What the War in Ukraine Has Truly Cost Us灰蒙蒙的天空下，战壕里的一名乌克兰士兵。 政府谈论胜利，因为这给了士兵希望和继续战斗的意愿。 但最终，战争就是在泥泞的散兵坑中死亡。
对战争的惊人浪费感到敬畏。
但最终，战争是在泥泞的散兵坑中死亡。
这是一场在没有战略价值的冰天雪地里的生存斗争。这是一代人的怨恨，产生了新的一代人的怨恨。
这是一条价值110亿美元、横跨波罗的海的大约740英里的管道，一夜之间变得毫无用处。
这是欧洲最大的一些钢铁厂无法生产或运输一块金属板。
这是一座迷人的海滨城市，在轰炸和围困中被清空。
事实上，它可能感觉是唯一真正重要的事情。
但同样真实的是，我们作为人类的集体繁荣取决于没有战争，这使人们有喘息的机会，他们需要耕种、贸易、取得科学突破和艺术。
但研究人员报告说，和平有巨大的利润。
经济与和平研究所是一个无党派智库，根据 "与邻国的良好关系"、腐败、信息自由流动和代表性治理等因素对和平程度进行评分。
其最近的报告显示，在2009年至2020年期间，
和平状况有所改善的国家，其人均G.D.P.也平均每年上升3.1%。
而和平状况恶化的国家，每年仅增长0.4%。
虽然迄今为止，世界已经避免了核战争的相互保证的破坏，但它没有躲过相互保证的经济退化这一缓慢移动的子弹。
密歇根大学政治学副教授尤里-朱科夫估计，在前线至少呆了一个月的乌克兰城镇，其经济活动大约减少了一半。
他一直在使用从太空中看到的光辐射作为重炮轰击地区经济活动的代表。
"就其核心而言，战争是一项根本性的愚蠢事业。
"如果你关心的是经济产出和安全的最大化，你几乎不会选择发动战争。"
他的评估是什么？
即使习近平主席设法夺回该岛，他必须付出的经济和外交影响力损失的代价将使其成为一场不折不扣的胜利。
对中国和美国来说，其代价将是灾难性的。
根据兰德公司2016年的一项研究，
为期一年的冲突可能使
中国的G.D.P.下降25%至35%，
美国的G.D.P.下降多达10%。
"中国将获得台湾，但牺牲了其成为全球综合超级大国的更大野心"。
但各国总是误入灾难性的军事冲突。
相互加强军备是一个原因。
另一个原因是，领导人长期以来淡化其成本，低估和平的好处。
据即将出版的一本关于支付伊拉克和阿富汗战争的幽灵预算的作者琳达-比尔姆斯(Linda Bilmes)说，
这些战争在十年内被视为紧急开支，并在第二个十年里在五角大楼的基本预算之外提供资金，避免了对全部成本的正常财务监督和审查。
到目前为止，还没有人认真尝试对这场战争的长期费用进行估计或预算。
以及和平的好处--
并不意味着我们会失去战斗意志。
恰恰相反，
诚实地说明战争是什么以及它的代价，对长期的胜利至关重要。
FARAH STOCKMAN
What the War in Ukraine Has Truly Cost Us
Ms. Stockman is a member of the editorial board.
I’ll never forget the stories I heard on the Ukrainian-Polish border one year ago: Newlyweds who separated hours after saying their vows so the groom could return to the front. A tax preparer in Boston who quit her job to return to Ukraine with suitcases full of medical supplies. The wife of a border guard who made the three-hour round trip from Lviv to the Polish border almost daily to drop off fleeing women and children and pick up weapons and supplies.
The one-year mark of this terrible war brings up a range of emotions, including deep admiration for the Ukrainian people and dismay over the unfolding Russian offensive. But another feeling comes up, too, that doesn’t get talked about enough: awe at the breathtaking waste of war.
