Make America Fight Nazis Again
My bold anti-terrorist manifesto
1. Substack Has a Pacifism Problem
There has been, recently, a worrying uptick in the number of bloggers arguing that war is bad.
Two of the most prolific and intelligent anti-imperialist agitators on this site are the Very Deep State–Ignorant
and Extremely Failed Tankie .1Shouse, for example, thinks that the war in Yemen is very bad:
Glenn also thinks that the war in Yemen is very bad:
These are both, as the kids say, L takes on the Signal group chat scandal (far outmatched by mine) but they do make some good points about US involvement in Yemen.
For instance, Glenn writes that:
Houthi capabilities were not seriously degraded by the Biden administration’s year-long precision bombing campaign, and the group only emerged stronger from a seven-year air war by Saudi Arabia — backed to the hilt by the United States — that plunged Yemen into a humanitarian crisis and killed at least 377,000 people.
Yikes! Shouse adds:
As early as 2016, the United States government was aware that it was likely implicating itself in further war crimes by backing Saudi Arabia’s indiscriminate bombing campaign.
And, of course, none of this was authorized by the US Congress, much less the UN Security Council. By and large, the war in Yemen has been inhumane, ineffective, and illegal. I agree with Shouse and Glenn on this.
Where we differ is on the question of what to do next.
Glenn implies, in the same article and elsewhere, that America should quit its habit of “throwing crappy little countries against walls,” abandon stereotypically-motivated foreign policy, and so on.
Similarly, Shouse writes that intervention is probably hopeless:
These attacks will not deter the famously un-deterable Houthis. Biden’s attacks on them never did, and the Houthis emerged even stronger after a seven-year airwar on them by the Saudis. Enforcing the Israel-Hamas ceasefire is the only way to stop the Houthi attacks (barring a Vietnam-esque war in Yemen).
But I’m skeptical that American foreign policy is primarily crappy-country-throwing-driven (or at least I believe interventionism doesn’t need to be), I don’t think the Houthis are entirely un-deterable, and I definitely don’t think we should give in to their demands (or force Israel to do so).
As I see it, the Houthis are probably among the best candidates in the world for precise and effective American military intervention. If anything, we should scale up our military effort against them—quit the non-deterring occasional bombing, and go all-out.
2. Punching Nazis as an Overwhelming Moral Priority
wrote yesterday, quite compellingly, that Nazis are bad. This is primarily because they did the Holocaust, but it’s also because they wanted to do the Holocaust. Hitler was ragingly, blatantly antisemitic, everyone knew this was the case, and so, after WW2, we decided as a society that raging, blatant antisemitism was a bad thing.As Yglesias puts it, responding to various revisionists who criticize Churchill’s aggression toward Hitler:
Nazi Germany was a kind of ultimate evil … The fanaticism and brutality of the Holocaust works as a stand-in for the overall view that the Nazi regime was a transcendent evil with which no compromise was possible.
Broad anti-Nazism “became the cornerstone of the moral order that emerged in the late-1940s.” American elites first renounced antisemitism, but soon began to renounce things like racism and segregation too. Anti-Nazi sentiment is primarily to thank for the liberal and (mostly) colorblind state we live in today.
Somewhere between Vietnam and Iraq, the American public lost confidence that its government’s foreign policy was truly motivated by anti-Nazism. We started too many silly wars about silly little things like communism and oil and 9/11. These were the crappy-little-countries wars Glenn criticized—he’s right to criticize them. They were fought for trivial reasons, temporarily lifted our self-esteem, and then the illusion of morality was shattered and we discovered that we were only ever fighting them for trivial reasons.
But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight Nazis. When the opportunity to demonstrate an explicitly anti-Nazist foreign policy presents itself, we should take it.
Here’s the Houthis’ slogan:
Or, in English:
God is the Greatest
Death to America
Death to Israel
Curse be upon the Jews
Victory to Islam
Oh my!
Not to get all Godwin’s law on you, but the Houthis are fucking Nazis! I’m skeptical that we ever have a pro tanto reason to do violence to people, but Nazis are probably as close as it gets.
And even on a fully consequentialist worldview, an extremely well-armed group explicitly threatening genocide is certainly a legitimate target for a just war.
If there’s anyone in the world we should be chucking bombs at, it’s the Houthis.
3. But They’re Not Actively Engaged in a Holocaust!
There is one substantial circumstantial difference between the Houthis and the Nazis: the Nazis were already engaged in Holocaust-y activities by the time we started bombing them, whereas the Houthis are not. They’re just being terroristic little rascals, shooting missiles at ships and Tel Aviv and so on.
I don’t think this is a good argument at all—if I gave you the option to bomb the Nazis like crazy in 1935, you should probably take me up on it, even though the Holocaust hadn’t started yet. When a powerful political force says, “I would like to kill many millions of Jews,” you should say, “Oh, that’s bad, you’re bad, I’m going to do all I can to stop you from doing that.”
