By Matt Johnson
Friday, September 09, 2022
In an essay for
the New Republic in June, Sen. Bernie Sanders’s foreign policy
advisor Matt Duss offers some moral and political instruction for the Left.
There are “instances,” he writes, when the “provision of military aid can
advance a more just and humanitarian global order. Assisting Ukraine’s defense
against Russian invasion is such an instance.” This is a gentle reproach, and
it’s full of hedges and caveats like this one: “...for many of my friends on
the left, this is all too familiar. It is all too convenient that, having
finally drawn the longest war in our history to an ignominious close in
Afghanistan, we should now happen into a new one to give us meaning. I get that
sentiment.” Duss is strangely sympathetic to the idea that the invasion of
Ukraine is just an arbitrary, warmongering post-Afghanistan rallying cry
intended to “give us meaning.” He seems to be concerned about the sensibilities
of people who hold that view or he wouldn’t have addressed it in such a
fraternal I’m-with-you-but sort of way.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has been cataclysmic—tens
of thousands have been killed, while millions have been
torn from their homes and displaced within Ukraine and across Europe. Entire
cities have been leveled and many Ukrainians have been captured, tortured, and
sent to internment camps. Civilians have been massacred in Bucha, Irpin, and
elsewhere. Having attempted in vain to conquer and annex the entire country,
Vladimir Putin is now trying to slice off as much territory as possible.
Russian forces are executing this strategy with indiscriminate artillery and
missile bombardment of civilian areas—a terror campaign that doesn’t require
precision-guided munitions (which Russia quickly depleted and is struggling to
replace). The sanctions imposed on Russia have fueled a global financial
crisis, and Putin has held shipments of food and energy supplies hostage in
retaliation. Russia is obliterating Ukrainian culture in the areas it controls.
Despite all this, Duss finds it necessary to inform the
Left that the conflict isn’t in fact a propaganda item invented by Western
governments to inflame our appetite for war. It’s a depressing commentary on
the principles of today’s left-wingers that someone needs to hold their hands
through these elementary points. As Duss notes, the Biden administration tried
to avoid war and now wants to support Ukraine without drawing the United States
or NATO into a larger conflict with Russia. Western leaders were desperate to
prevent the war, for reasons that are becoming more obvious by the day. Beyond
the massive influx of Ukrainian refugees in Europe and around the world,
Western publics are now facing rates of inflation they haven’t seen in decades,
an energy crisis, and the possibility of recession (if we haven’t already
entered one).
Rather than pandering to the Left and spelling out why
Ukraine matters in big, bold font, Duss may want to consider why he has to
treat his fellow left-wingers like children and convince them that the invasion
is, in fact, exactly what it looks like—a Russian atrocity. “In the interest of
‘steel manning’ leftist objections to the U.S. role in Ukraine,” he writes,
“I’ll look at arguments from two of the giants of the international left, two
people for whom I have tremendous respect, MIT Professor Noam Chomsky and
Brazilian opposition leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.”
The arguments advanced by these “giants” typify the
evasiveness and moral confusion that have come to characterize much of
left-wing thought on foreign policy. Chomsky incorrectly observes that Western
countries have refused to negotiate with Putin and are now “fighting Russia to
the last Ukrainian.” Duss takes issue with the insulting imputation that
“Ukrainians are merely instruments of U.S. policy” and points out that
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had already announced that his country
is willing to observe “permanent neutrality.” As far back as March,
Zelensky said he
had “cooled down” on the prospect of joining NATO, as the alliance was “not
prepared to accept Ukraine.” Here’s what Lula has had to say about
the war in Ukraine, after announcing that “it’s not just Putin who is guilty”:
The U.S. and the E.U. are also
guilty. What was the reason for the Ukraine invasion? NATO? Then the U.S. and
Europe should have said: “Ukraine won’t join NATO.” That would have solved the
problem. … That’s the argument they put forward. If they have a secret one, we
don’t know. The other issue was Ukraine joining the E.U. The Europeans could
have said: “No, now is not the moment for Ukraine to join the E.U., we’ll
wait.” They didn’t have to encourage the confrontation.
