Why America’s Loudest anti-Ukrainian Voices are Right-Wing

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion last month, I’ve read several incisive criticisms of the American left for not sufficiently supporting Ukraine. (Professor Greg Afinogenov, who wrote one of them, was my guest on last week’s Zoom call.) But remember this: The two most influential Americans who deny a clear moral difference between Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky both hail from the political right. They’re Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump. There is no host at MSNBC, nor any congressional Democrat, who has been as dismissive of Ukrainian democracy or as complimentary of Vladimir Putin. It’s worth asking why.    

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But first, a word about this week’s Zoom call. It will be back at its usual time, Friday at Noon ET. Paid subscribers will get the link this Wednesday and the video the following week. Our guest will be my CUNY colleague, Professor Alia Malek, author of the remarkable book, The Home That Was Our Country: A Memoir of Syria and an essay earlier this year in The New York Times Magazine about the struggle to bring Syrian officials who committed war crimes to justice. We’ll talk about the ways Russia’s aggression in Syria foreshadowed its aggression in Ukraine and how the media covers war differently when it occurs in the Middle East as opposed to Europe. Join us.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Back to the left, the right, and Ukraine. Before explaining why there’s more indifference to Ukraine’s plight on the American right, let me explain what I mean by indifference. It’s not anti-Ukrainian to say the country should be geopolitically neutral or to suggest that NATO expansion bears some of the blame for the current war. What is anti-Ukrainian is equating the government in Kyiv—a flawed democracy being invaded and bombed by its stronger neighbor—and the Russian police state that’s doing the invading and bombing. So when Carlson says Ukraine is “not a democracy” but a “tyranny,” that’s anti-Ukrainian. And when Trump calls Russia’s invading army a “peace force,” that’s anti-Ukrainian. There’s a crucial difference between debating the best way to stop Russian aggression and justifying it.

There are figures on the American left who hold views similar to Carlson and Trump’s. (By “left”—and I recognize this is a crude shorthand—I mean people who think promoting equality is more important than preserving traditional values.) If you search the Web, you can find leftists who believe that neo-Nazis dominate the Ukrainian military and that the Western media is inventing Russian atrocities because it wants war. But they’re not in Congress and they don’t host shows on Cable TV.

Why is that? Why do right-wing anti-Ukrainian voices enjoy more prominence than left-wing ones? The answer is that when it comes to foreign policy, the American right and the American left tend to speak different languages. American conservatives are more comfortable with the vocabulary of national interest. They’re more comfortable with the United States asking, about any given overseas event, what’s in it for us? Trump’s entire critique of the “globalist” foreign policy class was that America’s leaders did not ask that question forcefully enough.

Nationalist language can justify extremely hawkish policies when conservatives feel America is under threat. After 9/11, many conservatives claimed that Iraq posed such a grave risk to American security that the US should attack. Some say the same today about the prospect of Iran getting a nuclear bomb. But in the wake of disillusioning wars like Afghanistan and Iraq, influential conservatives have deployed nationalist language to argue that Americans need not care about things that happen far from our shores. When it comes to Russia and Ukraine, that’s Carlson’s strongest conviction: That America has no dog in the fight. In the words of J.D. Vance, a Carlson ally running a Trumpy campaign for Senate in Ohio, “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another. I do care about the fact that in my community right now the leading cause of death among 18-45-year-olds is Mexican fentanyl that’s coming across the southern border.” When Carlson says Ukraine isn’t a democracy or Putin isn’t so bad, he’s not offering a considered judgment about each country’s political system. He’s trying to muddy the mainstream media’s Zelensky-is-good, Putin-is-bad narrative enough to convince Americans that they need not care what happens between the two governments. Like Trump, Carlson’s basic view is that all countries—democracies and dictatorships alike—are just out for themselves. America should be too. When the US falls prey to sentimental illusions about defending democracy or opposing aggression in far-off lands, it gets screwed.

Most Beltway conservatives reject Carlson and Vance’s indifference to Ukraine’s plight. And Carlson and Vance’s perspective has lost ground as a result of Russia’s grotesque crimes. But among grassroots conservatives it retains significant appeal. Liz Cheney’s foreign policy views may enjoy more traction among Washington Republicans than do Carlson’s. But she’s at greater risk of losing her seat than he is of losing his show.    

