The liberals’ war

On April 5, the U.S. House of Representatives passed non-binding resolution 831, titled “Calling on the United States Government to uphold the founding democratic principles of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and establish a Center for Democratic Resilience within the headquarters of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.” It’s a truly remarkable document, that you can read in full here.

The resolution may have been non-binding, but that doesn’t make it any less ideological.It lauds NATO for its commitment to democracy and “collective defense.”It notes that “Russia’s full-scale invasion of sovereign and democratic Ukraine underscores the importance of placing shared democratic values at the heart of NATO’s Strategic Concept” and “reaffirms its unequivocal support” for the alliance.

For socialists, another notable fact about this resolution is the unanimous Democratic vote for it—including every member of “the Squad” and all self-identified members of the Democratic Socialists of America. Even the non-socialist liberal Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.)—who has the distinction of being the only representative to vote against the 2001 post-9/11 resolution that became a blank check for “forever wars” since—voted for it.

As passed, the resolution is a whitewash of NATO’s history and reality. From this resolution, you wouldn’t know that one of NATO’s founding members, Portugal, existed as a fascist regime until the revolution overthrew it in 1974/75. Or that Turkey and Greece, members since the 1950s, experienced years of military rule that didn’t lead to their expulsion from the “democratic” alliance. Or that its core “democratic” members carried out multiple colonial wars and supported military coups throughout the Cold War.Or that today, it includes among its members such authoritarian governments as Poland’s and Hungary’s. NATO is a military alliance, and any “democratic” rhetoric it spouts is little more than camouflage for its real aims.

In liberal circles, support for Ukraine is ubiquitous. In liberal neighborhoods, Ukrainian flags adorn houses and apartments, right next to Black Lives Matter signs. Liberal NGOs organize rallies and raise money for Ukrainian solidarity. There’s nothing wrong with these genuine gestures of solidarity with the people of Ukraine.

But there’s an entirely different set of calculations taking place at the level of the liberal elites who populate the cable news shows, the opinion pages, and most importantly, the U.S. government. For them, the Ukraine-Russia war is the chance to find a unifying cause that fits with their world view of warmed-over Cold War nostalgia.

In arecent Baffler article, Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins noted the affinity of figures like Yale historian Timothy Snyder or Atlantic author Anne Applebaum—both treated as sages in their multiple appearances on the liberal MSNBC network—with the liberal ideologues of the 1940s and 1950s whose opposition to “totalitarianism” led them to ally with the U.S. side of the Cold War.

Snyder and Applebaum and their friends—including a number of “never Trump” neoconservatives who were propagandists for George W. Bush’s 2003 war in Iraq—have made the rounds for years to decry Trumpism and authoritarian politics sweeping Western Europe. Now they are in full war cry, worried that the “West” will shrink from confronting Putin and Russia, as Applebaum warned in a recent Atlantic article:

How should the West respond? There is only one rule: We cannot be afraid. Russia wants us to be afraid—so afraid that we are crippled by fear, that we cannot make decisions, that we withdraw altogether, leaving the way open for a Russian conquest of Ukraine, and eventually of Poland or even further into Europe. Putin remembers very well an era when Soviet troops controlled the eastern half of Germany. But the threat to those countries will not decrease if Russia carries out massacres in Ukraine. It will grow.

Instead of fear, we should focus on a Ukrainian victory. Once we understand that this is the goal, then we can think about how to achieve it, whether through temporary boycotts of Russian gas, oil, and coal; military exercises elsewhere in the world that will distract Russian troops; humanitarian airlifts on the scale of 1948 Berlin; or more and better weapons.

The specific tactics will be determined by those who best understand diplomacy and military strategy. But the strategy has to be clear.

Unlike socialists who defend Ukraine’s right to self-determination and support its military struggle against Russia, the neo-Cold Warriors are less concerned with defending Ukraine’s freedom than they are with the implications of the Ukraine-Russia war for “the West,” NATO and the U.S.-dominated global political and economic regime.

The sort of anti-authoritarian politics that mainstream liberals embrace is long on bellicosity and short on policies or activism to address the erosion of working-class living standards and democratic rights. Former President Barack Obama’s “tempered liberalism” exemplified this, wrote Steinmetz-Jenkins:

Obama’s national security advisers described his foreign policy as “pragmatism over ideology.” In practice, this transformed an electoral campaign predicated on opposition to the Iraq War and cutting taxes into a presidency replete with forever wars and neoliberal economic policies. Tempered liberalism engenders enemies, undermines welfare, and, in turn, brings out the very forces that it now struggles to defeat.

Take the Biden administration, which is clearly feeling more confident in pushing its agenda on Ukraine than on winning “Build Back Better,” voting rights or new COVID-19 policies. In the space of a few weeks, and with little congressional opposition, the U.S. government has pushed out billions in military aid to Ukraine and its NATO allies. At the same time, it’s begging the Congress not to cut off payments for COVID vaccines, treatments and testing. And all of Biden’s speeches about standing up to authoritarianism in Europe ring hollow when paired with the administration’s passivity in the face of Republican attacks on voting rights and abortion rights.

In case anyone gets the wrong idea that the Biden administration is prioritizing the needs of ordinary Ukrainians over those of ordinary Americans, they should recall that the U.S. has offered asylum to only 100,000 Ukrainian refugees. At the time of writing, Poland has accepted nearly three million Ukrainians.

Early in the war, some pro-Democratic Party pundits speculated that the Russia-Ukraine conflict would give Biden the opportunity to “reboot” his presidency. Two months into the war, there’s scant evidence of that. But it persists as a delusion among liberals—and even many in the social democratic left—who think that the Russia-Ukraine war is a template for creating a “popular front” in defense of democracy against authoritarianism.For an effective demolition of that argument, see Australian socialist Mick Armstrong’s recent article here.

The recent elections in Hungary and Serbia—and the forthcoming presidential election in France—put these politics to the test. Opposition figures in Hungary and Serbia tried to defeat the historically pro-Russia authoritarian incumbents by trying to build pro-Western “democratic fronts” spanning the neoliberal center to the social democratic parties. In both cases, the authoritarian incumbents routed the challengers. However cynically Hungary’s Urban and Serbia’s Vucic presented themselves as opponents of the Russia’s war, they matched a popular mood that wasn’t interested in signing up to a NATO-led crusade. Serbians haven’t forgotten that NATO warplanes bombed their cities for 77 days in 1999. The French election did not play out in the same way, but that didn’t make a victory for the Macronist “center” a decisive blow against the far right or for democracy.

The British radical Paul Mason has recently argued for a similar “popular front” or “democratic front” strategy that includes even calls to democratize NATO. Armstrong’s article, quoted above, aptly put this sort of demand in the realm of “fantasy land.”And while Mason was simply advocating this in a post on Medium, the Democrats and their “elected” DSA enablers actually voted to endorse NATO as a force for democracy. That’s the cul-de-sac where imperial liberalism leads.