Spectator Sport

My initial thought for an opening to this post was: "Whenever there is serious conflict in the world, one can be certain that people are watching, looking for clues as to the incentives that will start the next conflict." But, to be sure, this is only somewhat true. There are plenty of "serious" conflicts, events both acute and chronic, that have resulted (or are resulting) in death, displacement and suffering for tens of thousands, if not a million or more, people, but that receive little attention overall.

What attracts attention to a conflict is not its level of "seriousness" but how it impacts the interests of others, and who those others are. A case could be made that, here in the United States, the Russo-Ukrainian war is of interest mainly because people have decided that the outcome of the conflict will determine whether the People's Republic of China (PRC) attempts to invade the Republic of China (ROC) and forcibly reintegrate it. Sure, people pay lip service to the idea that Ukraine is a recognized sovereign nation, and the Russian Federation has no legitimate right to expand its borders by the military annexation of neighboring countries. But for many people around the world, Russian military adventurism is an abstraction. The number of people who expect, say, an amphibious assault on Alaska in the service of reclaiming that could likely be counted on one's fingers.

Likewise, American interest in the Israel-Hamas war in southern Israel and Gaza tends to be driven by domestic concerns, such as lingering worries about "Islamic terrorism" (despite the fact that Americans are quite ready, willing and able to murder one another to the tune of between ten and twenty thousand people a year), and the politics of various denominations of Christianity that see a prosperous and stable Israel as a prerequisite for the fulfillment of messianic prophecy, thus making the pacification of the Palestinians into a matter of religious importance. And, of course, no negative international event that the public pays attention to escapes attempts of the Democrats and/or Republicans to assign and/or deflect blame.

While these particular conflicts have attention paid to them, there is little interest in actively working for conclusions. Russia is a nuclear-armed state; thus, there is a fear that substantive moves to force it to abandon its attempts to conquer Ukraine could lead to things escalating to the point that nuclear weapons are used. For all that the United States claims to want "peace in the Middle East," Washington is not an honest broker; it's difficult to miss successive administrations' pro-Israel bias, one that matches that of, if not the whole of the public, the media and political establishments.

And this goes back to what I was initially thinking about these conflicts; that the interest in them is less about the conflicts themselves, but what might follow them. Ukraine is not important to the United States in the same way that Taiwan appears to be; the Russians are an annoyance, but the Chinese are viewed as a threat, so keeping them from expanding their influence is viewed as important. Likewise, Islam has come to be seen as a hateful and violent ideology that seeks to take advantage of any vulnerability in its quest to impose itself on the world at large.

Perhaps strangely, however, neither group is credited with much capacity to develop and independent view of the world. China is said to be watching the reactions to the Russo-Ukrainian war to plan its next moves, despite the fact that there's no logical reason why responses to them must be related. Iran, accused of backing Hamas in this latest conflict is likewise said to be watching the outcome of the conflict in Gaza. Personally, I detect a whiff of self-importance to it all; the idea that actors on the world stage watch us watching world events, because our passive reactions are important enough that they must be taken into account.