If you would have reason to bomb the Nazis in 1935, I think you also have reason to bomb the Houthis in 2025.
There might be a way to rescue this objection: the Nazis, when threatening to do the Holocaust in 1935, had lots of Jews sitting in and around their country to do it to; whereas the Houthis would have a difficult time conducting a mass killing of Jews in Yemen, given that only somewhere between one and five of them are left.
This certainly reduces the probability of a Houthi-led Holocaust—but it doesn’t send it to zero.
Glenn sometimes says things like, “on a long enough time horizon the probability of nuclear war approaches 1.”
Well, similarly, if you leave the Houthis to take over Yemen completely, let them build up their arsenal with Iranian support, and wait until they’re lobbing more, faster, bigger missiles at Tel Aviv, then on a long enough time horizon, the probability of Holocaust-level Jew-killing approaches 1. It seems to me that if Glenn wants us to pursue nuclear disarmament, he should also want us to pursue Houthi disempowerment—I’m not sure we can accomplish that except through crushing sanctions and large military campaigns.
But, honestly, as much as I’m generally uncomfortable with virtue-related intuitions, I think you can ignore all that nonsense. It might be legitimate to simply say that your holding Nazi dispositions is good reason for me to punch you. Whether you’re actively beating up on Jews or not, I don’t think you should be walking around unpunched.
There are some gerrymandered consequentialist explanations for this intuition I could come up with: Nazis walking around unpunched sends a positive signal to other Nazis, unpunched Nazis are more likely to do Nazi things, unpunched Nazis are more likely to proselytize Nazism, and so on. I do think these consequentialist reasons have merit, but I can’t honestly say that I’ve thought about them in a context divorced from my base desire to punch Nazis.
Point for
, I guess.4. The Campaign in Yemen is Like the Bombing of Dresden
This is the most legitimate objection.
I’m unmoved by arguments like “Congress didn’t approve it” or “it’s a violation of international norms”—no, the American military’s job is to punch Nazis. Those are good general arguments, good general safeguards, because the American military often gets sidetracked trying to punch people who aren’t Nazis. And I don’t particularly like it when we undermine international norms, but I’m willing to make exceptions in the name of punching Nazis.
Of course, as much as it’s good to punch Nazis, it’s very bad to also punch through 25,000 innocent people in order to do so.
Similarly, as much as it’s good to bomb the Houthis, it’s very bad to kill 377,000 Yemenis in the process.
For a war to be just, you need a decent reason to start it in the first place—we’ve got one, they’re Nazis—but you also need to prosecute it justly.2 It’s not totally clear what this means, but it certainly involves things like proportionality and discriminance. You should be attacking military targets only—you can kill some civilians in the process, but only when you really absolutely need to.3
It’s especially difficult to be proportional and discriminate when you’re fighting terrorists like the Houthis. Nazi military installments were broadly separated from German civilian infrastructure—not so for the Houthis! When you’re fighting a terrorist group, just about every potential target looks like Dresden—some weapons, some infrastructure, some soldiers, and a whole lot of innocent people on top.
So… what? We give up, let the terrorist Nazis win?
No!
It’s possible, though costly and grueling, to conduct a proportional and discriminate offensive against a terrorist group enmeshed in a civilian population. How do we know? Israel’s done it!
The war in Gaza is not a genocide. It’s bloody—very bloody—but the ratio of combatant to civilian casualties is actually remarkably close to even. Obviously the war could (and ought to) be less deadly for civilians, but when you’re fighting Nazis who use human shields, you take what you can get.
An offensive against the Houthis matching the precision of the war on Hamas is probably impossible for Israel to accomplish, or even for Saudi Arabia. The Israeli military is small, and though its intelligence apparatus is impressive, it’s obviously much better at gathering information on an enclave sitting in its territory than on a huge nation a thousand miles away. The Saudis, on the other hand, don’t really have an effective military at all—it’s big and new and fancy, but its leaders are apparently hopelessly corrupt and inept—why do you think they’ve bungled the war so badly thus far?
No, we need someone else who can wage a Hamas-styled war against the Houthis. Who could possibly do it?
The good ol’ US of A! We have the technology, we have the know-how—we can punch Nazis justly. And we absolutely should.
You also have to be justice-minded about what goes on after the war—basically, aim for the Marshall Plan rather than the Afghanistan mess.
I have a sneaking suspicion that Glenn and Shouse might object to just war theory. In that case, uh, yeah, I guess no wars should ever be fought. I happen to think that the idea “some wars have, in fact, been just (e.g., WW2)” is intuitive enough that we should maintain the possibility that future wars can be just too.
