The Atlantic recently published this piece, which I highly recommend. The article compares the effectiveness of our aid to Ukraine to the effectiveness of our aid to Afghanistan. The thesis is that our aid to Ukraine effort has been dramatically more successful because the Ukrainians are doing all the fighting themselves. We’re doing the thing we’re best at, which is supplying logistics, training, and funding. But we’re not trying to do the fighting for them.
That brings me to today’s concept: the blood price of freedom.
For a country which was not free to become free, power has to shift from whoever is controlling it to the people broadly. As we discussed in a previous post, when power is concentrated in someone’s hands, the chances that they will voluntarily give it up are virtually zero. The people will have to take that power back, and the person holding it will resist, almost certainly violently. The consequence is that many, many people will certainly suffer, and quite a few will probably die. But that is the price of freedom. It’s a price measured in blood, and not until a large enough fraction of a country’s population is willing to pay that blood price will that country ever become free.
That’s what we’re seeing in Ukraine right now: a country where essentially the entire population has decided that it is, in fact, willing to pay the blood price of freedom. And it is a very steep price indeed, fighting an army the size of Vladimir Putin’s. But I say to you: the Ukrainians will never be more American than they are right now, in this moment, suffering and dying in the dead of winter as they fight the invading army of an ostensibly much more powerful nation, as George Washington and his army did almost 250 years ago. We paid our blood price then: we lost 25,000 lives to battlefield deaths or related disease and had another 25,000 seriously wounded or permanently disabled. America’s population was only 2.5 million then, so that’s 1% of our population dead, and another 1% wounded or disabled. Relative to today’s population, that’s the equivalent of 6.6 million Americans dead or seriously injured. Put another way, it’s as if the entire populations of Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Delaware, Rhode Island, and Montana were killed or wounded so that the rest of us could be free.
So America paid its blood price. And now Ukraine is paying theirs. That’s why, as I’ve said before, we as conservatives should not hesitate to give our full-throated support to the Ukrainians. We understand the gravity of so many Ukrainians’ decision to accept death as the price for their brothers and sisters to live free. We should not allow the politics of the moment here in the United States to obscure this simple idea.
In the end, this insight gets to the reason that the Afghanistan intervention failed: too few Afghans were willing to pay the blood price. We did the fighting, and we paid Afghans to join their military and get trained. But you cannot pay another country’s blood price for it; that’s why, despite having the finest military this planet has ever seen, America could not simply give the Afghans freedom. Once they were on their own, faced with the guns of the Taliban, very few were willing to pay the blood price of freedom. So Afghanistan is once again not free.
And it will never be free, until the people there have suffered enough under the Taliban to rise up and collectively pay the blood price. The current population of Afghanistan is around 41 million people, so if the 2% America paid for its own freedom is a good benchmark, Afghans will have to be willing to spend over 800,000 of their own lives to buy their freedom from the Taliban. There will be no meaningful change in Afghanistan until that happens. When it finally does happen, then and only then should we show up, the rest of the developed world in tow, with what we do best: logistics, training, and the world’s biggest checkbook, to help the Afghans build a real country.
In the meantime, we have a lot of change we need to bring to our own country. Power is getting increasingly concentrated here; that’s the root cause of why our government and our economy no longer seem to care about or benefit everyday people. But let me be crystal clear: America has already paid its blood price. No one needs to die now to bring real change here in America. Yet it’s also true that to bring real change, we *will* eventually have to fight. There’s no way around that. But *how* we fight matters. I hope to fight for regular people, to make their lives better, and I hope that one day you will join me in that fight. But understand that if you do join me, we fight one way and one way only, and that is marching arm in arm with our fellow Americans, with no weapons save the justness of our cause, and the righteousness in our hearts. *That* is how we will fight. That is the way.
Thanks for the insight. Indeed, freedom is not free.
Great piece Gus!