used to being sneered at as Kremlin agents or traitors, and such jibes no longer worry us. But we could do with some sign that people such as Murray have for once listened to our counter-arguments. Telling us that the American (or British) public doesn’t like dictators is not really the devastating point he seems to think it is. The United States and Britain have often had perfectly good relations with all kinds of despots, and Washington currently props up (for example) the military junta in Egypt that bloodily overthrew that country’s democratically elected government in 2013. This pretense of idealism is just stuff, which no person of intelligence can take seriously.
“The United States and Britain have often had perfectly good relations with all kinds of despots.”
Conservatives who have any sense do not like war, which destroys beauty, love, tradition, family, and religion wherever it rages. It invariably extends the power of the state to interfere in the private lives of previously free people. Ever since the great European emotional spasm of 1914, this process has been repeating itself and accelerating. The last gasp of Christian Europe was the Christmas Truce of that year between German and British soldiers on the Western Front, when both recognized for a few blessed hours that they had been brought up and educated for a higher purpose than blowing each other to pieces in a sea of mud. But that did not last long. Ever since, the only available idealists have been materialists and worldly utopians, often all too willing to launch a missile or drop a bomb on a crowded city in the name of some good cause or other.