Three Putin Stooges

Just over a year ago, after Putin began his invasion of Ukraine, I predicted on this blog that the isolationist and nativist faction of the GOP would soon lose the will for any ongoing support to the Ukrainian defense.  Particularly as the economic costs of sanctions started to mount, and people began to face real sacrifices in their daily lives for the sake of opposing Putin's expansionism, I wrote: "there will Trump and Tucker Carlson be, ready to declare: 'See! Putin's not your enemy. It's these Democrats! They're the ones trying to bleed you dry. What did Putin ever do to you? Who cares about Ukraine? Let Ukraine hang!'"

I then concluded: "And so the nation's other major party—the one that for years told us that they were the only party that truly had the guts to defend U.S. strategic interests and champion the cause of 'freedom' around the world—will be prepared to run the next election on a pledge to cozy up to Putin and let him trample over the rights of people in Ukraine and other neighboring countries."

After this past week's events, we seem to be closer than ever to seeing this prophecy fulfilled. We already knew from way back that Trump was a Putin stooge. We also knew that Tucker Carlson was no friend to the Ukrainian cause, publicly opposing support to the struggling country and even mocking the physical appearance of President Volodymyr Zelensky when he spoke before Congress late last year to ask for ongoing U.S. support (the idea of Carlson sneering, from the safety of his cable news perch, at a man who daily puts his life at risk to defend his country, while he pleads before Congress for his citizens' lives and future, is a particular kind of revolting). 

Now, the non-Trump presumptive frontrunner for the 2024 GOP presidential ticket, Ron DeSantis, has joined the same braying chorus. In an already-notorious appearance on Carlson's show earlier this week, Florida's extreme-right governor described the Russian invasion as a "territorial dispute" between two nations that does not implicate any "vital national interest" of the United States. Admittedly, these comments met round denunciation from GOP senators and party leaders, who are still described—with what sounds increasingly like wishful thinking—as the "Republican establishment." But that doesn't mean they will harm either DeSantis's or Trump's chances of heading the Republican ticket in 2024. 

The facile take on all of this would be to point out the irony of the two major parties' apparent "reversal" of roles on foreign policy issues over the last decade, and suggest it shows hypocrisy on both sides of the aisle. Ten years ago, after all, the GOP was firmly cemented as the party of hawkish and "interventionist" foreign policy. The Democrats, meanwhile, were far more likely to be skeptical of the U.S. intelligence agencies, the national security state, and adventurism abroad. Now, one might say, the two have traded places. The American center-left is far more institutionalist and supportive of U.S. military aid abroad than the GOP, whose likely presidential contenders have become isolationist and anti-establishment. 

Before we turn around and start accusing American liberals of showing just as much hypocrisy as the GOP, however, we should consider the possibility that the two situations are just actually different. The kinds of U.S. internationalism we're talking about today might just actually be more morally defensible than the ones we were talking about in the 2000s. The question of whether the U.S. should violate the UN charter by invading Iraq, for instance, is a very different moral question from whether the U.S. should support an allied nation—with military aid but without intervening directly—as it defends itself from the unprovoked aggression from another nation that has just violated the UN charter. 

To be sure, some liberals have traded in their skepticism of the official U.S. foreign policy line a little too easily, I fear—perhaps suggesting that they never had much of it to start with, or that such as they had went only skin-deep. I do think the U.S. should be doing more to bring about a negotiated end to the conflict than they are currently, for instance, and—specifically—that Ukraine should be asked to swallow some hard compromises for the sake of peace. Obviously, this is a hard request to make, since the Ukrainians are morally in the right. But saving lives and avoiding more bloodshed is often more important than the question of who's in the right. 

Ultimately, if this war is ever going to end, one side or the other will have to partially back down. The ideal solution would be for Russia to simply withdraw. But the U.S. has little influence to make that happen, whereas it has considerable pull with its Ukrainian allies. 

Nor do I accept the argument that this is not the U.S.'s fight to win and therefore it would be inappropriate for them to tell the Ukrainians what compromises they should accept. To be sure, the Ukrainians can fight on their own for as many maximalist demands as they want to, and the U.S. can have no say in the matter; it's their choice. But the U.S. does have every right to decide how much of its taxpayers' money they are willing to commit to demands that go beyond simply restoring the status quo ante. I think the U.S. should certainly draw the line at supporting any Ukrainian attempt to retake Crimea. And Ukraine may need to swallow the ugly injustice of parting with some Eastern separatist territories too, for the sake of peace.

To argue for an imperfect compromise in the interests of ending the war more quickly and saving human lives on both sides of the conflict, however, is very different from suggesting that Putin's war was morally justified, or that it does not implicate any significant interests of the United States. The policy of moral indifferentism and even outright Putin stoogery, which is emerging as the dominant position among the presumptive GOP frontrunners, should never be conflated with a principled policy of pacifism or non-interventionism that simply chooses to accept a morally imperfect outcome—while acknowledging it to be imperfect—for the sake of bringing this insensate bloodshed to an end. 

It is especially important to insist on this distinction, since many on the isolationist and nativist "New Right," as well as erstwhile pseudo-leftists of the Glenn Greenwald stripe, will try to accuse liberals of hypocrisy. They will claim that they are the true inheritors of the anti-interventionist and anti-establishment strand of thinking that opposed the U.S. War in Iraq and the various abuses of the U.S. "War on Terror." The possibility that the situations might in fact be radically different—that Putin is in the wrong here and acting as the aggressor, not the U.S.—will not trouble people content with simplistic analogies and reflexive anti-institutionalism. We will need to insist on the distinction for them. 

The real moral hypocrisy to behold here is not on the left, therefore, but on the right. The same political party and—in some cases—the same individuals who two decades ago thought the U.S. military could do no wrong, who promoted bogus U.S. intelligence to support an aggressive invasion, who seemed to support any U.S. military action, no matter how flagrantly it violated international law or human rights prohibitions against torture and indefinite detention, so long as it was directed against poorer countries in the developing world, now suddenly turns coward when the vaunted values of freedom and democracy and self-determination are actually under attack from a comparably-sized rival great power. 

Where are the brave voices now that so loudly cried "to arms" in 2003? Once they are no longer picking on the weak, once they are no longer leading an invasion in a contest they are certain to win, but are instead facing down a strong foe who is doing the invading this time around, they have suddenly dropped their tail between their legs. They are, as William Hazlitt once wrote of Cobbett, "bullying and cowardly; a Big Ben in politics, who will fall upon others and crush them by [their] weight, but [are] not prepared for resistance, and [are] soon staggered by a few smart blows." In short, now that they are facing an enemy their own size, instead of a weaker victim, they are utterly craven. 

In my post just over a year ago, in which I issued my prophecy about the direction the American right would ultimately go in the face of Putin's aggression, I quoted a poem by E.E. Cummings that denounced in blistering terms the U.S.'s failure to support its Hungarian allies in the face of a Soviet invasion. One fears that the cowardly sentiments Cummings attributed to U.S. leadership at the time describe equally well—if not even better— the foreign policy attitude of the emerging GOP frontrunners: "be quiet little hungary," [or, let us substitute, Ukraine] they say, "and do as you are bid/a good kind bear is angary/we fear for the quo pro quid." 

And as we look with dread upon the coming 2024 elections, when this is almost certain to be a hotly-debated issue, and the future of U.S. support for the Ukrainian defense may be in jeopardy, I am tempted to side with the cynical sentiments with which Cummings closed: "so rah-rah-rah democracy/let's all be as thankful as hell/and bury the statue of liberty/(because it begins to smell)."