The disturbing part was that, even though the majority of the candidates on stage voiced support for these consensus views, they do not actually represent the majority of the Republican party. The pro-Ukraine vote on stage may have amounted to about 87% of the candidates in the race-- but they collectively are polling in the single digits among likely GOP primary voters. The candidate who wasn't on stage-- the absent Trump-- is still attracting more support in the polls than all the others combined. And the only person present for the debate who disagreed with the rest on Ukraine is also the most representative of Trump's views on this subject--the lickspittle Vivek Ramaswamy, who spent his air time evidently trying to toady up to the absent former president in the hopes of an eventual cabinet post or even a VP spot on the ticket.
So, as much as appearances might have briefly suggested that rationality still survives among the GOP, at least on this one issue-- those looks were deceiving. The dominant and ascendant view in the party is one that is indistinguishable from Vladimir Putin's preferred foreign policy. And so, in watching the debate, one can begin to see an incredibly dark future unfurling before one: one in which Putin waits out the next election, cozies up to Trump and his henchmen after they are re-elected (or even before), just as he did in the past, and counts on them to reverse U.S. policy. A second Trump administration would happily oblige any flatterer, and would have no problem with cutting off a vital lifeline to the Ukrainian defense and standing pat while a newly-emboldened Putin steamrolls over the country.
The most disconcerting thing to me personally about seeing these views on U.S. military policy rise to prominence in the Republican Party is that they are a kind of grotesque parody of my own. After all, I too tend to oppose U.S. defense spending and military interventionism. I have likewise called for some limits to be placed on indefinite U.S. support for Ukrainian war aims, and I have even written that we should be prepared to swallow an unpleasant compromise on some issues in the interests of a negotiated peace along the lines of the earlier Minsk agreements. On a superficial view, therefore, it might be proper for someone to ask me: in what sense do you even disagree? Shouldn't you be delighted to see this kind of isolationism take over the party that just a a few years ago was thoroughly dominated by trigger-happy Neoconservatives?
Indeed, it's become standard among a certain strand of the dirtbag left--the Greenwald contingent, let us call them-- to say that they are the ones who have been consistent, in migrating toward Trump and the so-called New Right, whereas "liberals" like me are the ones who have proven fickle in their views. They accuse us of betraying our own principles and ideals by suddenly speaking in favor of U.S. military spending, when we were supposedly the party of anti-imperialism. If we opposed the Iraq war, why would we support U.S. involvement in the present foreign conflict? And if I have some concerns about current U.S. foreign policy, and feel that indefinite military support to Ukraine may risk prolonging the conflict, why shouldn't we be rooting for Trump and team to come back into the White House?
What is usually missing from this superficial line of questioning is any recognition that the U.S. role in invading Iraq might be morally distinguishable from the U.S. role in helping another country repel an invasion of its sovereign territory. It's true that I think the U.S. should limit its support to aiding Ukraine purely to the goal of reestablishing the status quo ante; but this is not because I think for one second that Putin's claims upon Crimea or the Donbas are justified or conscionable. I do not. I think he is an autocratic bully and aggressor, who is plainly trying to peel off as much territory from his unoffending neighbors as possible in order to support his revanchist agenda. If compromise with him is called for, it is purely in the interests of saving as many lives as possible, in a world where perfect justice is seldom achievable through arms--not because one should have the least sympathy with Putin's aims.
This should not come as a surprise to people anywhere on the left--dirtbag or otherwise. After all, there has always been a crucial moral distinction between people who oppose war on universalistic humanitarian grounds, and those isolationists who oppose foreign intervention for precisely the opposite reason: namely, that they do not recognize universal moral commitments and think that people in foreign countries have no claim on our compassion or solidarity.
Thus, during the run-up to the Second World War, someone could be a John Haynes Holmes-style pacifist, who opposed U.S. involvement on principled grounds of opposition to violence--a person who, like Randolph Bourne during the First World War, argued that the "war technique" is always the wrong way to promote democratic and universalistic moral ends. I would respect such a person; maybe I would even have shared their views. But there is all the difference in the world between that person and a Lindbergh-style isolationist, who opposed U.S. involvement due to actual sympathy with the German aggressors.
It is clear which tradition Trump and his toadies are continuing. When Vivek Ramaswamy gets up on live TV before a national audience and mocks President Zelensky of Ukraine--a person of infinitely greater courage than someone like Ramaswamy or Trump could ever conceive--when he mocks him for defending his country's existence in the face of a Russian war of aggression--he is not making some principled point in opposition to the use of the "war technique." He is not saying that violence is the wrong way to go about trying to defend democracy from tyrants and bullies like Putin. He is, to the contrary, saying that the U.S. should align itself with Putin's regime and agenda. And only a person of extremely limited conscience and understanding could fail to distinguish those two positions.
Of course, even though these distinctions seem clear enough in my mind, they do require some ability to tolerate nuance and tension in one's views. It will therefore always be difficult to maintain this perspective in mind, and many people calling for a negotiated peace with compromise on both sides will inevitably find themselves flirting with an outright defense of Putin's actions. For many intellectuals who take this standpoint (John Mearscheimer, e.g.), the defense of Putin takes the form of advocating a "realist" theory of foreign policy, which purports to align itself with both a classical realist tradition stemming back to Hobbes and Spinoza, and a modern realist school that embarks from E.H. Carr's The Twenty Years' Crisis. In brief, this theory holds that independent states exist in an international state of nature or anarchy, and that each state will therefore act first and foremost in pursuit of its own self-interest.
