By Abe Greenwald
Monday, March 03, 2025
Oceans may protect the United States from the violence of
wars in Europe and Asia. But those oceans do nothing to stop America’s domestic
tribal fights from invading and disfiguring far off countries. We’re watching
it happen to Ukraine, and Europe as a whole, in real-time.
There are, to be sure, right-wing foreign-policy thinkers
who genuinely embrace a worldview that dictates the U.S. do little or nothing
to help Ukraine fend off Russia’s invasion. They may believe that we should
focus our military resources more directly on deterring China, or they may
think that what goes on between long-warring peoples overseas is none of our
business anymore. Whatever their theories, they have their studied reasons for
opposing military aid to Ukraine. But the larger part of anti-Ukraine MAGA
isn’t nearly so considered. Ukraine has merely become a casualty of our
partisan squabbles.
MAGA resents Ukraine and Volodymyr Zelenskyy because Joe
Biden supported Ukraine (however insufficiently) and wove that support into a
roundabout argument against Donald Trump’s supposed threat to democracy itself.
Trump supporters also have a fondness for Vladimir Putin because they’re
following Trump’s lead in advertising respect for the Russian strongman to
scandalize liberals.
This isn’t about a considered position on the proper role
of the U.S. regarding Ukraine and Russia, and I can prove it. In his first
presidential term, Trump was more supportive of Ukraine’s effort to fend off
Russia than Barack Obama had been. Not only did the MAGA chorus have no
objections; Trump bragged about it, and his supporters ate it up. Here’s Trump
speaking at a joint press conference with Zelenskyy in 2019:
“Well, we’re working with Ukraine. And we want other countries to work with
Ukraine. When I saw ‘work,’ I’m
referring to money. They should put up more money. We put up a lot of money. I gave you anti-tank busters that—frankly,
President Obama was sending you pillows and sheets. And I gave you anti-tank busters. And a lot of people didn’t want to do that,
but I did it.”
And, yes, Zelenskyy wore a suit for that meeting—because
his country wasn’t under total siege, as it is today. Which means that Trump
was proud to support Ukraine with money and defensive weaponry even before
Putin launched a full-scale invasion. If anything should have set-off populist
alarm bells about unnecessary overseas spending and fomenting foreign wars, it
was increasing U.S. military support for a country that wasn’t yet under full
attack. And aside from academic foreign-policy “realists,” everyone in
Trumpland was fine with it. They were fine, too, with the fact that Trump’s
zinger about “pillows and sheets” was lifted directly from Sen. John McCain—a
neocon.
Things have changed 180 degrees since then, but not owing
to fresh policy arguments or sudden moral revelations. Trump’s inverting
America’s position on Russia and Ukraine is a direct extension of domestic
partisan gamesmanship. Before Biden’s politicized support for Zelenskyy, there
was Trump’s failed effort in 2019 to get the Ukrainian president on board with
launching an investigation into Biden and his son Hunter. Trump described the
relevant conversation with Zelenskyy as a “perfect phone call,” but he
obviously felt slighted. And when Trump takes offense, everyone pays.
Flash forward to the present—Zelenskyy is a “dictator”
who disrespects the U.S. and doesn’t want peace, and Putin is a common-sensical
advocate of diplomacy. It’s far less astounding that Trump preaches such things
than that so many Republicans and nominal conservatives echo them. Men and
woman of the right who justly condemned Barack Obama for mocking Mitt Romney’s
warnings about Russia in 2012 have gone full Obaman now that those warnings
proved terribly prescient. But they’re not only mocking Americans who see Putin
as a bad actor; they’re mocking Ukraine as Putin tries to consume it.
None of what’s playing out here is foreign policy in the
traditional sense. It’s not a matter of weighing contingencies against moral
obligations or thinking strategically about the future of free and unfree
nations. It’s not about considering global stability or the bonds of
longstanding alliances. It’s a game of shirts and skins playing out on the
largest-possible stage. And its consequences will stretch across the globe for
years to come.
What was it Mitt Romney said that Obama found so silly?
Russia “is without question our No. 1 geopolitical foe. They fight for every
cause for the world’s worst actors.” Much has changed—that hasn’t. Putin is
allied with China, North Korea, and Iran. But if he’s not a Democrat or a
neocon, he can’t be that bad, right?
Just watch. You’ll find out.
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