Leftists don’t generally talk about Ukraine like Carlson, Trump, or Vance because they’re not as comfortable with the language of raw nationalism. Going back to Karl Marx, leftists tend to emphasize class, a category that cuts across borders. And as citizens of a rich nation, leftist Americans generally want the US to do more, not less, for people whose countries are suffering. When asked whether the US should open its borders to people fleeing persecution or spend more on foreign aid, Democrats are dramatically more likely than Republicans to say yes. It’s this moral universalism that keeps Rachel Maddow and Bernie Sanders from saying, as Vance did, that they don’t care about Ukraine.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that leftists necessarily support America’s wars. But when they oppose them they generally employ a more universalistic vocabulary. They tend to argue not that America shouldn’t care about other countries but that its interventions are harming them as well as the US itself. What powered progressive opposition to the Vietnam War was the conviction that it was harming both Americans, whose sons were dying and whose tax dollars were being squandered, and Vietnamese, who were being mercilessly bombed. Part of what initially tempted some on the left (including myself, unfortunately) to support the Iraq War was the belief—fed by Iraqi exiles like Kanan Makiya—that overthrowing Saddam Hussein would benefit the long-suffering Iraqi people. When it became clear that the war, in addition to being a disaster for the US, was a disaster for Iraqis, most of whom wanted their US occupiers out, leftist support for the war collapsed.

To oppose America’s intervention in Ukraine, therefore, Sanders or Maddow would need to argue both that it’s harming the United States and that it’s harming the people of Ukraine. They aren’t saying the former because the US isn’t directly at war. American soldiers aren’t dying and the Biden administration is eschewing a no-fly zone and other steps that might spark Russian retaliation against the US. And they’re not saying the latter because it’s so obvious that Ukrainians want American military support.

The leftists who oppose such support often claim that Ukraine’s military is infested with neo-Nazis. It’s their way of suggesting that the government in Kyiv doesn’t share the left’s values and doesn’t truly represent Ukraine’s people. But that’s a hard argument to sustain when Ukraine’s president is a secular, democratically elected Jew. When South Vietnam’s autocratic government asked for US support in the 1960s and 1970s, many left-leaning Americans strongly suspected that the Vietnamese people’s real sympathies lay with the communist Vietcong. When Zelensky requests US support today, it’s impossible to credibly claim that his people’s sympathies lie with the Kremlin.

In some ways, the reaction of left and right-leaning Americans to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine resembles their reaction to Serbia’s invasion of Bosnia in the 1990s. Back then, Pat Buchanan—an ideological forerunner of Carlson, who for a time seriously challenged for the 1996 Republican presidential nomination—said America didn’t have a dog in the fight. On the left, by contrast, the sight of a hyper-nationalist dictator ravaging a pluralistic democracy led prominent progressives to support Bill Clinton’s decision to bomb. It was in Bosnia that a new post-Cold War species, the liberal hawk, with its proclivity for humanitarian war, was born.

But the era of humanitarian war (or, if you prefer, “humanitarian” war) is over. America’s disastrous 2011 intervention in Libya put the final nail in its coffin. And besides, humanitarian wars aren’t possible against nuclear powers. America isn’t going to bomb Russian tanks as it once bombed Serbian tanks. So most American leftists are stuck wanting to support Ukraine but fearing that the tools America can deploy may be inadequate for the job. The much fiercer internecine struggle is on the right, between hawks who are willing to risk war with Russia through a no-fly zone and isolationists like Carlson, who wonder why America should care about Ukraine at all. If I were Ukrainian, I’d be happy the guy in the White House is a Democrat.

Other Stuff:

I published a New York Times column this week about why it’s a mistake to call Tucker Carlson and Tulsi Gabbard traitors.

Jewish Currents has just released a fascinating, and all-too-timely, print edition about the identity, culture, and politics of Soviet Jews. Subscribe and check it out.

There’s been a lot of powerful writing in recent weeks from Russians lamenting their country’s return to totalitarianism. But I found this essay by Cathy Young in The Bulwark particularly moving.

In 972 Mag, Raef Zreik examines the bitter irony that Ukrainian Jews taking refuge in Israel to escape Russia dispossession may end up contributing to Israel’s ongoing dispossession of Palestinians.

Last week, I spoke at a virtual Bernie Sanders townhall on “The Progressive Response on Foreign Policy and the War in Iraq.”

If you’re in New York City, I’ll be moderating a debate this Wednesday entitled “Are the US and NATO Responsible for the War in Ukraine?” featuring, amongst others, Timothy Snyder and Julia Ioffe.

See you on Friday,

Peter