Turning War Rhetoric on Its Head From Ukraine to Gaza

Two wars are burning intensely before our eyes, each engaging the U.S. as an ally, arms supplier, and global power. The war in Gaza has drawn attention away from the war in Ukraine momentarily, but we have witnessed in both places the appalling loss of life and staggering destruction in cities large and small.

The Continuous Loop of Belligerence

These are different wars under different circumstances, but they share a similar fate: each is caught in a recurring cycle of violence, a continuous loop without a terminating condition and with the potential of escalation. Chronic fighting reflects and compounds historical hostilities constituting a “cycle of unresolved conflict that makes military force the strongest currency on both sides,” writes Israeli political scientist Dahlia Scheindlin (Time, 1/22/2024, p. 60).

Scheindlin is referring specifically to the 75 years of recurring violence in Israel-Palestine since Israel was founded in 1948. While peace is not equivalent to perfect security, she observes, neither is ongoing warfare. Cyclical belligerence, this time between Israel and Hamas (again), makes life in Israel a “nightmare now” and the nightmare in Gaza “a thousand times worse.” While not a perfect solution, the peace treaties between Israel and Egypt in 1979 and between Israel and Jordan in 1994, facilitated by Israel’s withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula in 1982, have proved enduring. In the meantime, the festering question of a Palestinian homeland remains unresolved and volatile.

The continuous loop of belligerence and suffering between Israelis and Palestinians exhibits a basic pattern of militancy in human affairs that traverses time, place, and circumstances. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proclaims there will be no Palestinian state and the war in Gaza will continue until Israel achieves complete victory. Hamas maintains an unyielding determination to destroy Israel and replace it with an Islamic Palestinian state. The antagonism is absolute and unmitigated in the pronouncements of each side; both are committed to obliterating the other. This is a prototypical language of alienation and extermination that intensifies and prolongs warfare.

The Case of Ukraine

The basic pattern extends to the war in Ukraine, with the combatants issuing parallel declarations of nonnegotiable aims, but its iteration is marked as well by significant differences between the adversaries in the Ukraine and Gaza wars. The circle of violence in Ukraine is expressed by dueling presidents. While Russia’s President Vladimir Putin maintains there will be no peace until his goals in Ukraine are achieved, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy insists that peace depends on defeating the invading Russians. Putin’s goals include, in his words, “denazification of Ukraine, its demilitarisation and neutral status,” which amounts to a call for Ukraine’s unconditional surrender. Zelenskyy’s ten-point Peace Formula requires a full Russian withdrawal from all of Ukraine, including Crimea, payment of reparations, prosecution for war crimes, securing Ukraine’s nuclear sites and grain exports, and exchanging prisoners of war.

The question becomes... how long the brutal war in Ukraine should be prolonged with the aid of Western weaponry?

My immediate purpose is neither to sort out the present embattlement of Israel-Palestine nor to suggest any key correspondences between Netanyahu and Putin or Zelenskyy, or between Hamas and Putin or Zelenskyy. My focus is on the situation in Ukraine. The relevance of the two cases is limited to highlighting a rhetorical excess—a clash of demands and requirements incompatible with peacemaking initiatives. My point is to suggest a way out of the conundrum in Ukraine by a slight, but telling, shift of perspective.

The insistence on victory by both Putin and Zelenskyy seemingly precludes a diplomatic settlement, at least until one side gains the upper hand in what is now a stalemated war. The U.S. and its NATO allies are beginning to waver, however, in their commitment to provide high levels of military aid on which Ukraine depends. The question becomes, then, how long the brutal war in Ukraine should be prolonged with the aid of Western weaponry?

A question embedded in the above question is whether the war can be concluded by negotiations resulting in less destruction and loss of life. Ongoing talks among an increasing number of countries are aimed at developing support for a workable peace plan based on Zelenskyy’s ten-point Peace Formula (which Putin rejects) once circumstances on the ground allow for negotiations between the two sides, but the stance of no-peace-without-victory, to return to Scheindlin’s point, defaults to the currency of military force.

