War and economics don't get along

Putin's invasion of Ukraine will cost the West, but it will cost Russia more.

Randolph Bourne.

“War is the health of the state,” Randolph Bourne famously wrote during World War One in an essay he never completed because the Spanish flu pandemic—whose global reach was attributable largely to troop movements—killed him first. Bourne was never in especially good health himself. His troubles began at birth when a clumsy doctor deformed his face with forceps, and continued at age four when he contracted spinal tuberculosis that left him hunchbacked. Bourne thought about health almost as much as he thought about war. “I do not like the idea of helplessly suffering one's misfortunes, of passively bearing one's lot,” he wrote in an essay published anonymously in the Atlantic Monthly in 1911. “The Stoics depress me.” Bourne thought a lot, too, about the sort of idiot nationalism that animates Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (and which bestirs Donald Trump to endorse it) in a pro-immigration essay that the Atlantic published in 1916. This was the essay in which Bourne popularized Josiah Royce’s phrase, “beloved community,” which Martin Luther King half a century later adapted for the civil rights movement.

(The evidence suggests King was drawing not on Bourne but on Royce; lots of others used the phrase, too, apparently, including the Howard University theologian Howard Thurman, who exercised strong influence over King’s thinking and got the phrase from Royce. Jimmy Carter later spoke in his 1978 State of the Union Address of beloved community, with less success. It makes me a little sad that hardly anybody invokes the phrase today. But I digress.)

Here’s what Bourne had to say about war, health, and the state:

Wartime brings the ideal of the State out into very clear relief, and reveals attitudes and tendencies that were hidden. In times of peace the sense of the State flags in a republic that is not militarized. For war is essentially the health of the State. The ideal of the State is that within its territory its power and influence should be universal. As the Church is the medium for the spiritual salvation of man, so the State is thought of as the medium for his political salvation…. War sends the current of purpose and activity flowing down to the lowest level of the herd, and to its most remote branches. All the activities of society are linked together as fast as possible to this central purpose of making a military offensive or a military defense, and the State becomes what in peacetimes it has vainly struggled to become — the inexorable arbiter and determinant of men’s business and attitudes and opinions.

What Bourne doesn’t discuss here is what a very bad economic idea war is. War may be the health of the state, but it’s the death of the economy. Vladimir Putin’s military adventure is going to dent prosperity in the United States, but it’s going to seriously gum up the Russian economy, which is surprisingly tiny for a country so big. As Harvard’s Jason Furman put it to the New York Times, “Russia is incredibly unimportant in the global economy except for oil and gas. It’s basically a big gas station.”

My thoughts on all this are in my latest New Republic essay. You can read it here.