War never conforms to our desire for the good guys to defeat the bad guys, and Ukraine won’t be any different
War never conforms to our desire for the good guys to defeat the bad guys Written by: One thing anyone who studies foreign policy for a living knows is that fairytale endings never happen in war. I suspect Ukraine will follow this sad trend. Why should we expect anything different? War never conforms to humanity’s desire for the good guys to defeat the bad guys. Indeed, great power politics grounded in realpolitik but shaped by mankind’s sense of morality is a mixture that yields tragic results. The demand for closure, clean endings to conflicts where the antagonists get punished, is rarely fulfilled. Wars only have happy endings in the movies. In fact, some wars never seem… One thing anyone who studies foreign policy for a living knows is that fairytale endings never happen in war. I suspect Ukraine will follow this sad trend. Why should we expect anything different? War never conforms to humanity’s desire for the good guys to defeat the bad guys. Indeed, great power politics grounded in realpolitik but shaped by mankind’s sense of morality is a mixture that yields tragic results. The demand for closure, clean endings to conflicts where the antagonists get punished, is rarely fulfilled. Wars only have happy endings in the movies. In fact, some wars never seem to end, as the combatants are left unfulfilled — or just haven’t been weakened enough. That’s why so many historians see World Wars One and Two as really the same war, just with smaller conflicts in between that broke up the course of tragic events. Such a reading of history is surely a sign of what is to come in Ukraine. The likely culmination of thousands of people on both sides dead and wounded, dreams crushed, hopes dashes, and lives shattered, will be an imperfect peace that both sides will surely find fault with.
