Are liberal hawks back?
Maybe. But there's a difference between Ukraine in 2022 and Iraq in 2002.
At The Atlantic, Dominic Tierney makes the case — in a piece titled “The Rise of the Liberal Hawks” — that progressives have overcome a longtime reflexive opposition to American militarism.
Progressives typically see war as inherently murderous and dehumanizing—sapping progress, curtailing free expression, and channeling resources into the “military-industrial complex.” The left led the opposition to the Vietnam War and the Iraq War and condemned American war crimes from the My Lai massacre to Abu Ghraib. Historically, progressive critics have charged the military with a litany of sins, including discrimination against LGBTQ soldiers1 and a reliance on recruiting in poor communities.
But Trump2 and Ukraine, he says, have changed everything:
To be sure, there’s a leftist fringe in the United States that still considers America the world’s evil empire and remains deeply hostile to its military power. That fringe includes the linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky, who praised Trump as a model statesman for pushing for a negotiated peace in Ukraine. But the bulk of the left has shown remarkable solidarity with the Ukrainian cause. Liberals who once protested the Iraq War now urge Washington to dispatch more rocket launchers to defeat Russian imperialism. Representative Jamaal Bowman of New York, a member of the progressive caucus, tweeted: “We unequivocally stand with the global Ukrainian community in the wake of Putin’s attack.”
Tierney tells a story that doesn’t sit quite right to me. Probably because — for those of us of a certain age — the term “liberal hawks” sends a chill up our spines.
It’s true that “the left” led opposition to the Iraq War. Even at the outset of the invasion, in 2003, just 40 percent of Democrats supported the effort. But the pro-war effort was augmented by a notable brigade of liberal hawks — folks like Christopher Hitchens, Peter Beinart at The New Republic, and (rather notably) Jeffrey Goldberg … who is now editor of The Atlantic. 3
Would the U.S. have invaded without establishment liberals backing the charge? Maybe. But maybe not. In any case, the left side of the political spectrum was more mixed on the issue than Tierney presents here. The contrast between then and now isn’t quite so clean as he suggests.
On the other hand, there probably is a contrast between how folks on the left are treating Iraq and Ukraine. And it seems obvious to me there are two major reasons why:
* The U.S. — despite a good deal of intelligence and weapons aid to Ukraine — is still at something of an arm’s length from the conflict there. Americans aren’t directly fighting, dying, or killing to defend Kyiv from Putin.4
* In Ukraine, America is on the side of the defenders against agression. In Iraq, we were the aggressors.
My own sense is that the dovishness of the American left has largely been a function of anti-imperialism — a sense that a hubristic, trigger-happy United States often goes abroad in search of monsters to destroy, regardless of whether those monsters actually pose much threat to Americans or the country’s legitimate national security interests. In Iraq, that sense was exacerbated by the fact that the supposed security interests involved — weapons of mass destruction — didn’t actually exist. (Similarly, in Vietnam, the “domino theory” turned out to be a pile of horsepucky.) The result: We killed people, we tortured people, and we unleashed chaos that still hasn’t fully been resolved … and all for no good reason. It’s not just that American imperialism is bad and immoral in and of itself. It also produces bad, immoral results.
Put more simply: To be anti-imperialist is to be against wars of aggression.
That means sympathy to Ukraine and its defense against the Russia invasion is actually very consistent with opposition to the war in Iraq, not a shift from it. There are some purely pacifist people out there — I came of age among Mennonites, and their teachings still influence me — but most people recognize the difference between punching somebody in the nose and blocking that punch.
So I’m not sure that means liberals have become “hawks,” at least not as I’ve thought of the term. Hawks would probably argue that they’re for a robust self-defense, but over the course of my lifetime it’s looked mostly as though those folks are actually spoiling for a fight — forever happy to magnify a potential threat and afterward call their aggression “self-defense” if it does the job.
But that means I worry about what this moment means for lefty anti-imperialists like myself.
I’m worried our natural sympathy for Ukraine’s self-defense will get twisted into backing for a more aggressive project of America diminishing Russia’s power through Ukraine. I don’t think that’s happened yet, or at least it’s not the prime reason that Ukraine is still waging war instead of suing for peace. But it’s something to cautious about.
I’m also worried that we forget our history too easily — that if there really is a new generation of “liberal hawks,” its leaders and loudest voices will overlook why the previous generation’s liberal hawks soon ended up regretting the disaster they helped prod America into creating in Iraq.
Tierney, of course, makes liberal hawkishness sound like a good thing. “Zelensky, Ukrainian progressives, and the European Union?” he writes. “Or Putin, Trump, and Tucker Carlson? The left picked the right side.” Maybe. Let’s just hope it doesn’t get distorted into something ugly, stupid and disastrous … again.
Top o’ the pops
This is a weird thing to point out. Liberal criticism of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” was definitely a critique of homophobic policies, but given that it was a push for the military to be more inclusive, it wasn’t exactly anti-militaristic.
I’ll leave that alone in this piece, but I’ve written about how the anti-war impulses of the Trumpist right are actually very weird: https://theweek.com/ukraine/1009840/why-progressives-should-be-cautious-about-the-anti-war-right
Some coincidence, that.
That might not be an entirely correct perception. My friend Bonnie Kristian: “Are we at war in Ukraine? If we swapped places — if Russian apparatchiks admitted helping to kill American generals or sink a U.S. Navy vessel — I doubt we’d find much ambiguity there. At the very least, what the United States is doing in Ukraine is not not war. If we have so far avoided calling it war and can continue to do so, maybe that’s only because we’ve become so uncertain of the meaning of the word.” https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/20/opinion/international-world/ukraine-war-america.html