Hawks and Dreadnaughts

 So I guess I've become a diehard booster of Ukrainian military aid. But I admit I'm not entirely comfortable about that fact. After all, it does mean endorsing the more "hawkish" position, at least on this one issue. Which feels out of character for me (as it no doubt does for many other liberals who spent the Bush and Obama years seeing themselves as default "anti-interventionists"). 

Of course, there are many nuances to point out. I maintain that it's not so hard to see a moral distinction between funding Ukraine's defense and other, more expansionary projections of U.S. military force. Helping Ukraine fend off an invasion is very different from the U.S. hauling off and invading another country, as it did in Iraq—or as today's Neocons are urging us to do to Iran. 

Plus, I hold that there remains some conceivable middle-ground position—such as supporting calls for negotiations and diplomacy while also continuing to provide military aid, so that Ukraine is negotiating from a position of strength, and is not forced to make ruinous concessions to Putin that would essentially rob it of all independence and long-term security. 

But whatever reasonable middle we might conceive, Republicans are not offering it. They have successfully polarized the issue. They—at least in their increasingly dominant "America First" wing—have boiled the issue down to whether or not we like Putin. And if that's the question, I will always be against Putin, and Putin's friends and admirers, and on the side of his victims. So I support Ukraine. 

But this does mean I am in some sense with the militarists on this one. I am in company with those with whom I "have good reason/ Never to agree" (to borrow a phrase from Langston Hughes). So I started to worry: does this make me some kind of crypto-Neocon? Have I become a hawk, gradually, by degrees, almost without realizing it? 

But then I saw Senator Joni Ernst's most recent comments on the Ukraine aid package. Of all the Republican factions, she is a member of the one that comes closest to my own policy position on this issue. She is willing to vote, that is to say, for more Ukraine military aid, without insisting on any nasty anti-asylum riders attached, simply because it is needed. All of which I can get behind. 

She was careful to clarify, however, that she only liked the Ukraine bill so long as it delivered purely military funding, with no other kinds of aid attached. As the Wall Street Journal reports: Ernst "said she [...] wanted to make sure the funding for Ukraine was heavy on weapons and light on humanitarian assistance. 'I’m all about weapons, not welfare,' she said[.]"

What an absolutely perfect distillation of Republican moral idiocy! "I will support internationalism and caring about the fate of our democratic allies abroad—but only to the extent we are not helping any displaced people or providing for basic needs." "I will support the aid bill, but only so long as you guarantee that the money will be used to kill people, and not feed people." 

This from the party of Lincoln, and its representative from my adopted state here in prairie country. I thought of Vachel Lindsay's poem, in which he imagines the shame Abraham Lincoln would feel if he were still alive decades later, seeing the militarism and imperialism of World War I-era policy. What would Lincoln make, Lindsay asks, of the "dreadnaughts scouring every main"? 

Ernst is clearly of the pro-dreadnaught brigade, rather than representing the legacy of Lincoln. She is for aiding our allies, but only so long as she can be sure it will be building more dreadnaughts. That is what real "hawks" sound like. That is the true militarist position. She has got that part down cold. "I'll support your aid bill, but only if it is sending weapons, not welfare."

And all at once I realized that I did not have to fear confusion with the hawks. There is a fundamental moral divide between liberal internationalists and militaristic war mongers. Even if they happen to overlap on a single issue, their reasons for supporting it will never be the same. So, I have not become one of the hawks. And may the day never come when I start to sound like one.