We Can Support Ukraine and Admit the Racism in US Foreign Policy At the Same Time

In a 2016 essay, the journalist Howard French wrote about the moment he convinced his bosses at the New York Times to make him the newspaper’s correspondent in Tokyo. Upon hearing the news, another Black journalist at the Times exclaimed, “Howard has reached the river!” The coverage of Ukraine shows how difficult crossing that racial boundary is, and why it’s so important to the way Americans see the world.

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But first a word about next week’s Zoom call. We’ll be back at our normal time, Friday at Noon EST. As always, paid subscribers will get the link on Wednesday and then the video the following week. Our guest will be Spencer Ackerman, author of Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump, and a terrific newsletter called Forever Wars. We’re going to talk about how Ukraine has changed the American foreign policy debate and how this moment compares to the one after September 11. I’ve been struggling to find a language that expresses both my revulsion at Russia’s aggression and the recognition that my own country has committed aggression too—aggression that has helped Putin rationalize his crimes. I suspect Spencer will be able to help with that. Join us.

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In moments like this—when an international crisis dominates the news—you realize how bifurcated American political commentary is between domestic and foreign affairs. It’s like a football team. When the conversation turns to events beyond America’s shores, one set of pundits leave the field and another replaces them. Except in this case, the two units have strikingly different compositions. The contrast was particularly noticeable when the media briefly pivoted from Ukraine to cover Joe Biden’s selection of Ketanji Brown Jackson to be the first Black woman on the Supreme Court. When cable talk shows and newspaper opinion pages covered her nomination, they showcased a multiracial set of voices. When they toggled back to Ukraine, the diversity largely disappeared.

The Ukraine crisis offers a case study both in how these divisions are enforced, and in how they impoverish America’s foreign policy debate. On February 27, Nikole Hannah-Jones, founder of the 1619 Project, which reinterprets American history by centering slavery and the Black experience, tweeted that Europe is “a geopolitical fiction to separate it from Asia and so the alarm about a European, or civilized, or First World nation being invaded is a dog whistle to tell us we should care because they are like us.” The backlash was fierce and contained an unmistakable message: You’re out of your lane. Fox News reported that “Critics blasted Hannah-Jones over the claims, mocking her references to race amid the ongoing war in Ukraine.” Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby claimed that Hannah-Jones’ tweet showed that the “only tool” she has to interpret the world “is racial grievance.” The implication is that race is irrelevant to American perceptions of Ukraine, and that writers like Hannah-Jones who focus on it are exporting their pet obsession into a foreign policy arena in which it does not belong.

But race does help explain America’s response to Ukraine. It helps explain why so many reporters have expressed shock that these atrocities could occur in Europe. It helps explain why Congress authorizes military aid to help Ukrainians resist foreign military occupation while penalizing Palestinians—who in the West Bank have lived under foreign military occupation for more than a half-century—merely for urging non-violent boycotts. It helps explain why the Biden administration is offering save haven to Ukrainians but not to migrants from war-ravaged African countries like Ethiopia and Mali. When discussing domestic policy, progressive commentators often note that American police respond more harshly to Black protesters than white ones and that the media describes opioid-addicted rural white Americans as victims but drug-addicted urban Black Americans as depraved. Why wouldn’t these racial disparities shape American foreign policy too?

So if race does shape America’s response to Ukraine, then why the outrage? I suspect it’s because critics fear that Hannah-Jones’ critique could undermine America’s faith in its moral superiority—a faith they consider essential to resisting Putin’s aggression. Again and again in recent days, hawkish pundits and politicians have used the Ukraine crisis to rally American self-confidence. After Russia began its full-scale invasion, President Biden announced that “America stands up to bullies. We stand up for freedom. This is who we are.” In the New York Times, Bret Stephens declared that, “This Is a Moment for America to Believe in Itself Again.” David Brooks exulted that because of Ukrainian bravery, “There’s been a restored faith in the West.”