How sad that human beings survived deadly waves of Covid only to get right back into the business-as-usual of killing one other. It’s senseless to spend tens of billions of dollars on missiles, tanks and other aid, when more needs to be done to help communities adapt to rising oceans and drying rivers. It’s lunacy that farmers in a breadbasket of the world have gone hungry hiding in bomb shelters. It’s madness that Vladimir Putin declared Ukrainians to be part of his own people — right before he sent his army into the country, where Russian soldiers have been accused of raping and murdering civilians.
Governments gussy up war. They talk of victory because that gives soldiers hope and the will to fight on. But in the end, war is death in a muddy foxhole. It’s an existential fight over a frozen field with no strategic value. It’s a generational grudge that begets new generational grudges. It’s an $11 billion, roughly 740-mile pipeline laid across the Baltic Sea rendered useless overnight. It’s some of the largest steel plants in Europe unable to produce or ship a single metal sheet. It’s a charming seaside city emptied out by bombings and siege.
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When a country is fighting for its survival, as Ukraine is, the ability to wage war is essential. Indeed, it can feel like the only thing that really counts. But it is also true that our collective prosperity as human beings depends upon the absence of war, which gives people the breathing room they need to farm, to trade, to make scientific breakthroughs and art.
The economic rewards reaped by not being at war can be hard to quantify. But researchers report that peace is wildly profitable. The Institute for Economics and Peace, a nonpartisan think tank, scores peacefulness according to factors like “good relations with neighbors,” corruption, free flow of information and representative governance. Its recent report shows that countries that saw improvements in peacefulness between 2009 and 2020 also saw G.D.P. per capita rise by an average of 3.1 percent per year. Countries where peacefulness deteriorated saw an increase of just 0.4 percent per year.
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Mr. Putin’s war in Ukraine makes us all poorer, hungrier and more insecure. Although the world has avoided the mutually assured destruction of nuclear war so far, it has not dodged the slow-moving bullet of mutually assured economic degradation.
Real global incomes this year could be $2.8 trillion lower because of the Russian invasion, according to a report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Ukrainian towns that have spent at least a month on the front lines have seen their economic activity cut roughly in half, estimates Yuri Zhukov, associate professor of political science at the University of Michigan. He’s been using light emissions as seen from space as a proxy for economic activity in areas with heavy shelling.
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“At its heart, war is a fundamentally stupid enterprise,” Gerard DiPippo, a former C.I.A. analyst who now works for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me. “If all you care about is maximizing economic output and security, you would almost never choose to start a war.”
Mr. DiPippo researches the impact of sanctions on Russia as well as the likely economic fallout if China were to invade Taiwan. His assessment? Even if President Xi Jinping managed to retake the island, the price he would have to pay in lost economic and diplomatic clout would render it a Pyrrhic victory. The costs would be catastrophic, both for China and the United States. According to a 2016 study by the RAND Corporation, a yearlong clash could curb China’s G.D.P. by 25 percent to 35 percent, and U.S. G.D.P. by as much as 10 percent.
“China would have gained Taiwan but sacrificed its larger ambition of becoming a global and comprehensive superpower,” Mr. DiPippo and a co-author wrote for C.S.I.S.
One hopes that the destruction in Ukraine will help convince Chinese leaders that reunification with Taiwan by force would be a self-defeating policy. But countries blunder into disastrous military conflicts all the time. Mutual arms buildups are one reason. Another is that leaders chronically downplay their costs and undervalue the benefits of peace.
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The American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are a case in point. Those wars were treated as an emergency expense for a decade, and funded outside the Pentagon base budget for the second decade, avoiding normal financial oversight and scrutiny of the full costs, according to Linda Bilmes, author of a forthcoming book on ghost budgets that paid for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
With the war in Ukraine, the United States is once again underestimating the cost of our involvement, since replacing the weapons that have been given to Ukraine will likely cost 10 percent to 30 percent more than their current value on average, Dr. Bilmes says. To date, there has been no serious attempt to estimate or budget for the long-term expense of this war.
Acknowledging the real cost of war — and the benefits of peace — doesn’t mean that we’ll lose our will to fight. To the contrary, an honest accounting of what war is and what it costs is essential to victory over the long run.
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