“Give war a chance,” the maverick strategist Edward Luttwak implored at the tail end of the Clinton administration. The quest for durable peace, he thought, was habitually interrupted by those liberal do-gooders who refused to let wars “burn themselves out.”

Spool forward some 25 years and war is being given a whole lot of chances, from Israel’s onslaught on Gaza and Lebanon to weaponized famine in Sudan to the long, grinding war in Ukraine. Amid this devastation, Western leaders have in the past years showed a unified front, largely supporting Ukraine and Israel and ignoring Sudan. But a new dynamic has underpinned this informal coalition: the growing penchant for war — and the tolerance of its costs — among the Western liberal-left establishment once lampooned by Mr. Luttwak.

When did the left become so comfortable with war? We need to ask this question with some urgency — not least because Donald Trump repeatedly played on fears of global war in his election campaign before promising to “stop wars” in his victory speech. The standard explanation is that terrorists and an axis of autocracies are threatening the world order, and Western leaders — whatever their political affiliation — must act. Certainly, the world looks more dangerous than it has for a long time. But this does not fully explain the way that the Biden administration has so single-mindedly been arming Ukraine and Israel while also letting allies in the Persian Gulf wage a devastating proxy war in Sudan. Nor does it quite explain the enthusiasm for the remilitarization of Europe coming from liberal commentators, Nordic social democrats and German greens alike, who will now be looking worriedly across the Atlantic.

Two other explanations stand out. First, history has shown that governments and bureaucracies tend to become addicted to a war footing, with failure sucking them in further — think of America’s war on terror, or Vietnam. War encourages a perverse cycle of escalation in which huge financial and political gains accrue for governments and the military-industrial complex while the costs tend to be borne by weaker parties — before they start to come home in some shape or form.

We’ve called this bipartisan pattern “wreckonomics” and have found it especially present in wars or conflicts with costs that Western politicians can largely outsource — from fighting terrorism, drugs and smugglers to quasi-colonial interventions during the Cold War. Traditionally, the political right has been the dominant actor in these forays, including Richard Nixon’s war on drugs and George W. Bush’s war on terror. That last effort proved a savior for the military-industrial complex while inflicting relatively limited American fatalities as instability, terrorism attacks and mass displacement accumulated elsewhere. Today, the war in Ukraine is once again offering a supercycle of vastly increased military spending, this time without the risk of any Western combat deaths.

There’s an important difference between invading Iraq and Afghanistan, on the one hand, and defending Ukraine against Russian invasion on the other. Yet where war involves a skewed distribution of costs and gains, it tends to incentivize further escalation. Notably, Western leaders, such as Britain’s Keir Starmer, France’s Emmanuel Macron and NATO’s former head Jens Stoltenberg, have suggested that the Ukraine war is winnable, without having a clear road map beyond sending more weapons — to the point of potentially allowing long-range Storm Shadow missiles to be fired into Russia itself.

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber? Log in.

Want all of The Times? Subscribe.acegame888

• acegame888
• Did
• Liberals
• Become
• When