Losing a war upends governance

 

“War is hell,” said General Sherman, and he was winning. It’s worse than hell when you lose, especially for the folks at the top who always promise glorious triumphs when sounding the trumpet to get the war going.

Biden may be old and sick, but if he were presiding over victory in one of his wars, I’m not sure anyone could have browbeaten him into stepping aside. FDR was half dead in 1944 when he ran for his fourth term, and he carried 38 states.

When wars go badly, the disgruntled tend to keep quiet about it even in countries where dissenters aren’t shot. Loyalty to the boys (and girls) in uniform requires that citizens keep “supporting” them long past the point when doubts about the outcome are impossible to ignore.

Unhappiness about the progress of warmaking is therefore likely to be sublimated, channeled into other forms of discontent. I lived through an illustrative episode in my adolescence watching support for LBJ, a wildly popular figure in 1964, collapse.

Of course, there were others factors aside from the Vietnam quagmire. Johnson pushed through major civil rights legislation and alienated racists. Some people disliked the introduction of Medicare and Medicaid although there was a broad national consensus in their favor. He was an effective horse-trader and acknowledged to be a master politician.

But Johnson’s decision to gamble everything on war in Asia did him in. The death toll was unacceptable—of Americans, that is. (After Vietnam, the war party kept the body counts way down.)

Nixon promised to put an end to the war and then, once in office, escalated. It wasn’t for a proud militarist to preside over humiliating battlefield defeat. Eventually, he too was ousted, ostensibly over electoral shenanigans that would be scarcely noticed today.

The unpopular war had undermined two presidents. Young draftees kept dying—until compulsory service ended in 1971. Atrocity tales filtered back home, even before the notorious My Lai massacre came to light. The secret expansion into Cambodia sparked new horrified amazement.

All the while, official discourse was dominated by Kissingerian types promising that things were going just fine, that we should stick with the leadership just a little longer, and that dissent aided the enemy. Extreme militarists continued to denounce grumblers and call for even heavier bombing of North Vietnam’s cities and ports, even for nuking them. Demagogues encouraged blue-collar workers to attack antiwar protests and to hate “draft dodgers” and peaceniks.

But a substantial minority of the population viewed all this as profoundly immoral as well as stupid. Happy talk about progress on the battlefield wasn’t as convincing in 1971, ‘72, ‘73, even as Nixon racked up a historic electoral victory over George McGovern. Nixon’s support was broad but paper-thin. Less than 2 years after his historic 49-state victory, Nixon was out.

Fast forward to today: we’re doing great in Ukraine; Russia is a gas station parading as a country (Nigeria with snow); its soldiers are drunks; and its equipment is all rusty. No one can challenge mighty NATO with the greatest fighting force in history behind it. Any day now, the Ukrainians will bounce back and chase Putin/Hitler’s armies back into Russia, which will then collapse and shatter into various parts, just like in 1991.

And Joe Biden is at the top of his game and not at all senile.

The defeat of the West in its European war of choice will be far more destabilizing than the ragtag departure from 20 years of occupation in Afghanistan. No one will take the blame for the debacle because in this country we don’t do responsibility. But someone will have to preside over it, and a likely candidate is someone expendable, a last-minute placeholder pushed into the spotlight at exactly the worst moment.

In 1974 it was Leslie Lynch King, Jr., who had been shoehorned into the vice presidency just months before after an old-fashioned cash-in-shoeboxes scandal. Leslie was better known by the name he adopted after his mother got remarried—to Gerald Ford, Sr.

Poor Leslie/Gerald was left holding the bag as the helicopters sailed away from the rooftop of the Saigon embassy. Who will get that undesirable job when the U.S. decides that Ukraine is Europe’s problem and walks away from another ignominious debacle?

Welcome, President Kamala.