By David Cline

Not long after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with a patriotic fervor rivaling the 4th of July, Ukrainian flags could be seen adorning some of Salisbury’s most prestigious homes along Salisbury’s most prestigious streets. I was left puzzled and mystified as I drove through the Historic District, seeing these foreign flags displayed so proudly. Were these the homes taking in Ukrainian war refugees? Were these people shipping their sons and daughters off to Ukrainian trenches? Maybe they were donating princely sums to Kiev’s war chest? This was not merely a show of solidarity for the beleaguered nation but, as it turns out, something more aggressive, clueless and destructive.

Hawks, neocons, the MIC…a virtue signaling war monger by any other name is just as sure to make war. Since 1945, military adventurism has become American doctrine writ large. Despite Eisenhower’s warning, like clockwork, we lure ourselves into new conflicts just as the old scars begin to fade. Korea, Vietnam and the Middle East. With countless proxy, brushfire and covert wars, the American public cannot bother themselves to acknowledge; the list is exhaustive. With over 100 bases abroad, we’re pumped and primed for the next iteration of spreading democracy. Yet, here I was, 5,000 miles and an ocean away from the front, surrounded by Salisbury’s new Ukrainian diaspora. Politics without skin in the game is sinister theater at best. These people, though absent minded, thought they were doing…something, I guess. Letting all passersby know how utterly courageous and defiant they were. Shaking their Twitter fingers at Putin during dinner parties, like Ralph Wiggum, they were helping.

Unfortunately, the fallout from their self-assured untouchable arrogance is never without consequence. Across the nation, Americans like them not only “supported” Ukraine but supported American involvement in Ukraine. Herein lies the rub. Like most proxy wars, it started out innocently enough: moral support, money, materiel, logistics and small arms. We have aging stockpiles. Putin is bad. Help the defenseless. Immediately, American taxpayers, by extension, were in fact killing Russians. To the thrill of his supporters, President Biden began crossing his own redlines of support. Redlines that in his words, would lead us to WWIII. Soon we saw heavy artillery, HIMARS, Patriots, Bradleys, Harpoons, Abrams and ATACMS. The U.S. was now at war with Russia at the expense of Ukrainian blood and over $200 billion in U.S. taxpayer funds. All of this served to prop up a collapsing Ukrainian military and extremely corrupt Ukrainian government, and to prolong a war entering its third year. The evil irony here is that the genesis of this conflict is based on two U.S.-driven catalysts: NATO’s decades-long march east and the U.S. government’s hand in the Maidan coup.

Of course, foreign meddling like this helps to fan the flames of larger conflagrations (the CIA calls this “blowback”) around the globe which Salisbury’s elite cannot be bothered with. It won’t be them, their children or their neighbors who will answer the call to march off to Eureastasia and die in the name of…doing something. Washington and Jefferson instructed us against such reckless and blind behavior, to avoid this type of foreign entanglement and unstable alliance. You should know, we supported Stalin, Ho Chi Minh, Saddam and Bin Ladin…until we went to war with them. The specters of those good intentions haunt us like fever dreams. But if you buy the words of Madeleine Albright, “the price is worth it.”

The U.S. military is not your pawn, U.S. taxpayer funds are not monopoly money. Though he lied us into Vietnam, LBJ had it right, that Americans (and American money) shouldn’t get marched off to do what locals ought to be doing for themselves. Republics die trying to be empires. Think twice before you rally round the flag of a foreign nation. Someone, somewhere is going to pay for it.

David Cline lives in Salisbury and currently serves in the U.S. Army Reserves.