Comment by marvin

I'm not sure I've sufficiently communicated the background of my moral ambiguity here. I came of age during the War on Terror; the years where Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria were the primary fronts for Western military power. The brutal necessity of the Western world standing up to aggression against dictatorships was not so obvious during these years; from my vantage point of Western media the impression was that dirt-poor suicide bombers were the biggest risk to our civilization. And we were dealing with those with an aggression that at best left a dubious aftertaste.

One could be excused during these two decades for erroneously assuming that the world has for the foreseeable future moved on towards trade and economic competition, rather than wars of aggression. With nuclear weapons ensuring the balance. It was probably naïve, but not helplessly naïve. Against this backdrop, regularly seeing weddings and maybe-civilians bombed from drones on dubious intel, it doesn't seem like a childish or cowardly stance to just turn one's back on the weapons industry. I'd call that a reflected decision.

The same reasoning is almost palpable in European politics, which made a 180 degree shift away from this in the two weeks after Putin dispelled these notions. My point is, it wasn't obvious from where I stood that we would be back here today. Now that we are, the calculus seems clearer.

Maybe with a more measured US-led use of military force since 2000, Western defense politics wouldn't have required so much hand-wringing.