This is part of our weeklong series marking the one-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, February 24, 2022. See all of the stories here.
The restrainer community within the United States runs the political gamut. From democratic socialists on the left to realists in the center to libertarians on the right, restrainers embrace a diversity of political ideologies.
While in general, each subgroup of restrainers argues that the United States should do less in the world, there are significant differences between and within these political communities about exactly what this “less” entails.
The United States’ arming of Ukraine to fend off the Russian invasion that began in February 2022 provides a useful means to explore some of the fissures among left-wing restrainers, an especially important topic given that the left is likely to serve as a bulwark of the restrainer community long into the future.
In particular, this piece will focus on disagreements within the left concerning whether or not the United States should send weapons to Ukraine.
But before delving into this topic, it is important to be specific about what I mean by the term “left.” Broadly speaking, when I use “left” I’m referring to what some have labeled the Bernie Sanders-wing of the Democratic Party — people who self-identify, in whole or in part, as “democratic socialists.” When it comes to foreign policy, as Cornell Law School professor Aziz Rana recently noted, what unites most democratic socialists is that “many … offer a general critique of U.S. primacy and faith in the objectives of the national security state.”
Nevertheless, when left-wing restrainers move from the realm of theory to practice, they wind up embracing significantly divergent foreign policy positions. Nowhere is this more apparent than in how different groups of self-identified leftists have responded to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
On one side stand those, like Sen. Sanders’ former foreign policy advisor Matthew Duss, who insist that left-wing principles necessitate the United States’ arming of Ukraine. On the other stand those, like myself, who argue that in the medium- and long-term, sending weapons to Ukraine will strengthen U.S. primacy and the national security state that supports it, ultimately preventing the achievement of left-wing goals. Exploring the reasons why both sides reach their conclusions helps illuminate divisions within the community of left-wing restrainers and highlights potential future areas of intra-left conflict.
As the above suggests, the following discussion will not focus on who was “responsible” for the war, whether the war is an imperialist one, or which side did what when. Instead, it will explore a question more directly related to policy: Should the United States intervene in the conflict?
Duss has made the case for arming Ukraine in two pieces: an essay published last June in The New Republic and an interview with the journalist Isaac Chotiner released by The New Yorker last November. In brief, Duss argues that the United States should support Ukraine for four reasons. First, he maintains that the left-wing “values of social justice, human security and equality, and democracy” will be best served by the United States shipping weapons to Ukraine. Second, while he admits the myriad failures of recent U.S. foreign policy — as he states, “our political class advocates military violence with a regularity and ease that is psychopathic” — he nevertheless insists “that the Biden administration is not the Bush administration,” meaning that the public can trust that President Biden and his advisers, who have “acted with restraint and care not to get drawn into a wider war with Russia,” will continue to do so in the future.
Third, Duss avows that, though the history of the so-called “rules-based international order” is laden with hypocrisy, the creation of any just global order in the future will rest on “preventing powerful countries from invading and obliterating weaker ones.” Simply put, defending international law today will help build a better world tomorrow. Finally, Duss invokes the principle of “solidarity,” averring that “we should acknowledge what our Ukrainian colleagues and others from the region are saying,” and what they are saying is that they want U.S. weapons. To ignore these entreaties, Duss argues, would be to abandon “our commitment to colleagues around the world who require more than just a call to stop the war.”
Is it true that left-wing values can only be served by arming Ukraine? To my mind, it depends on what timescale one adopts. In the immediate term, it’s difficult to deny the horrors that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has caused. And it’s probably accurate to say that if the United States never sent weapons, these horrors would have been intensified. Nonetheless, when making U.S. foreign policy, one cannot only look to the immediate consequences of a given action; one must also focus on how a policy affects the structure of what historians have termed the American Empire — an empire that has done enormous damage to the world.
When one takes structure into account, it’s clear that the empire and its constituent parts have been strengthened by the arming of Ukraine.
