Warped Thinking and War

Watching cable news and talk shows, reading newspapers, and listening to the president, it seems clear that war fever has hijacked our attention. No one wants war, but everyone seems consumed with discussing it - and missiles, military options, and the escalating threats from leaders on both sides.

Here are the questions I hear most often:

How dangerous is the nuclear threat from North Korea? How soon and how far could their missiles reach? What military options does the U.S. have to respond?

What would war look like on the Korean peninsula?

Is the president bluffing or serious? Is his administration united or divided?

Here are some of the questions I don't hear:

What might constitute a negotiated resolution, and how might we achieve it? What assurances do both sides need, and how could they be guaranteed by both bilateral and multilateral agreements?

How does a democracy, the United States, decide to go to war - and who gets to decide?

What Is the president required to do under the War Powers Act?

What does the Constitutional requirement that Congress has the power to "declare war" mean?

May the president, under the Constitution or the War Powers Act, launch a pre-emptive strike?

What would war cost the United States in terms of lives and dollars?

What would be the strategic consequences of war on our foreign affairs, domestic affairs and economy, and the long-term prospects of our nation?

If we go to war, how widespread might it become, how would it end, and what would victory look like?

How would a nation heavily in debt and averse to raising taxes pay for another war?

Indeed, loud as the press, pundits and politicians are on the first set of questions, they are silent on the second set. For the media, this signals an irresponsible breach of their trust to inform with facts and hold the nation's leaders accountable for their words and actions. The media obsession with covering conflict may help them gain audience attention (the road to advertising revenue), but it ill serves the role they need to play in republican government. For Congress, this refusal to engage in serious thinking and debate demonstrates an abdication of their constitutional responsibility. For both, they have sacrificed the demands of reason to the seductive hype of emotion.

Since 2001, the United States has gone to war against another nation at least four times. Two of those - Afghanistan and Iraq - have cost thousands of American lives and hundreds of billions of dollars. Two others - Libya and the cruise missile attack on Syria - were much shorter in duration. What we have gained from these ventures is open to some debate, but it seems reasonable to conclude that neither victory nor peace have been achieved in any of them. In that sense, whatever tactical success they achieved, they are all strategic failures.

Yet here we are, on the verge of war again. We seem as unreflective, as limited in our ability to think, as before. As some psychologists have put it, the elephant (emotion) seems uncontrolled by its rider (reason). It is as if we are driving at full speed in dangerous traffic without ever looking further than the car in front of us or in the rear-view mirror. With the advantage of neither foresight nor hindsight, we plunge on with the naive belief that, as the United States, we can do anything.

The president's strategy may be to talk tough, trusting that what works in a business negotiation will work in global affairs, not realizing that you can walk away from a bad deal but not a busted world. Congress's strategy may be to sit on the sidelines so that it can distance itself from the decisions the president makes. The media's strategy may be to give the public what it thinks we want rather than the facts and questions we need. But that does not excuse us, as citizens, from demanding the careful thinking that any decision involving war and peace requires.