Beneath these assertions lie an old anxiety: That if Americans focus too much on our sins, we’ll lose the faith in ourselves necessary to defend our position in the world. In his 1964 book, Suicide of the West, James Burnham, one of the most influential conservative intellectuals of the Cold War, warned that unless Americans believe “Western civilization is superior to other civilizations and societies, it is not worth defending; unless Westerners are willing to use their own power, the West cannot be defended.” If you think doubts about America’s righteousness threaten America’s ability to defend itself, then you’re likely to fear admitting Black Americans into America’s foreign policy debates because Black Americans have particular reason to doubt that righteousness. In The Fire Next Time, published one year before Suicide of the West, James Baldwin wrote that, “The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed that collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace.” Baldwin describes this iconoclasm as an advantage. But for Burnham and his successors today, it’s a threat. It’s dangerous enough to let the 1619 Project—which challenges the myth that America’s founders were “freedom-loving heroes”—into America’s schools. It’s even more dangerous to let its message permeate the Pentagon, State Department, and National Security Council.

If acknowledging American racism and supporting Ukraine really were incompatible, then Americans would face a terrible quandary because we would have to choose between facing the truth about ourselves and supporting a people who need and deserve our support. But it’s a false choice. Hannah-Jones did not argue that, in the name of color-blindness, Americans should treat Ukrainians as callously as we treat Ethiopians and Palestinians. To the contrary, she argued in her very next tweet that, “We should care about Ukraine. But not because it is European, or the people appear white, or they are ‘civilized’ and not ‘impoverished.’ All people deserve to be free and to be welcomed when their countries are at war.” Since the Ukraine crisis began, there’s been a lot of talk about the supposed parallels between the anti-war left and the anti-war right. But Hannah-Jones’ argument is the opposite of the one Tucker Carlson makes. He insists that Americans cannot afford to worry about Ukraine because we must focus on problems at home. (And by “problems” he generally means non-white immigrants.) She argues that Americans can worry about both Ukraine and countries outside of Europe that are suffering oppression and war. He wants to contract our sphere of moral concern. She wants to expand it. 

Expanding that sphere of concern doesn’t make America weaker. It makes America stronger because it makes America a more credible moral voice. People around the world, especially in the Global South, are acutely aware of America’s racial double standards. But because America’s foreign policy debate includes so few people of color, those double standards often go unacknowledged here at home. Which leaves Americans unaware of how hypocritical the US looks overseas. That hypocrisy makes it easier for Putin to justify his aggression. Just look at his speech on February 24 announcing his full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It’s filled with references to America’s violations of international law, particularly in the Middle East.

In 1967, when Martin Luther King, Jr. condemned the Vietnam War, he too was ferociously attacked for straying into the overwhelmingly white precincts of American foreign policy. From the perspective of people like Burnham, King’s assertion that the United States was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world” constituted a threat to the moral confidence Americans needed to wage their struggle against Soviet communism. But far from undermining American strength, King’s efforts greatly enhanced it. For millions around the world, the civil rights movement did more than any self-congratulatory presidential speech to show that there really was a moral difference between the United States and the Soviet Union. In 1988, as East Germans launched protests that would help bring down the Berlin Wall, some sang “We Shall Overcome.”

What Americans need to believe in in this moment is the principles of liberal democracy and self-determination for which Ukrainians fight. We need to believe in them enough to support them even when, as in Israel-Palestine, the people fighting for them are doing so in the face of opposition not from Moscow but from Washington. Believing in these universal principles is very different from believing in America or “the West.” And the more people like Nikole Hannah-Jones cross the river, and integrate America’s foreign policy debate, the easier it will be to tell the difference.

Other Stuff:

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), David Klion profiles Roman Abramovich, the Russian oligarch who Yad Vashem is trying to keep off America’s sanctions list.

Amidst the flood of news about Ukraine, I’ve found a Latvian podcast called “Eastern Border” uniquely valuable. Its quirky host translates documents from Russia that provide insights into the war I haven’t heard anywhere else.

I’m still binging Timothy Snyder. Here’s a terrific lecture he gave last week on “Russia and Ukraine: The Origins of the Crisis.”

Evidently Florida Governor Ron DeSantis hasn’t heard of the French Resistance.

This Indian talk show has the perhaps most hilarious ending I’ve ever seen. 

See you on Friday,

Peter