US Envoys Meet with Leaders in Moscow and Kyiv Amid Ongoing Drone Attacks
Drones over the Black Sea, Envoys on the Train
While hundreds of flying machines trade explosions between Russia and Ukraine, a quieter traffic in arguments and interests may yet restore the only real basis of prosperity: peace, justice, and the freedom of ordinary people to get on with their work.
We are told that in a single night Russia launched more than a hundred long‑range drones and missiles at Ukraine, while claiming to have destroyed more than twice that number of Ukrainian drones over its own territory, Crimea, and the waters of the Black and Azov seas. Amid this traffic of destruction, at least two civilians were killed and others wounded on each side. At the same time, two envoys of the United States travelled by train to Kyiv, having just passed three hours in private conversation with Russia’s ruler in Moscow. Thus, while machines cross borders to destroy, men cross them to talk. One traffic narrows the market with fire; the other attempts, perhaps feebly, to widen it with words.
When I wrote of the division of labour in the pin‑manufactory, I assumed a tolerable security of person and property. No man can specialise in making pins when he must specialise in finding shelter from falling metal. Here we see the principle in its negative form. Each drone that strikes a workshop, a road, a dwelling, contracts the extent of the market; each night of alarms shortens the horizon in which a tradesman, a farmer, or a carrier dares to plan. The damage is not confined to the building that burns. It propagates through wages, profit, and rent, till the annual produce of the land and labour is diminished for people who never saw a drone except as a distant light.
In such circumstances, the visible interests are those of generals, ministers, and arms‑makers; the invisible interests are those of the labouring poor. The former gain offices, contracts, and applause; the latter gain only dearer bread, broken sleep, and the doubtful honour of being counted among the steadfast. As in all great public questions, the benefits are concentrated and loudly celebrated, while the costs are dispersed and silently borne. Every intercepted missile is paraded; every shuttered workshop is merely absent from the statistics. Before we praise the valour that launches or repels these attacks, the impartial spectator in each of us ought to ask who pays for the spectacle, and whether they ever consented to buy a ticket.
The journeys of the American envoys between Moscow and Kyiv belong, at least in intention, to a different class of action. One Russian adviser has called the talks “highly useful”; the Ukrainian president has declared himself ready for a “substantive conversation.” Here are faint hints that some parties remember what I called in The Wealth of Nations the sovereign’s first duty: the defence of the society, not its perpetual endangerment. Yet we must beware the man of system in peace as much as in war. A scheme that imagines borders, populations, and long‑standing resentments can be rearranged as easily as figures in a diplomatic memorandum will find that the great chess‑board of human society does not move at the stroke of a pen.
Self‑interest, when bounded by rules of justice and moderated by the eyes of spectators, can reconcile contending parties; the same self‑interest, when joined with the hope of aggrandisement and the habit of impunity, makes war its own excuse. Each government here invokes defence, yet each continues offensive operations that predictably invite retaliation. This is not the invisible hand guiding men, by pursuing their own safety, to secure that of their neighbours; it is the very visible spiral by which every fresh injury makes the next seem both natural and necessary. A peace that relies on unusual virtue will fail; but a peace that aligns each party’s safety with the safety of its neighbours might yet succeed, if anyone will take the trouble to design it.
In The Theory of Moral Sentiments I argued that we judge ourselves by appealing to an impartial spectator imagined within the breast. Let the rulers, advisers, and envoys now engaged in this quarrel consult such a witness. Would a well‑informed, disinterested observer applaud the nightly exchange of drones that kills a pensioner in one town and a driver in another? Would he consider it praise‑worthy to risk the natural progress of opulence in two great countries, and to endanger many others besides, for the sake of what is called national dignity? Or would he see, beneath the lofty language, the same old deception of ambition, which persuades men that honour and happiness lie in commanding events that they can scarcely foresee and never fully control?
The real wealth at stake is not the reputation of states, but the cottages, shops, and small savings of millions who have no seat at any negotiating table. Every day that the conflict continues, another cohort of young people learns the arts of destruction instead of the arts of production; every night of bombardment nudges some tradesman or peasant from industrious hope toward sullen despair. If the present talks are indeed to be “highly useful,” it will not be because they produce a grand design to be admired in chancelleries, but because, step by imperfect step, they restore the ordinary conditions under which ordinary people can once again mind their own business in peace. To them, and not to the authors of manifestos, belongs the true verdict on this war.
From the works cited
- An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations — The division of labour (the pin factory) as the engine of opulence, limited by the extent of the market.
- An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations — The sovereign's three duties (defence, justice, public works and institutions) and the four maxims of taxation.
- The Theory of Moral Sentiments — The impartial spectator internalized: we judge ourselves by imagining how a fair observer would see us, and self-command is the discipline of living under that gaze.