As a descriptive account of the way states tend to behave, on average, in the absence of an effective international sovereign, I have little to quibble with about realism. But all too often, the proponents of descriptive realism seem to conflate it with a normative account of how states should behave. They seem to imply that "great powers" have a moral right or entitlement to expand their "sphere of influence," simply because they can, or at least that others are not permitted to demand otherwise of them. As much as I admire E.H. Carr's classic work, for instance, it is not free of some of this confusion, and one must recall that it could be read as a tract in favor of the strategy of appeasement in the run-up to World War II: in effect, arguing for the surrender of territory to Hitler because Germany, as a great power, had a kind of "natural right" to gobble up the terrain of its neighbors, to an extent limited only by its own economic and military capacity.
Reading Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise this weekend (in the Shirley translation), I see that this same moral confusion between the descriptive and normative versions of realism was already present in one of the classical proponents of the theory, often cited as a founding advocate of realism as an account of international relations.
Spinoza's book--though far more popular and colloquial in style than his more esoteric works like the Ethics-- is in many ways a muddled one-- perhaps partly because Spinoza, in speaking to the public at large, felt the need to disguise the full extent of his moral and religious heterodoxy. Spinoza makes, after all, a number of seemingly inconsistent claims. He argues, first, that human beings in a state of nature possess the "natural right" to satisfy any of their personal desires, without respect to social aims, up to the limits of their own power and capacity; it is only after they adopt a social contract that they give up some of these rights in order to secure the protection of the state. And then, since independent states exist toward one another still in a state of anarchy, with no larger state standing watch over them, each presumably still has the same "natural right" to do whatever it wills, up to the limits of its own power.
Now, obviously this is true in a trivial sense. If, by "natural right," one means simply "what one is able to do by nature," then it is true by definition that one can do whatever one wants to do up to the limits of one's power and capacity. But such a statement, far from telling us anything about international politics, is simply tautological. We are merely saying: states can do as much as they can do. We have subtly supplanted the normative implication of a phrase like "natural right" with a purely descriptive one: namely, that people are free to act to the limits of their own power; but in the process of doing so, we have merely managed to produce a statement that cannot possibly be denied.
Indeed, Spinoza bites the bullet on this. When engaging the hypothetical counterargument that independent states, regardless of what they can do, nonetheless ought to behave justly, the philosopher replies that all he meant to say was that states can act freely in the international domain at their own peril-- he didn't mean that there will be no prudential checks upon their actions.
Meanwhile, he also answers those critics who point out that his own theory of religion posits justice and charity as virtues incumbent on all human beings. Since we are asked to comply with these virtues as individuals, should we not expect the same of sovereign states in their actions toward each other? Here, Spinoza draws a distinction between a natural duty and a religious duty. Religion, he tells us, requires that we do what the Scriptures teach, which he has earlier in the treatise condensed into a set of basic moral injunctions. Yet, for Spinoza, God is synonymous with nature, so it is also true to say that, for him, to act in accordance with divine law is to act in accordance with nature.
Would it not therefore be accurate after all to say that, for Spinoza, to do whatever one wills up to the limits of one's power--that is, up to the limits of nature-- is in fact to act in accordance with the divine will (since this is synonymous with natural law)? And so, is it not true that for Spinoza, after all, acting in accordance with "natural right" really is divinely encouraged, and the trivial descriptive claim is in fact making a more substantive normative claim after all?
Thus we can see that, as much as Spinoza denies any intention to equate "natural right" with moral right, in reality they are indistinguishable within his system, since for him the divine and the natural realms are one. Thus, every state is free--both as a matter of fact and as a matter of right-- to try to expand its power and act according to its own desire as much as it chooses. The conflation between descriptive and normative claims that has dogged realism to this day was therefore already present in one of its founders.
If we are not beholden to Spinoza's metaphysics, however, I see no reason why we should not be able to maintain simply that realism may suffice as an explanatory account of Putin's actions--but not as a justification for them. Even if great powers tend to try to maximize their power and territory, that is to say--that does not mean they should, or that we have no moral right to try to oppose them when they do so, up to the limits of our own power.
Whether military aid is the right way to achieve this may be doubted; whether some limits should be set around what war aims we are willing to support with that aid can also be debated among people of good will. I probably err much more on the side of caution and compromise than most of the old-school GOP candidates on the stage.
But, regardless of how we come out on any of those questions, we should never for an instant allow this debate over policy and strategy to shade into actual support for or complacency toward Putin's murderous actions: and yet that is exactly where the Trump/Ramaswamy wing of the new GOP would take us. We must preserve a distinction fiercely between any principled opposition to the "war technique," and the craven Trump/Ramawamy impulse to power-worship Putin as a strongman and make excuses for his aggression and mob boss-style atrocities. We must be true to the words of Camus, and do for the heroes of Ukraine what he urged his contemporaries to do for the defenders of Hungary, after their uprising was brutally crushed by Soviet tanks in 1956. I quoted his words on this topic of the outset of Putin's war, and I repeat them again now:
"In Europe’s isolation today, we have only one way of being true to Hungary, and that is never to betray, among ourselves and everywhere, what the Hungarian heroes died for, never to condone, among ourselves and everywhere, even indirectly, those who killed them."
What exactly our policy stance is on how best to respond to Putin's aggression may differ. But we must never, as Camus urges, betray what the Ukrainian defenders died for in resisting him; and never condone, even indirectly, the despot who killed them.
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