Contesting the War Rhetoric

Breaking the cycle of violence requires contesting the rhetoric of war. The prosecution of war is unavoidably rhetorical (as is peacemaking). Propaganda is part and parcel of warfare. When the stakes are high, public persuasion is a must. We cannot tell from what is said publicly how much of it is a true expression of actual beliefs and how much is posturing. The facts might be accurate enough in any given case, but they can serve more than their intended interpretation.

Treating nonnegotiable stances as necessarily rhetorical and thus contestable could help to open an otherwise closed fist. Considering the possibility of opening some space for dialogue between belligerents is better, at least, than yielding habitually to ritualized propaganda.

Breaking the cycle of violence requires contesting the rhetoric of war.

For instance, when President Zelenskyy says Ukraine must win the war and achieve all its demands, he supports his nonnegotiable position with the claim that defeating Russian aggression in Ukraine is crucial to preventing Russian aggression against others and preventing it from undermining the international order. Speaking to the UN General Assembly, Zelenskyy stressed that “evil cannot be trusted.” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken echoes Zelenskyy’s claim that aggression must be deterred, saying “Putin wouldn’t stop with Ukraine”; allowing Putin to prevail in Ukraine “would be opening a Pandora’s box” (Time, 1/22/2024, p. 56).

Here we have the classic good-versus-evil argument, which purifies one side and debases the other in a battle of opposites. In war rhetoric, the battle between good and evil is encoded variously as civilization versus savagery, defense versus aggression, freedom versus force, and rationality versus irrationality; these contrasts are conveyed in decivilizing, dehumanizing, and demonizing images of the enemy as a plague, beast of prey, barbarian, machine, criminal, lunatic, fanatic, and fiend (Ivie, Third World Quarterly, 26.1, 2005). Putin, for instance, has been called inhuman, mad, evil, a terrorist, and a war criminal, among other epithets. Putin, too, has deployed demonizing imagery in characterizing Zelenskyy as a Nazi to vindicate the invasion of Ukraine. When entrapped by such language, one cannot see a way to negotiation. Bargaining with a demonic figure is perceived as equivalent to appeasing an insatiable appetite for power, which was the troubled Cold War logic of the hot Vietnam War, warning that one country after another would fall to communism like dominoes if aggression were not deterred and victory secured.

The narrative is always more complex than an oversimplified reduction to good versus evil.

This is the narrowed standpoint of a language formation that frames negotiation out of the picture and perpetuates a potentially escalating cycle of violence. Within this rhetorical framework, even the threat of Russia deploying nuclear weapons is dismissed as overblown.

Yet, the narrative is always more complex than an oversimplified reduction to good versus evil.

The question of where to place blame is confounded by where in the continuous loop of violence one identifies the starting point of a given war. The culpability of combatants is different, for example, if the narrative begins with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine than if it begins with NATO’s advancement eastward after the demise of the Soviet Union. George Kennan called NATO’s eastern expansion an unnecessary and fateful error that would inflame Russian militarism; historian M. E. Sarotte says it was undertaken in a manner that made the post-Cold War political order resemble its Cold War predecessor and unmade hopes for cooperation between Russia and the West; and Putin has used it to vindicate his aggression against Ukraine.

Violence is self-perpetuating. Dueling narratives of culpability remain vexed. Disrupting the cycle requires a different outlook than the totalizing mindset of eradicating an evil enemy.

A Twist of Perspective

Even in the heat of battle—a battle that, at this writing, has reached an impasse of sorts—we can question, from the standpoint of U.S. foreign policy, the rhetorical posture that says Russian aggression in Ukraine must be vanquished to prevent more aggression elsewhere. Is this war a matter of all or nothing, of strict dualisms, of being hard rather than soft, strong rather than weak, heroic rather than cowardly? Even given the asymmetry between Zelenskyy’s aim to vanquish Putin’s aggression and Putin’s goal of vanquishing Ukraine, the question remains: Where might we rediscover the ambiguities and complexities of human conflict displaced by absolute oppositions?

The question of where to place blame is confounded by where in the continuous loop of violence one identifies the starting point of a given war.

