What Reaction Would You Prefer?

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, July 10, 2025

This post is in response to On Messages and Munitions

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

 

Michael has a typically thoughtful response to one of my recent pieces, to which John Puri tagged on with some equally compelling observations. I do, however, take issue with how he reframes one of my assumptions about my fellow Americans.

 

I had presumed that Americans would observe from afar as Russia rains rockets and drones down on Ukraine’s population centers — the largest and most savage volleys of the war so far over the last several weeks — and look on it all with distaste. “They’ll catch glimpses now and then of the horrors their leaders tacitly sanction, and they’ll resent seeing America once again abandon its friends for fear of its enemies,” I wrote. For some reason, Michael seemed to take offense at the suggestion that Americans are altruists.

 

“This is the hawkish version of Blame America,” Michael writes. “It comes when the American people fail to live up to the global mission assigned to them by a foreign policy court around the executive.”

 

That’s rather uncharitable. I should think that my outlook isn’t an attack on the American people, but rather a vote of confidence in them. I do not assume that the American people will look on the orgy of carnage Vladimir Putin has unleashed against a people he doesn’t believe should exist with bovine passivity. My experience with my countrymen suggests that they will recoil in horror at the wanton slaughter of innocents. What other reaction would we prefer to see? Despair? Hopeless vexation? Handwringing as we summon the rationalizations necessary to soothe our addled consciences?

 

Agitation and shock at conditions that are agitating and shocking is natural. Any other reaction is a product of an intellectual response. We have to intellectualize ourselves out of instinctive revulsion toward the circumstances Russia is creating in Europe. Horror is the natural response to atrocity. Horror is also a prelude to the exercise of the agency we have held in reserve throughout this conflict. I can understand, then, why opponents of deeper support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and the lives of its people hope to hold their visceral revulsion at bay.

 

Michael’s broader point is, of course, correct: Policymakers do not and should not formulate American grand strategy predicated on the sentiments bubbling up to the corridors of power from street-level. Moreover, mirabile dictu, they clearly aren’t. So, crisis averted on that front. I remain confused, however, by the triggering effect of my assumption that Americans are, in their hearts, unwilling to placidly spectate crimes against humanity. That seems less an insult to me than a compliment. Your mileage may vary.