As Eric Lipton, Michael Crowley, and John Ismay recently wrote in The New York Times, the war in Ukraine, combined with new fears of great power competition, has impelled a sharp rise in U.S. military spending, to the degree that such “spending … is on track to reach its highest level in inflation-adjusted terms since the peaks in the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars between 2008 and 2011.” To take two examples cited in this piece, Lockheed Martin “booked more than $950 million worth of its own missile military orders from the Pentagon in part to refill stockpiles being used in Ukraine,” while “the Army has awarded Raytheon Technologies more than $2 billion in contracts to deliver missile systems to expand or replenish weapons used to help Ukraine.” As Raytheon CEO Gregory J. Hayes gleefully noted, “we went through six years of Stingers in 10 months.”
As this indicates, sending weapons to Ukraine enriches and strengthens the U.S. military-industrial complex. This should concern those aware of the U.S. Empire’s history.
Duss’s second point is that the Biden administration is different from the Bush administration, and we therefore don’t have to worry as much about Biden launching an “endless war” in Ukraine. To some degree this is true. From what we can tell, Biden didn’t seek a war in Ukraine, which makes him very different from Bush, who started wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Nevertheless, the history of war shows time and again that efforts initially intended to be limited in scope can easily expand. To take a recent example, the NATO intervention in Libya in 2011 rapidly expanded from a mission to protect “at risk” civilians to an effort to depose Muammar Qaddafi. Wars oftentimes go in unexpected directions, and it is impossible to predict how a given politician will react to the course a war might take.
Moreover, as happened in Libya, politicians will often undersell the potential extent of an operation or commitment in order to maximize public support for their effort. Given these realities, it’s not difficult to imagine a world where the United States winds up indefinitely footing the bill for Ukrainian defense, diverting resources that could potentially be used for welfare to weapons.
Duss’s third point is that any just world order will depend on countries not invading each other. This is, of course, correct. The question, though, is how best the United States could help build such a world order in the medium- and long-term. In my opinion, the way to do so is for the United States to significantly reduce its presence abroad. Most nations, especially those in the Global South, simply don’t trust Americans.
This is why, as the Quincy Institute’s Sarang Shidore recently pointed out, “most Global South states, while opposed to the Russian invasion [of Ukraine], have not backed the United States on its strategies of sanctioning Russia or seeking a defeat of Moscow. Some have explicitly criticized what they see as Washington’s double standards.” Put another way, the Global South, for good reason, has little faith in Americans, and sending weapons to Ukraine isn’t going to change that. If the United States wants to construct a more just world, Yankees must come home.
Duss’s final point is that the U.S. left must express “solidarity” with Ukrainians and send them weapons when they ask for them. There are two problems with this position. First, there is no agreed upon criterion within the United States to determine which populations should be listened to when asking for weapons and which should be ignored. Any reasonable person would admit that simply asking for weapons doesn’t mean that a group should get them.
Second, there is no left-wing transnational organization able to determine democratically whether shipping weapons is in the interest of the global left, and thus whether shipping weapons in a given instance expresses “solidarity” or not. As Rana notes, leftists today “have few representative organizations that speak on behalf of mobilized publics and could work hand in glove to develop a transnational agenda or appropriate responses to international crises. This means that leftists do not have any clear political agent [able] to serve as the engine of transformation.” Without such a left-wing agent, it is unclear how left “solidarity” could actually be expressed beyond what any given individual thinks is a solidaristic action.
As the above suggests, there are significant disagreements within the U.S. left as to whether the United States should send arms to Ukraine. These differences reflect divergent opinions on a diversity of issues related to politics, international order, and, in the final analysis, history. These differences will probably continue to divide the left into the foreseeable future.
Nonetheless, if U.S. leftists approach each other in an honest and open matter, they will hopefully be able to reach some sort of consensus about how they should relate to each other, their country, and U.S. foreign policy in a moment that lacks a leftist organization able to speak on behalf of the “left” as a whole. It is important that they do so, as the left will serve as a core part of the restrainer community for years to come.