Or maybe they’d simply object to what I consider just prosecution of a war? I’m not sure, so I’m gonna try to stop speculatively strawmanning…
I find your argument that over a long enough timeframe leaving the terrorists alone, would result in the probability of a second holocaust approaching one, obviously mistaken. You don’t seem to take adequate note of the difficulty of causing such large scale bloodshed to Israel from Yemen, especially once you remember that Israel has nuclear weapons. Your analogy with nuclear war doesn’t work because in fact, the probability of nuclear war over a long enough time span is also not one. We could all die of a pandemic or artificial intelligence or new technology could render nuclear weapons obsolete or future governments could do nuclear disarmament, even if we don’t do it now. Similarly, just because you leave them alone, doesn’t mean they somehow inevitably succeed at an incredibly difficult task, especially when suffering a civil war is the biggest predictor of future civil wars.
Your analogy to Nazi Germany in 1935 doesn’t work because they had an obviously realistic ability to do what they did, unlike the terrorists in Yemen. Also, you are slightly cheating there because you already know what happened. If we were only working with the information available in 1935, a very strong argument could be made for not starting World War II. After all Hitler and nazi leadership seem to be genuinely interested in forcing the Jews, to leave Germany at that point and only started to implement the final solution years later when the government had gotten a lot crazier. It would have been genuinely difficult to predict just how insane Hitler would have been in both his foreign policy and racial animous. And even so if other countries had been more willing to accept refugees from Germany a lot fewer people would have died. And most leaders don’t treat their promises with such contempt, so it was genuinely surprising that Hitler proved completely impossible to negotiate with.
I actually think the bombing of Drezden was a very bad thing because it contributed very little to the war effort, but killed a bunch of civilians so that analogy, hardly makes your point for you.
I don’t really get your punching Nazis principal, especially because it seems to be in considerable tension with your opposition to unnecessary civilian casualties. after all, I suspect a lot of the civilian population has very hateful views. Also, it leads to pretty bizarre conclusions if applied to other situations. Did Julius Caesar and his soldiers deserve to be punched for all the war crimes he did during the Gallic war? Except his soldiers didn’t actually do anything that any other Romans would not have done if they had been part of his army. And not being part of his army, didn’t have anything to do with moral objections and was nothing more than just getting lucky for completely unrelated reasons. In fact, being willing to do completely outrageous things to your out group is something loads of people in history would have been willing to do so. Your principal would imply that it was a tragedy that something like at least a fifth of the human population in history didn’t get bombed to death, which is a completely absurd conclusion.
I also just find morally implausible because I already find retributive justice unpersuasive and your principal takes it to the next level by merely making holding sufficiently evil political views punishable with the death penalty or at least a major risk of death. Also, I don’t really see why your principal only applies to nazi like beliefs. Communism has killed more people then even Hitler managed so by your standard, the Vietnam war was likely justified. For that matter, why people who cause immense amounts of suffering through their opposition to immigration or consumption of factory farmed animals not similarly deserving of being punched. All these confusing situations become much simpler if you think of punching Nazis as being for the purpose of deterrence. So, we have a social norm in favour of punching such people because it discourages other people from adopting their beliefs and if they do adopt them, discourage them from acting on them in any way or coordinating with each other to achieve their aims. But if it’s merely a consequentialist social norm, your argument doesn’t really work, especially because I don’t actually think that America sending its Army into Yemen will actually discourage such attitudes and movements in the middle east.
Finally, your claim that America should do something like the Marshall plan is just utopian. The Marshall plan happened because of several unusual circumstances like the need to contain the Soviet union and the fact that western Europe would make an important trading partner. I find the probability of America not doing a repeat of the Afghanistan mess to be pretty low, barring anything unusual like this.
I guess I don't understand why you think America should attack the Houthis but support Israel. Sure, the Houthis say "death to the Jews," and the Israeli government usually says "death to the Palestinians" under their breath–though they're increasingly saying the quiet part out loud. The Houthis have very limited capabilities and they're clearly not trying to commit genocide; they're only attacking ships in the Red Sea and they're doing this because of Israel's heinous war on Gaza. During the ceasefire, the Houthis stopped attacking ships. When Israel broke the ceasefire, they began again.
Why do you consider the Houthis pure evil but think the Israelis are just fighting for their lives? From the Houthi perspective, they're risking their own lives to stand up for beseiged innocent Palestinians. (I don't share this view.) Many people (not me) view the Israelis as "pure evil," because the Gaza War obviously would have never happened if Israel hadn't illegally occupied, settled, and repressed Gaza for half a century.
The "pure evil" narrative tends to push us toward maximally belligerent foreign policy where we view our enemies as hell-bent on committing grave crimes, and the only way to stop them is through some disastrous war.
https://theoshouse.substack.com/p/what-is-pure-evil
In reality, peoples' intentions, ideologies, and military actions are shaped by circumstance, and very few people and groups are implaccably evil. That's why all these Manichaean wars end up making things far worse than they were before hand (think Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Yemen, etc.) and making millions of people hate America.
I do university debate, and whenever someone drops a Hitler analogy in a round, it's considered bad form. There's really nothing analogous to Hitler. That's why Hitler was so uniquely evil—he was different than everyone else, and we have yet to see anyone remotely like him.