It’s as if Lula hasn’t read or listened to a single word
Vladimir Putin has written or said over the past decade. The idea that the
United States and Europe could have “solved the problem” with an announcement
that Ukraine wouldn’t join NATO is ridiculous. First, Ukraine’s early offer of
neutrality made no difference to Moscow. As former Polish Defense Minister
Radosław Sikorski explained in a debate about how
Western governments should respond to the war in May, “President Zelensky has
already conceded that Ukraine doesn’t need to join NATO—Ukraine can become a
neutral country. At which point, President Putin should have said, ‘Right, I’ve
won my war. I can go home.’ And yet, nothing like that has happened.”
Second, there’s the library of speeches and articles
Putin has generated outlining his imperialist vision for Russia—from his address after
the annexation of Crimea to his 7,000-word treatise “On
the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” (published in July 2021) and
his speech on
the eve of the invasion in February.
One of the most common deformations of left-wing thought
on foreign policy today is summarized by the political theorist Michael Walzer
in his 2018 book, A
Foreign Policy for the Left. The “default position” of the Left, Walzer
argues, is anti-interventionist and tends toward the view that “everything that
goes wrong in the world is America’s fault.” One consequence of this view is
the “denial of agency to other countries.” Instead of blaming the horrors in
Ukraine on the revanchist dictator who launched a savage imperialist war
against his neighbor, many left-wingers insist that the West is “also guilty.”
This habit has become so ingrained that declarations of Western complicity and
culpability are often the only contributions left-wing organizations and
figures make to debates about war and human rights.
Duss criticizes the “pernicious authoritarian agitprop of
The Grayzone and the like” and urges his fellow left-wingers to avoid “wasting
time with atrocity-denying grifters and click-baiting provocateurs,” but this
is fairly low-hanging fruit. The Grayzone is a cranky website
run by Max Blumenthal, which routinely publishes articles like this
one, which theorizes that Russia’s bombing of a theater in Mariupol (in
which civilians were sheltering) may have been a “false flag attack” to trigger
“direct NATO intervention.” While it’s nice to see a prominent left-wing
foreign policy advisor condemning one of the most noxious and conspiracy-laden
propaganda outlets on the Left, Duss argues that it’s “important to
differentiate between the genuine anti-war anti-imperialism of DSA [Democratic
Socialists of America] and others in the American left.” But like Chomsky and
Lula, the DSA demonstrated its faithful adherence to the default position of
the Left after the invasion of Ukraine when it issued a statement that
“reaffirms our call for the US to withdraw from NATO and to end the imperialist
expansionism that set the stage for this conflict.”
“While the failures of neoliberal order are clear to
everyone,” the statement concluded, “the ruling class is trying to build a new
world, through a dystopic transition grounded in militarism, imperialism, and
war.” In response to Rep. Conor Lamb’s criticism of
the DSA’s statement, Duss declares that the “left-punching of floundering
moderates is transparently cynical and opportunistic.” Here’s what’s actually
cynical and opportunistic: using the Russian invasion of Ukraine as an excuse
to criticize America’s “imperialist expansionism” and jeer about the “failures
of the neoliberal order.” Duss takes issue with the fact that solidarity with
the Ukrainian resistance is “hard to find in some of the statements” from the
DSA, but he maintains that, “Centering opposition to U.S. imperialism and
militarism is an entirely appropriate starting point for any U.S. left
organization, even if it’s not the whole race.”
But for many left-wing organizations, intellectuals, and
politicians around the world, resistance to Western “imperialism” is the
“whole race.” When Russia massed its forces on the Ukrainian border, former
British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn condemned… NATO. The Stop
the War Coalition, the organization Corbyn led before he became Labour leader,
made the same argument as
the DSA: “The conflict is the product of thirty years of failed policies,
including the expansion of NATO and US hegemony at the expense of other
countries as well as major wars of aggression by the USA, Britain and other
NATO powers which have undermined international law and the United Nations.”
