These are the three social evils Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. warned would destroy America from within: Militarism, materialism, and racism. Decades later, they help explain the divisions in our country that led to the January 6 attack by protesters on the U.S. Capitol. Of the three, however, the role our recent wars have played in exacerbating these conditions is often the most overlooked.
Video produced by Khody Akhavi.
The rise of the populist right in European elections continues as Herbert Kickl, the controversial leader of the populist-nationalist Freedom Party (FPÖ) appears on course to become Austria’s new chancellor after attempts to form a centrist coalition collapsed.
In a historic first for postwar Austria, the Freedom Party won the elections in September with 29%, followed closely by the center-right People’s Party (ÖVP). Chancellor Karl Nehammer resigned after having failed, after prolonged talks, to form a coalition with the social democrats and liberals. On January 6, President Van der Bellen asked Kickl to attempt to form a government. Talks immediately began with the interim leader of the People’s Party.
The Freedom Party campaigned on opposition to supporting Ukraine. The People’s Party and other major parties favor continued humanitarian and diplomatic support; neutral Austria has not supplied weapons but has backed EU sanctions against Russia. Because ÖVP and FPÖ agree on immigration and other domestic policy issues, they are considered likely to be able to form a governing coalition, having between them a comfortable majority of seats. However, it is unclear whether FPÖ’s distinctive positions on foreign and security policy will be tempered by partnership with ÖVP.
The novel prospect of a government headed by FPÖ has elicited alarm and anxiety among many Austrians, although the ÖVP and FPÖ have previously governed together, with FPÖ as the more junior partner. In this sense, Austria has long since abandoned the ‘firewall’ strategy followed by Germany, which forbids any coalition with the populist right. Kickl was Interior Minister under ÖVP Chancellor Sebastian Kurz until a major scandal in 2019 forced the Freedom Party out of power. Kickl has led the party’s recovery from near collapse in public support in the aftermath of the scandal.
The uneasy partnership of the two parties began in the early 2000s when under the controversial leadership of Jörg Haider. Haider had moved the Freedom Party sharply to the right, and the EU imposed diplomatic sanctions on Austria to protest his party’s involvement in government. Once a speechwriter for Haider, Kickl follows in Haider’s footsteps with passionate and polarizing positions on immigration.
Germany is approaching elections on February 23 with a solid “firewall” against coalition with the populist right Alternative for Germany (AfD). Because of the obvious parallels, the Austrian case is closely followed in Germany. The Greens’ leader Robert Habeck said Austria’s example showed that centrist parties needed to learn to stick together, while the AfD’s leader Alice Weidel called for the CDU/CSU to join AfD to form a “bourgeois” majority.
As in Germany, Austria’s center-right supports Ukraine and sanctioning Russia, while the populist right in both countries firmly opposes continuing on that policy course. Both center-right and center-left in both countries call for sharp curbs on immigration, reflecting, to some extent, anxieties among the public about security. Kickl’s attacks on the mainstream press and media, his call for a ‘Fortress’ Austria to keep out migrants, and his aspiration to serve as ‘Volkskanzler’ (people’s chancellor) evoke comparisons to the AfD’s Bjorn Höcke, the party’s leader in the state of Thuringia.
AfD now polls at about 20%, second to the center-right CDU/CSU at about 30% but ahead of the social democrat SPD (16%) and the Greens (13%). If the trend of growing support for AfD continues, it will become more and more difficult to form stable governing majorities that exclude them. From the standpoint of the CDU/CSU, the cooperation in governing coalitions of the center-right ÖVP and FPÖ may serve as a cautionary tale because FPÖ has, at last, surpassed the ÖVP in popular support and is, therefore, less amenable to moderating its more controversial positions. On the other hand, some conservative members of the German center-right might eventually be tempted to form a coalition with AfD rather than being obliged to adopt the compromises needed to form a “grand coalition” with the center-left Social Democrats. Coalition with CDU/CSU is clearly the AfD’s principal avenue to power.
Kickl is close to Hungary’s President Viktor Orban and calls him a role model. If Kickl becomes Chancellor, he is likely to join Orban in opposing the periodic renewal of EU sanctions on Russia. Kickl’s Freedom Party and Orban’s Fidesz in June founded the “Patriots for Europe” action in the European Parliament, where they press for enhancing the power of member states and curbing the power of the Commission.
Although Austria is not a heavyweight in Europe, the addition of one more EU member to the small camp of open opponents of continuing support for Ukraine will have consequences, especially as negotiations to end the war may soon begin. However, it is possible that ÖVP will be able to win concessions from Kickl on the Ukraine issue in return for joining the governing coalition.
Following a reported push from the Biden administration in late 2024, Mike Walz - President-elect Donald Trump’s NSA pick - is now advocating publicly that Ukraine lower its draft age to 18, “Their draft age right now is 26 years old, not 18 ... They could generate hundreds of thousands of new soldiers," he told ABC This Week on Sunday.
