On matters of war and peace, don't pay too much heed to the ideological commentariat

Since October 7, 2023, the Israeli war in Gaza and the subsequent escalations, blowbacks, and contagions has fueled the timeless industry of the ideological commentariat. By this, I refer to those ideologues who market themselves to those who think like them. They seek out an audience that wants a mirror of their own beliefs and presuppositions, and they happily offer this for sale. I’m most familiar with those on the political left, but there are comparable figures on the right, center-right, center, and center-left (however you demarcate these terms, this will be true). There are also more niche, narrow markets too. Environmentalists, paleoconservatives, neoconservatives, neoliberals, Trotskyists, Stalinists, Islamists, Zionists, Nazis; all these groups have their ideological commentariat. Usually, the ideological commentariat is a reverse Cassandra - never quite right, always believed (at least by their niche audience).

Consider the war coverage.

Let’s say there are some left or quasi-left anti-imperialist figures; let’s call them Steve Gritter, a former weapons inspector on the worst watchlist but who took a principled stance once a couple of decades ago, and leverages this for his current media career … Prichard Nedwurst, a Syrian-British anti-imperialist never seen in public without his Keffiyeh … Matt Bloomenbury, the child of a US State Department official who took a hard left turn and now runs his own campist news network. Let’s say, hypothetically speaking, that all these totally-made-up people want the US and Israel to lose, and they know their audience wants this too. Their coverage of the conflict is heavily biased by their “knowledge” that the US and Israel are about to suffer catastrophic defeat, and they fit all the evidence to suit that narrative.

Yet they’re not alone. If that’s not your cup of tea, and you’re a leftist who really likes the American revolution, there’s a crowd for you too; let’s call them Stan Stallone, an aged Trotskyist professor who founded an Echidna-themed leftist group decades ago and finds anti-imperialism cringe … Daniel Liam, a Portland-based publisher and sometimes-sci-fi writer who started a miniscule publishing house after getting sacked from his last gig … Leonardo Spence, an old Marxist historian and colleague of Stan Stallone. They can’t stand the anti-imperialist commitment to uncritically defending any regime attacked by the US, and deal with this by just being the inverse. They present themselves as “contrarians” who tell you the hard truths that the rest of the left doesn’t want to repeat. Yet they end up functionally becoming “Trump whisperers” who really “know” the rational kernel of Donald Trump’s 5d chess, and they sell us this “wisdom”. They might not like Trump and the capitalist oligarchy he represents, but they dislike the enemies of the US even more.

They’re not alone. There’s a rather different, more disparate group far more interested in farming drama for content; let’s call them “The Rearguard”, a youtube channel devoted to clickbait drama between equally-online leftists … a metaphorical bomb-throwing Australian expat who goes by “Mediocre Gordita” and hasn’t seen a social media spat not worth fighting … Natasha Windsor, a washed up trans content creator who has somehow become a lightning rod for online controversy. They are not ideologically united, in fact they usually hate each other, but they have another issue. Rather, they live off of an audience of online leftists whose politics has become reduced to interpersonal drama. They are uninterested in analyzing the actual events, and much more interested in targeting each other. There’s a touch of narcissism in their analysis, as they are most interested in being in the right for its own sake.

All these groups suffer from a similar problem, despite their differences. This problem is that their analysis of events is overly dominated by their normative concerns. That is to say, they have certain beliefs about what is right and wrong, and they project these beliefs onto their analysis of events. The good guys always win in the end, after all. Their analysis becomes, in effect, more akin to the ancient poet telling an epic poem by a campfire. Rama will defeat Ravanna, Odysseus will return home, and Aeneas will make it to Italy, and every event in the story only serves to set up this final triumph. Events become mere moments in the epic they’re telling.

Their normative bias means they get things wrong. A lot. They ignore facts that cannot fit their normative bias, they misrepresent facts that could only fit their normative bias with a great deal of mental gymnastics, and they almost always oversimplify and strawman the views opposed to their own. They rarely if ever acknowledge this after the fact and just move on to the new event. Their audience forgets they’ve gotten it wrong, and attacks anyone in the comments who points out their bad takes. Thus, they never own up to their errors, and their audience doesn’t end up caring.

For instance, among those pro-US leftists, their desire for Iran to lose and for their theocracy to be replaced with a Western-style liberal government led them to overlook the obvious fact that countries that are victim of sustained bombing campaigns tend to rally around the flag, even if they don’t much like the government. Then, when the government didn’t fall, they just moved on.

None of this is to say people with clear ideological commitments cannot be brilliant commentators. For example, Eric Draitser is an anti-imperialist Marxist who is careful and thoughtful about what he says, admits past errors, and brings a significant body of research to the table. I don’t follow him because he gets everything right, but because he brings good research to the table. He might have an “ideology”, but he is aware of the important difference between norm and fact.