Corbyn now says,
“Pouring arms in isn’t going to bring about a solution, it’s only going to
prolong and exaggerate this war.” Instead, Corbyn has called for the UN—as well
as the African Union and the Arab League for some reason—to resolve the
conflict. As if getting a few more negotiators involved will stop the Russian
war machine.
On the gravest foreign policy crisis of our time, much of
the Left has little to offer beyond vapid bromides about “immediate diplomacy
and de-escalation” (DSA) and the “resumption of diplomatic negotiations” (Stop
the War). Yes, we would all like diplomacy to succeed. When it fails, as it so
obviously has in the case of Ukraine, what does the Left suggest? Duss accused
critics of the DSA of “cherry-picking” its statement by focusing on the
criticism of NATO, but this was the only element of the statement that saved it
from complete meaninglessness and irrelevance. It’s bizarre to call for the
dissolution of NATO at a time when the alliance has never been more important
(and when other Western governments, like Sweden and Finland, have recognized
the necessity of joining). But at least it’s a specific policy prescription.
Demands for peace, negotiations, et cetera, on the other hand, merely present
the illusion of action and principle.
Not all of the Left has been so morally and politically
inert since the invasion. The German Greens, for instance, have been urging
their government and the rest of Europe to send the Ukrainians the means to
defend themselves. Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck and Foreign Minister Annalena
Baerbock, two leading Greens in the German Cabinet, were pushing Chancellor
Olaf Scholz to provide Ukraine with heavy weaponry when many of their
colleagues and other Western leaders were worried that this would escalate the
conflict too rapidly. Western governments eventually got around to sending heavy
weapons platforms like the US-made HIMARS precision-guided rocket system, but
not until Russia was already making significant gains in the Donbas. If other
factions of the Left are opposed to giving Ukraine the military assistance it
needs, they shouldn’t hide behind empty words like “solidarity” and
“peace”—they should explain why Ukraine isn’t worth fighting for.
Duss opens his essay with reference to an article by
the late author Christopher Hitchens published after the September 11th
attacks. “My chief concern,” Hitchens wrote, “when faced with such an
antagonist is not that there will be ‘over-reaction’ on the part of those who
will fight the adversary—which seems to be the only thing about the recent
attacks and the civilized world’s response to them that makes the left
anxious.” Duss argued that Hitchens was “totally wrong about this,” as he
believes the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were catastrophic overreactions. He
contrasts Hitchens’s point with an observation made
by Susan Sontag around the same time: “A few shreds of historical awareness,”
Sontag wrote, “might help us understand what has just happened, and what may
continue to happen.” Sontag, Duss writes, had “dared to suggest that the
attacks were partly a consequence of U.S. policies,” and her response was “more
courageous and prescient than anything [Hitchens] would ever write again.”
Here’s a bit of Sontag’s article that
Duss decides against reproducing two decades later:
Where is the acknowledgment that
this was not a “cowardly” attack on “civilization” or “liberty” or “humanity”
or “the free world” but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower,
undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How
many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq? And if the
word “cowardly” is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill
from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to
die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally
neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday’s
slaughter, they were not cowards.
Which is to say that American pilots were the real
cowards, while the theocratic ghouls who flew civilian airliners into buildings
full of civilians were the courageous resisters of the American empire. Duss
thinks this hideous sentiment was “courageous and prescient.” Al-Qaeda did, in
fact, declare war on civilization, liberty, humanity, and the free world on
September 11th, and the insistence that the massacre of 3,000 civilians in the
United States was merely a response to American foreign policy isn’t just
myopic and ahistorical. It’s an ugly misattribution of responsibility that
elevates the strategic rationalizations of mass murderers to the status of
legitimate grievances.
Despite his criticism, Duss acknowledges that there was
one line from Hitchens’s post-September 11th essay that he’s “been thinking a
lot about lately.” Hitchens argued that the Left’s arguments after the
atrocities in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania “boil down to this:
Nothing will make us fight against an evil if that fight forces us to go to the
same corner as our own government.” Judging by the Left’s response to the war
in Ukraine, Hitchens was more prescient than Duss is willing to admit.
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