Ukraine needs to "be all in for democracy," said Walz. However, any push to lower the draft age is unpopular in Ukraine. Al Jazeera interviewed Ukrainians to gauge the popularity of the war, and raised the question of lowering the draft age, which had been suggested by Biden officials in December. A 20-year-old service member named Vladislav said in an interview that lowering the draft age would be a “bad idea.”
“I would choose to be shot to death right here, in Kyiv instead of going to the frontline,” said a 17-year-old Ukrainian named Serhiy in these interviews. Serhiy’s mother shared her son’s opinion, as young people “aren’t developed mentally, they will jump on (enemy) weapons without thinking, without understanding.” Continuing with, “they don’t yet have a feeling of self-preservation, they are just flying into battle. This will be (the) destruction of the Ukrainian people.”
This idea that more young Ukrainians should be fighting may conflict with Trump’s stated goals of ending the war immediately and through negotiations. Or it might be a way to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into talks, knowing that he does not have much manpower left to give, even with the lowered draft age.
Despite lowering the draft age from 27 to 25 in 2024, Kyiv had to resort to using patrols to enforce the unpopular measure. Desertion has been a consistent issue in the Ukrainian military, with Kyiv charging at least 100,000 under desertion laws since 2022. Desertions have continued as recently as last week, with dozens of Ukrainian soldiers under training in France being accused of abandoning their posts.
Studies show that Ukraine is facing a severe population crisis if changes aren’t made. The U.N. Population Fund estimated that 10 million, or a quarter of the Ukrainian population, have been lost to death or displacement since 2014, and a separate study claimed that a third of Ukraine’s working population would be lost by 2040. Lowering the compulsive service age to 18 would certainly exacerbate demographic and population crises, especially as Russia seemingly has seen regular successes on the battlefield.
The war in general, is no longer popular with the Ukrainian people either. A recent Gallup Poll found that, for the first time, a majority of Ukrainians preferred a negotiated settlement to continued fighting. Since over 50% of Ukrainians are opposed to this war, it would seem that the “democratic” option would include peace talks as opposed to lowering the draft age, as supported by Walz.
The American Enterprise Institute has officially entered the competition for which establishment DC think tank can come up with the most tortured argument for increasing America’s already enormous Pentagon budget.
Its angle — presented in a new report written by Elaine McCusker and Fred "Iraq Surge" Kagan — is that a Russian victory in Ukraine will require over $800 billion in additional dollars over five years for the Defense Department, whose budget is already poised to push past $1 trillion per year.
Before addressing the Ukraine conflict directly, it’s worth looking at the security outcomes of high Pentagon spending during this century. As the Costs of War Project at Brown University has found, the full costs of America’s post-9/11 wars exceed $8 trillion. In addition, hundreds of thousands of people have died, millions have been driven from their homes, thousands of U.S. personnel have died in combat, and hundreds of thousands of vets have suffered physical or psychological injuries. And this huge cost in blood and treasure came in conflicts that not only failed to achieve their original objectives but actually left the target nations less stable and helped create conditions that made it easier for terrorist groups like ISIS to form.
Any call for ratcheting up Pentagon spending needs to reckon with this record of abject failure for a military first, “peace through strength” foreign policy. The new AEI report fails to do so.
As for its central thesis — that a Russian victory in Ukraine will require a sharp upsurge in Pentagon spending — neither part of the argument holds up to scrutiny.
Russia’s performance in Ukraine makes it abundantly clear that Moscow’s armed forces are deeply flawed. They are in a stalemate with a much smaller neighboring country that has parlayed superior morale and an infusion of U.S. and European weaponry into a fighting force that can hold its own against Russia’s much larger military. The only prospect for a Russian victory would be a long war of attrition in which Moscow’s advantages in population and arms production “win” the day.
But even a prolonged war is unlikely to result in total military victory for a Russia, and governing whatever portions of Ukraine it might control will be extremely costly, both economically and in terms of personnel. As a result, even if Moscow were to eventually win a Pyrrhic victory in Ukraine, it would be in no position to take on the 31 member NATO alliance. And it is long past time for our European allies to finally build a coherent military force that can defend its territory without a major U.S. supporting role.
The AEI report is wildly out of touch with current realities, which are tilting towards an approach that would pair continued support for Ukraine’s defensive capabilities with the beginnings of diplomatic track, an approach my colleagues at the Quincy Institute have been advocating since early in the conflict.
We are confronted with an almost mystical belief in official Washington that the first answer to any tough security problem is to increase Pentagon spending and spin out scenarios for addressing a potential war, rather than crafting a strategy in which preventing or ending wars takes precedence.
A cold, hard look at the wars of this century definitively shows that a military first foreign policy is a fool’s errand that does far more harm than good. How long will the American public sit still for this misguided, immensely costly conventional wisdom?
It’s long past time to take a fresh look at America’s military spending and strategy. Unfortunately, the new AEI report does little to reckon with the actual challenges we face.
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