The territorial taboo: Explaining the public aversion to negotiations in the Ukraine war support coalition
本文探讨为何乌克兰战争支持联盟中公众强烈反对与俄罗斯谈判及领土让步，认为神圣价值观和共享叙事（如国际法、战争罪、自由民主）制造了领土禁忌，但加沙战争暴露了西方价值观的地理局限性。
Despite severe and mounting war costs, many in the international coalition supporting Ukraine have publicly expressed strong aversion to negotiations with Russia, and Ukrainian territorial concessions, to end the war. What explains this aversion to negotiations and seeming taboo on territorial concessions? This commentary, drawing particularly on US policy debate, suggests that proclaimed sacred values helps explain this disposition. Ukraine’s war support network is a discursive coalition bound together by three shared narratives about the war and universal values. Stories about international law and territorial integrity, about war crimes and genocide, and about freedom and democracy, render talk about territorial concessions to Russia, as the aggressor state, taboo in different ways. Psychological factors, from commitment problems to hawkish biases, bolster this taboo. The Gaza war, however, has exposed Western sacred values as geographically limited. The territorial taboo disguises tragic trade-offs and the enormous costs of Ukraine’s fight, burdening the country with an unwinnable mission. Any settlement of the war is likely to see the territorial taboo abandoned, in de facto if not de jure terms.