The Ukraine War Debate

              A year into Russia’s war on Ukraine, an odd convergence is visible in American political debate on the issue, between voices on both the left and the right opposing US support for the Ukrainians.

              On the right, this opposition stems both from a Trumpian America First position, and from simple political reflex. Whatever the Biden administration is for, they are against, especially if they can use the issue to cast the president as uncaring about ordinary Americans in places like East Palestine, Ohio, and along the Mexican border. The same people decrying our aid to Ukraine excoriated Biden for withdrawing from Afghanistan. If Biden had instead escalated our presence in Afghanistan, they would have bashed him for that. If he had refused to support Ukraine, many of them would probably now be lambasting him for having abandoned a democratic ally in its hour of need.

              The opposition on the left is more principled, and more interesting. Here, the focus is on the continuities between the Biden Administration’s Ukraine policy, and the long, sad history of U.S. intervention abroad, going back long before the collapse of the U.S.S.R. Daniel Bessner wrote last week that “when making U.S. foreign policy, one cannot only look to the immediate consequences of a given action; one must also focus on how a policy affects the structure of what historians have termed the American Empire — an empire that has done enormous damage to the world.” Similarly, Samuel Moyn recently cast U.S. support for Ukraine as part of a continuing push for “the militarization of the globe under U.S. auspices.” In keeping with the critique of “cold war liberalism” that has been a leitmotif of his career, Moyn associates the liberals of the Biden administration with the neoconservatism of foreign policy thinker Robert Kagan, pointing to collaborations between Kagan and current Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and the presence of Kagan’s wife, Victoria Nuland, in Blinken’s State Department.

              I think this left-wing critique is misguided, for two reasons. First, it focuses relentlessly on the United States, as if it is the only international actor that really matters in the current crisis. It assumes that the principal driving forces behind global change since World War II have been U.S. imperialism and neoliberalism, and while it doesn’t exactly deny independent agency to other countries, it still sees the crises involving them principally as occasions for the projection of American power. Some opponents of current American policy on Ukraine, such as John Mearsheimer, in fact blame Putin’s invasion itself squarely on the U.S., and the eastward expansion of NATO.

              This viewpoint, though, underestimates the enormous independent capacity for disruption and destruction possessed by Vladimir Putin. As his hallucinatory recent speech on Ukraine suggests, Putin is anything but a rational actor in the international arena. He lives in a paranoid fantasy world of endless Western conspiracies against Russia and its greatness, and even if one believes that he was only driven to this extreme by NATO expansion, it doesn’t change the fact that his obvious goal now is to subjugate as much as possible of the former Soviet Union to his brutal Russian dictatorship, starting with Ukraine. Should we really equate preventing Putin from achieving this goal with the “militarization of the globe under U.S. auspices”?

In a Twitter exchange with Daniel Bessner last week, I wrote: “Unless I am reading you wrong, you are saying that the costs and risks of the US arming other countries and trying to affect the outcome of crises are always too great, no matter what the particular circumstances of the crisis.” Bessner replied: “yes, on balance I'm saying that.” Kudos to him for acknowledging the logic of his position, and it is by no means an absurd one, given both the lamentable record of American interventions abroad and the huge disparity of military and economic power between the U.S. and the rest of the globe. But one doesn’t need to be a superpower, or even a state, to act in a significant and autonomous manner on the world stage (see “Bin Laden, Osama”). International relations are not simply an arena in which one power acts, and everyone else reacts. And this means we have to judge every international situation on its own terms, considering the actions of all parties, and not just the most powerful one. When it comes to the present war, the horrors Putin has already inflicted on Ukraine, and his long-term goals, are strong reasons indeed for continuing current U.S. policy, despite the attendant costs and risks.

The left critique also underestimates the lasting and chastening effects of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars on American politics. Twenty years ago, neoconservatives and many Cold War liberals thought that the United States could impose Western-style democracy and capitalism on large parts of the globe. Does anyone still think that? Perhaps Robert Kagan does, but whatever his ties to the Biden State Department, he hardly calls the shots there. If he did, the U.S. would still be fighting in Afghanistan, and probably in a half dozen other hot zones across the world. Samuel Moyn writes that “liberals and neoconservatives in the last half-century have tended to agree on foreign policy more than their intermittent bickering implied. It now looks as if the Iraq imbroglio drove them apart only briefly.” I think this underestimates both the ferocity of arguments between liberals, from Vietnam to Contra aid to the Gulf War to Iraq, and also the extent to which liberals today have any appetite for forever wars, or for the projection of American empire. George McGovern’s 1972 call to “come home America” is one that more Americans, on the right and left alike, probably agree with today than at any time in the past half century. The problem is that the world doesn’t always let us do so.