Nor is it to say that more careful and scholarly people do not fall into this trap. Steve Mearsheimer, a deeply knowledgeable professor and scholar of the international realist school, has done great work. However, he is certain that Russia will defeat Ukraine due to its obvious advantages. This certainty has flavored all his analysis, to the point that he reliably overestimates Russian might and underestimates Ukrainian resilience. I don’t think his bias is motivated by Russophilia so much as his faith in his interpretation of geopolitical realism. Every fact is interpreted to justify his past warnings against NATO enlargement in Eastern Europe. No doubt, many “experts” have done the reverse, interpreting every Ukrainian victory and Russian defeat as proof that victory is right around the corner for Kiev. The apparent reality is that neither side is doing a great job of winning and just surviving a perpetual trench war until the other country collapses. If either of these groups was right, then this war would not be dragging on four years later with little significant change except a lot of dead bodies, a bunch of devastated infrastructure, and an economic boom in Pyongyang.

Lastly, the solution is not to just get off Youtube and read the New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post, and Fox News. As I mentioned earlier, this type of normatively-laden analysis exists across the spectrum, and the mainstream outlets are perhaps even more guilty of this than the anti-imperialists, the anti-anti-imperialists, and even the drama slop folks.

On the Iran war, the best analysis I’ve come across on a tactical level is from Malcom Nance, a fellow whose ideological commitments are definitely not my own. He is, as far as I can tell, a patriotic Obama liberal with a love of a more professional past version of the US military. Yet he was a naval officer and CIA figure who fought in the 1980s Tanker War with Iran. He understands logistics, and more importantly he understands the capacities and limits of the IRGC small boat fleet. When Trump was stating that the US had defeated the Iranian navy, the anti-anti-imperial left was uncritically lapping this up. Yet Nance was stating that no, the real power of the IRGC fleet was its small boats which could control the Strait of Hormuz, that the US would be unable to destroy these, and that Iran also had deeply entrenched anti-ship missiles to ward off the USN. Yet unlike the anti-imperialist left he also wasn’t exaggerating Iran’s capabilities to suggest the total defeat of Israel and the US were just around the corner.

Consider, why did the US Navy not invade Kharg Island or Qeshm Island? Nance’s version of events can explain this easily. The experts in the Pentagon know full well that the US would suffer hundreds if not thousands of casualties trying to take and hold this real estate, whatever bluster was coming out of Trump. Sunken ships would also sink the GOP in the midterms (even more than they’re already sinking), and the IRGC killing that many Americans would also kill off Trump’s popularity for good. The generals and admirals (even Trump’s appointed toadies and sycophants, except probably Hegseth) obviously pushed back when Trump insisted they do this, which is why there were assets near the Gulf to do it, but it was never tried.

The anti-anti-imperialists, on the other hand, cannot explain this because they take the incompetence and powerlessness of America’s strategic rivals to be axiomatic. They are definitionally less competent, less powerful, and less capable than the bourgeois republic that waves the Red, White, and Blue, so if the US didn’t take Kharg it isn’t about the risks but some strategic move on the part of Trump and his Pentagon. Moreover, they are uninterested in understanding actual military strategy or considering the importance of logistics. All this is disregarded to sell the narrative of US victory and the defeat of Islamic theocracy.

Meanwhile, the anti-imperialists want to tell us that the Iranians are about to defeat the US for good and drive Yankee Imperialism out of the Islamic world. All the strengths Nance rightly identifies get exaggerated into nearly unlimited Iranian might. The US didn’t decide against taking Kharg because it would be costly, but because Iran will down dozens of f-35s and sink dozens of ships. Iran is undefeatable, the US is a paper tiger, and after just one more battle we will see the US empire in its death throes.

The drama baiters, on the other hand, want us to forget all this. The real struggle is happening online, and the best way to honor the schoolgirls murdered by the US Navy in Iran is to watch and share drama slop. What really matters is projecting our moral disgust at Israeli genocide of Gazans and US war crimes in Iran onto some youtube personality with 1,000 subscribers. Like the other two groups, their analysis is entirely normative. This is, to a point, more appropriate than the other two groups, as applying norms to individuals to determine why they’re good or bad is what norms are for. Yet their audience appeal is not so different, as it has to do more with validating audience biases than really grasping events.

That’s not to say, don’t hear these voices out. Sometimes they get things right, and getting a wide variety of views is always useful. It’s also deeply distasteful when the state tries to silence them. We could imagine, for instance, if the aforementioned Prichard Nedwurst gets charged by the UK state under “anti-terrorism” laws. This would be a vile violation of his free speech simply for opposing Western foreign policy. Therefore, we should not dismiss these voices or celebrate their silencing by platforms and governments. Rather, we should take what they have to say with a spoonful of salt, listen critically, and don’t let them monopolize your thinking.