I have another prediction, and I want to write it down now, in public, before it happens, so that when it does happen, and I think it will, there’s a record of someone calling it in advance instead of just nodding along after the fact like everyone always does. Here’s the prediction. If this trajectory keeps going the way it’s going, the political script around the war in Ukraine is about to flip completely. The people who spent years being skeptical of the war, questioning the funding, questioning the endless support, questioning whether any of this made sense, those people are about to suddenly become the loudest voices in favor of it. And the people who spent years being the war’s biggest cheerleaders, waving the flag, insisting that support was non-negotiable, that questioning it was betrayal, those people are about to suddenly start getting cold feet and turning against it. The sides are going to swap. Almost entirely. And I want to say clearly, before it even happens, that when it does, both sides are going to be wrong, and I want to explain exactly why, because the reason matters more than the prediction itself.
They’re going to be wrong because they were never actually reasoning from principle in the first place. They were reasoning from position. From team. From side. And that’s the whole problem, that’s the rot at the center of how most people engage with something as serious as war, they pick a team the way you’d pick a team in a sports rivalry, and then they defend that team through every twist and turn the conflict takes, regardless of whether the facts on the ground still support the position they started with. War isn’t static. It changes. The actors change, the stakes change, the moral weight of different choices changes as new information comes in and new consequences unfold. A position that made sense in year one might not make sense in year four, not because the person holding it was foolish, but because the war itself became a different war. And the people who can’t adjust, who can’t update, who just keep repeating the same stance no matter how much the underlying reality has shifted underneath them, those are the people who end up trapped defending something that no longer resembles what they originally signed up to defend, or attacking something that no longer resembles what they originally opposed.
So watch what happens next, because I think it’s going to prove the point better than any argument I could make about it in the abstract. The people who were against the war early on, who got labeled as Russian sympathizers or isolationists or whatever insult was convenient at the time, a lot of them are going to look at this expanding, merging conflict, this thing that now includes Iran and drags in Russia and China’s interests and threatens to become something genuinely global, and they’re going to suddenly discover a newfound enthusiasm for Ukraine’s cause, precisely because it’s now wrapped up in a fight against Iran that lines up with other things they already believe in. Their opposition wasn’t really about the war itself, it was about who Ukraine was fighting and who Ukraine was aligned with. Change the alignment, change the enemy, and suddenly their entire position flips with it. And on the other side, the people who spent years insisting that supporting Ukraine was a moral imperative, a line in the sand for democracy itself, some of them are going to start getting nervous now that the war has expanded into something with a much higher risk of dragging in nuclear powers and pulling the world toward something far more dangerous than a regional conflict. Suddenly the same people who called any hesitation weakness are going to start whispering that maybe things have gone too far, maybe this needs to be reined in, maybe the risk-reward calculation looks different now. And they’ll be right that the risk-reward calculation looks different now, but they’ll be doing it for the wrong reason, because their support was never actually about a consistent principle either, it was about a story they’d committed to, and the story just hit a plot twist their narrative wasn’t built to handle.
That’s the thing about picking sides in something like this. It feels clarifying in the moment. It feels like you’ve found solid ground, like you finally know where you stand, like you can stop agonizing over the complexity and just plant a flag. But war is not the kind of thing that rewards flag-planting, because war is never black and white, not really, not even in cases where one side is obviously the aggressor and the other side is obviously defending itself. Even in the clearest cases, the ones where the moral clarity seems almost total at the start, the actual conduct of the war, the choices made by leaders on every side, the way the conflict evolves and expands and pulls in new actors with their own agendas, all of that adds layers and complications that don’t fit neatly into a hero-versus-villain framework anymore. And when people insist on forcing that framework onto something that has stopped fitting it, they end up doing something dangerous, they end up making excuses for things that shouldn’t get excused, or condemning things that don’t deserve condemnation, purely because it’s convenient for the story they’ve already decided to tell.
I want to be really specific about what I mean when I say the right position is to not be for any side, because I know how that sounds, and I know it sounds like I’m about to describe some mushy centrist both-sides position where you just shrug and say everyone’s equally bad and nothing matters and who’s to say really. That is not what I mean, and I want to be forceful about rejecting that reading, because it’s a lazy misreading and I don’t want anyone walking away thinking that’s my point. When I say I’m not on any side, I don’t mean I think the countries and the leaders and the militaries involved are all morally equivalent, I don’t think that, I have opinions about who’s acted more aggressively and who’s acted more defensively and who’s making choices that deserve more scrutiny. What I mean is something much more specific. I mean that my loyalty, my actual moral commitment, isn’t attached to any government, any military, any leader, any nation-state’s strategic interests. My loyalty is attached to the people who live inside these conflicts and have absolutely no say in how they unfold. The civilians. The families. The people who wake up one morning and find out their government has decided their city is now a front line, or their son is being drafted, or their neighborhood is now within range of a drone strike that has nothing to do with anything they personally did or believed or chose.
