The Liberals’ War

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Wednesday, August 09, 2023

 

We often are reminded that among elected Republicans, those who question or oppose additional support for Ukraine in its war effort are a minority. But among those who elect Republicans, skepticism about America’s foreign policy commands a healthy majority. Republican voters are more anti-war than their elected officials, which might explain why the few elected officials who differ from the Atlantic, the Brookings Institution, and the foreign-policy blob in D.C.— people such as Rand Paul and J. D. Vance — are willing to make so much noise about it. Seventy-one percent of Republicans oppose more funding for Ukraine. It was precisely anticipation of this arriving freight train of Republican skepticism that drove House minority leader Kevin McCarthy and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell to give the Biden administration more money than it requested for Ukraine before the last Congress adjourned.

 

There is also no longer any sign that skepticism about Ukraine will be an electoral anchor for Republicans. It’s something that was obvious to anyone who could detect the forces of political gravity acting over the last 18 months. CNN’s latest polling on the war shows that a majority of Americans oppose giving Ukraine more funding. The public is also skeptical about giving weapons, not a surprise when Ukraine is using them up so quickly that the U.S. is depleting its own stockpiles. According to the poll:

 

When asked specifically about types of assistance the US could provide to Ukraine, there is broader support for help with intelligence gathering (63%) and military training (53%) than for providing weapons (43%), alongside very slim backing for US military forces to participate in combat operations (17%).

 

But what’s really noticeable is the ideological split. The most progressive voters are the most supportive of the U.S. joining itself to the Ukrainian cause.

 

On providing additional funding, liberal Democrats are far and away the most supportive, 74% back it compared with 51% of moderate or conservative Democrats. Among Republicans, about three-quarters of conservatives oppose new funding (76%) compared with 61% of moderate or liberal Republicans.

 

Independents mostly say the US has done enough to help Ukraine (56%) and that they oppose additional funding (55%).

 

How did Ukraine become the liberals’ war? Some of it is just partisanship. The Biden administration owns the Ukraine project. And so opposition to Biden could lead conservatives to be more critical of his foreign policy.

 

But it goes deeper than that. Conservatives have been divided over foreign policy since the end of the Cold War for understandable reasons. In the Cold War, many conservatives abandoned America’s traditional foreign-policy restraint to meet the emergency threat of global communism, which had gained so much from World War II. When the Cold War ended, there were two options. Some conservatives remained committed to the Cold War institutions they had built up to fight it. And some conservatives reverted to the pre–World War II skepticism about American adventurism and liberal idealism that had been informed by ugly experience in the Spanish–American War.

 

The second camp is growing more, now that those Cold War institutions have become captured by progressives. Instead of advancing the national interests of an anti-communist alliance, these institutions are acting as another nexus of power for protecting the class interests of progressive bureaucrats and exercising their power explicitly to harm elected conservative governments. See how the alliance threatened to harm Poland’s socially conservative government for its internal education policies.

 

America’s military itself often appears to the Right to be captured by progressives. By the time we left Afghanistan, it wasn’t just U.S. military personnel and contractors, but heavily funded NGOs that were pushing progressive ideas onto Afghans, by, for instance, inventing gender-neutral terms in Pashto and Dari.

 

Even the mission in Ukraine has been explicitly defined by the Biden administration in terms of making Ukraine part of a more progressive world order. The U.S.–Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership was signed in November 2021, and its military commitments are seen by some analysts as the final cause of Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine. But the document goes beyond military exigencies and outlines specific goals for the cultural politics of Ukraine going forward, including “advancing respect for human rights, and fundamental freedoms in accordance with international commitments and obligations, as well as fighting racism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and discrimination, including against Roma and members of the LGBTQI+ communities.”

 

Liberals who dismissed Mitt Romney for calling Russia our chief geopolitical foe in 2012 began changing their tune just a year later, as Russia passed its own “don’t say gay”–style bills, and Obama began casting Russia as a foreign proxy for hated conservatives at home. That has only increased as progressive institutions blamed Russia for the election of Donald Trump and made out Trump to be a grand ally of Putin, even though our relations with Russia continued to worsen under his administration.

 

The political dynamic of conservative skepticism and liberal idealism in Ukraine really shouldn’t surprise anyone. Just as during the Cold War, conservatives got over their allegiance to Washington’s farewell address and a policy of hemispheric peacekeeping dating back to John Quincy Adams, progressives and liberals became skeptical of using American military power abroad only when it was being deployed against communists, with whom they morally sympathized. Now that the communist threat is gone, progressives are happy to take up their abandoned legacy from Woodrow Wilson and deploy America’s power as a revolutionary force around the world, empowering a class of bureaucrats to educate the benighted world out of every prejudice.