"It was worse than a crime; it was a blunder."

—erroneously attributed to Talleyrand, Napoleon, and others

In viewing the amoral world in which nations pursue their self-interests, we often adopt moral attitudes as well we should: sympathy with human suffering befits our better natures. But states don’t feel remorse, and their leaders are more often ruthless than humane. That said, while crimes are appalling, blunders are unforgivable because they expose not only that immoral acts were committed but that they were unnecessary.

Even a casual observer of the run-up to Russia’s invasion a year ago would have noticed the enthusiasm of Biden’s foreign policy team at the prospect of war. Biden himself assured skeptical reporters that a Russian move into Ukraine was imminent. But rather than express alarm or rush to emergency negotiations to forestall it, Biden seemed eager for the confrontation.

Biden’s neocons, Blinken, Winken, and Nod Sullivan, and Nuland, thought that a war would achieve the twin U.S. goals of crushing Russia and preparing the ground to confront China over Taiwan. They were convinced that unleashing an arsenal of economic punishments would cripple the Russian economy. They believed that the incomparable might of the NATO alliance would lead to triumph on the battlefield. In fact, they were probably helping Ukraine prepare a strike into the Donbass early last year knowing that Russia would be drawn in.

They turned out to be wrong on all counts. They have achieved precisely the opposite of their aims. Russia’s economy is at least at resilient as ours and arguably more so. The Russian military-industrial complex not only survived the attack, but now produces much more useful war materiel than the American version that churns out expensive gewgaws but can’t keep an army supplied with ammunition.

World condemnation of the Russian invasion is less uniform than our media pretend; here, we don’t dare say Biden’s neocon cabal had any role in starting the war, but plenty of studiously neutral countries around the world think it did. Not only that, a number of middlingly important countries are slowly edging out from under U.S. hegemony and looking east for their economic and perhaps eventually political alliances. Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Brazil, and plenty of others show early signs of what used to be called “non-alignment,” which should worry the Beltway Band.

If the U.S. had practiced diplomacy—a lost art in Washington—Ukraine could have preserved its national boundaries by granting autonomy to its Russian-speaking minority as outlined in the two Minsk accords. (Those, it turns out, were just delaying exercises not meant to be taken seriously, as admitted by both Merkel and Hollande in recent weeks.) But peace has no place in the neocon hivemind.

Now, Ukraine is near collapse and will end up a rump state west of the Dnieper River, having lost its industrial heartland, large portions of its territory and infrastructure, and tens of thousands of its young men. Even after the annexation of Crimea, a deal to avoid a battlefield confrontation was within reach, but as recently as last month the neocons were discussing how, victory in hand, they would proceed to break up the Russian Federation into various mini-states.

As the scale of the debacle becomes clear, Biden’s incompetent dreamers will be temporarily set back and probably ousted from power. But they will learn nothing from this failure just as they learned nothing from their string of previous ones. They can be counted upon to get back to work cooking up the next war over Taiwanese “independence.” They’ll manage to lose that one, too, and we will find ourselves—little by little, then all at once—slipping into the status of just another country that once thought itself indispensable.

When that happens, perhaps we can get a hearing on our leaders’ long string of blunders, costly to ourselves and catastrophic for others, that led to the deaths of millions in Vietnam, Iraq, and elsewhere. If these immoral acts had produced a measurable success, they would still be despicable. Because they solved nothing, they are worse than crimes.