Those are the people who get erased from almost every conversation about this war, and about wars in general, because the conversation almost always gets captured by the framework of nations and leaders and strategic outcomes. Did Ukraine gain ground. Did Russia lose momentum. Did Iran’s position weaken. Did the West’s resolve hold. Those are the questions that dominate the discourse, and they’re not meaningless questions, strategy and outcomes do matter in the sense that they shape what happens to millions of people downstream. But notice what’s missing from that framework entirely. The actual people. The ones who don’t get quoted in the think pieces, who don’t get interviewed on the cable news panels, who don’t have lobbyists or spokespeople or foreign ministries speaking on their behalf. They’re treated as background noise, as the backdrop against which the “real” story of geopolitical maneuvering plays out, when in reality they should be the entire point. They are the ones who bury their family members. They are the ones whose homes get flattened whether the strike that did it was justified by international law or not. They are the ones who lose everything regardless of who ends up winning the argument about who was more righteous.
And here’s the part that I think gets lost the most in all of this, the part that I keep coming back to. No matter which side “wins” this conflict, however you even define winning in something this sprawling and complicated, the civilians lose. Every single time. That’s not cynicism, that’s just an honest accounting of how these things actually play out historically. If Ukraine achieves everything it wants strategically, the people who lived through years of war, who lost homes, who lost family members, who spent years in bomb shelters, they don’t get those years back. If Russia somehow achieves its strategic aims, the people on the receiving end of that outcome don’t get compensated for what they endured either. If Iran gets weakened to the point of regime change or major capitulation, the ordinary Iranians who never had any say in their government’s foreign policy choices are the ones who’ll live through the chaos of that transition, not the officials who made the decisions that led there. Zoom out far enough and you’ll find that in almost every war in human history, the people who actually bear the cost are rarely the people who actually made the decisions. The decision-makers negotiate outcomes, sign treaties, declare victories, write their memoirs. The people just live with whatever’s left.
So when I say I’m on the side of the people, the citizens, I mean it as an actual, specific, load-bearing position, not a rhetorical flourish. It means that when I evaluate any development in this conflict, any escalation, any strike, any new front opening up, the question I ask first isn’t “does this help my preferred side win” because I don’t have a preferred side in that sense. The question I ask is “does this make things more survivable or less survivable for the people who have no control over any of it.” That’s a completely different lens than the one most people are using, and I think it’s the only lens that actually holds up over time, because it doesn’t depend on the story staying the same. It doesn’t require me to defend a position I took years ago regardless of how the facts have shifted since then. It doesn’t require me to suddenly flip my entire worldview just because the war expanded into a new theater that happens to align with different tribal loyalties. The position holds steady because it was never about the teams to begin with. It was about the people underneath the teams, the ones who get used as justification by every side in every conflict while actually being consulted by none of them.
This is why I think what’s coming, this predicted flip where the anti-war crowd suddenly turns pro-war and the pro-war crowd suddenly turns skeptical, is going to be such a revealing moment, almost a kind of test that most people are going to fail without even realizing they failed it. Watch how quickly people abandon consistency the second the conflict shape-shifts into something that better fits their pre-existing biases. Watch how little acknowledgment there will be that their position changed not because of new moral reasoning but because the war started serving a different narrative purpose for them. Almost nobody is going to say out loud, “I changed my mind because I realize now that my original stance was more about tribal alignment than principle.” Instead they’ll construct some retroactive justification, some story about how the situation “changed” in a way that conveniently validates whatever they now believe, and they’ll do it with total sincerity, because most people aren’t consciously dishonest about this stuff, they’re just not very good at noticing when their reasoning is downstream of their identity instead of upstream of it.
I don’t expect this prediction to make me popular with anyone, honestly, because both camps are going to feel targeted by it, and both camps are going to feel like I’m somehow letting the other side off the hook by refusing to fully commit to either narrative. That’s fine. I’m not writing this to be popular with either camp. I’m writing it because I think somebody needs to say clearly, before the flip happens, that the flip is not going to represent some kind of moral awakening on anyone’s part, it’s going to represent the same tribal reflexes just pointing in a new direction because the conflict itself pointed in a new direction first. And I think the only way to actually avoid getting caught in that trap, the only way to stay grounded through however many more twists this war takes before it’s finally over, is to refuse to build your position around a side at all. Build it around the people who never had a side to begin with, the ones who were just trying to live their lives before all of this started, and who will still be trying to live their lives, or trying to rebuild them, long after all the flags have been planted and unplanted and replanted by everyone else.
That’s where I’ve been standing this whole time, and it’s where I’m going to keep standing no matter which way the political winds blow next. Not neutral in the sense of not caring. Not centrist in the sense of splitting every difference down the middle for the sake of appearing balanced. Just consistently, stubbornly focused on the actual human cost, the people who bear it, and the outcome that hurts them the least, regardless of which government, which leader, or which narrative happens to be winning the argument in any given month.