Perhaps answers can be found within the war rhetoric itself viewed from a different angle, that is, by a slight twist of perspective. What if the question of deterring aggression shifts to asking whether the price Russia already has paid is a deterrent to further aggression? Indeed, we are told the cost of the war for Russia has been enormous. Can’t reports such as these be turned to a different purpose than justifying more war?

U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin says the Russian military has been badly weakened, and Lieutenant General Scott Berrier, head of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, estimates it will take up to a decade to rebuild that strength. Moreover, Russia’s reputation as a formidable military power has been tarnished, its military has suffered a massive loss of life, and its economy has been severely damaged by war expenditures and economic sanctions. Some analysts, according to a Rand Corporation report, say Russia’s decline is irreversible and may lead eventually to the breakup of the Russian Federation. More immediately, Russia’s influence and leverage over neighboring states is degraded, and Finland and Sweden, formerly neutral states bordering or in close proximity to Russia, have declared for NATO membership.

Prolonging the war might only exacerbate Russia’s plight and lead to desperate measures that could widen the war and escalate to the use of nuclear weapons. What would the U.S. or other great powers do if driven into such a corner? Capitulate, escalate, or negotiate?

Abandoning the paradoxical stance of no-negotiation-without-victory is warranted, even for Ukraine, though it was not the aggressor, (1) by the premise that the cost of this war to the aggressor is substantial enough to deter further aggression; and (2) by the prospect of more war leading to catastrophic consequences for all the parties engaged and beyond.

Widening the Crack in War Rhetoric

This turning of war propaganda on its head is but one crack in the façade of a ritualized rhetoric, a ritual that supports a persistent loop of escalating violence and renders negotiation improbable and peacebuilding unrealistic. That one crack might be widened, however, and more fissures located if we put our minds to the task.

Both the difficulty and possibility of breaking through the rhetorical barrier to peacemaking is amply illustrated by Keith Gessen in a New Yorkerarticle entitled “The Case for Negotiating with Russia.” The story features the efforts of Samuel Charap, who works for the Rand Corporation to advise the U.S. military. He specializes in U.S.-Russia relations and is a leading voice calling for negotiations to resolve the Ukraine war. He has encountered strong pushback, including accusations of being Putin’s mouthpiece and a traitor, but he persists, believing that neither side has the ability “to knock the other out of the fight entirely,” a view supported by the likes of General Mark Milley, former Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Violence is self-perpetuating. Dueling narratives of culpability remain vexed. Disrupting the cycle requires a different outlook than the totalizing mindset of eradicating an evil enemy.

How do you negotiate with Putin, whom U.S. war proponents believe must be decisively defeated to prevent him from continuing to attack Ukraine and moving on to threaten Moldova, the Baltics, and Poland in an unceasing, Hitler-like campaign of expansion? Whatever ambition Putin may or may not harbor, Charap reasons, his setbacks in Ukraine, where he has suffered a strategic defeat and made only marginal gains, demonstrate that he lacks the clout to pull it off.

The strategic reason for negotiating an end to the fighting is emotionally fraught given the sacrifices the Ukrainian people have made to hold off Russia’s brutal aggression. Still, Ukraine will have to make concessions eventually to terminate the war, as Charap points out. The U.S. should use its influence to help the Ukrainians come to terms with this reality now, at the beginning of 2024, after witnessing the failure of the counter-offensive to give Ukraine an upper hand on the battlefield. The U.S. diplomatic strategy would be to initiate searching conversations with Ukraine and NATO allies in a pre-negotiation phase that includes persuading Putin to appoint a negotiator. Laying this groundwork will require the U.S. to devote resources inside the administration to work out the practicalities of the initiative, knowing that it is important to try even though it may not succeed.

This peek Gessen has given us into an effort behind the scenes suggests that the no-peace-without-victory public posture is subject to reevaluation, that the very words used in public to report Russian setbacks can be turned, with a shift of perspective, into a reason to think that negotiating an end to the fighting would not strengthen Putin’s imperial ambitions. This is a crack in ritualized war rhetoric that must be widened to arrest eventually the recurring cycle of violence.