Grassroots Preview: De-Alignment
An Advance Copy of My Upcoming Progressive Populist Column
The Russian war on Ukraine has upended alliances, both domestically and internationally. The antiwar movement is split, the world is unsure of where the United States stands, and the bully occupying the White House is doing what he can to smash the China.
It’d be easy just to blame him, but he’s more symptom than cause, more flowering of the invasive, dangerous weed, than its seed.
My column for the Progressive Populist for the April 1 issue follows. You can read it now if you are a paying subscriber, or wait for the issue to come out in a few weeks.
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De-Alignment
Nothing good can be said about Russia’s war on Ukraine. The death toll, which has been almost impossible to pin down, continues to rise.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Russia invaded a sovereign neighbor and has engaged in war crimes. It has usurped large sections of Ukraine’s territory, and leveled Ukrainian cities and towns. Ukraine has responded, valiantly, holding on for three years against the onslaught, but it is the smaller and weaker participant, and there are limits to what it can accomplish on the battlefield.
The immediate and obvious costs, the most important for now, are the lost lives and decimated infrastructure in eastern Ukraine.
The war also has empowered arms traders and is offering a proving ground for new weapons: drones, new long-range American, British, and Russia weapons, North Korea missiles.
Some of the same can be said for Israel and its assault on Gaza — new, bolder and potentially deadlier weapons are being rolled out by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.
The war — both wars, really — has to end, both quickly and fairly, a dual-reality being ignored as of this writing, as the debate gets refracted through the lens of world power-dynamics, President Donald Trump’s bromance with Putin and the world’s autocrats, and American domestic politics on the right and the left.
The international dynamics are clear — or should be. The war is an example of two things: The bullies have been unleashed and the world order is in a state of flux.
Great power no longer demands responsibility (to quote from Spider-Man), but is instead the demand itself. Those with the bigger armies hold the cards, as Trump essentially told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
For Trump and his team, this means all diplomacy is a form of deal making designed to have winners (him) and losers rather than one in which everyone involved tries to find a solution that is both fair and long lasting. This is why his limited discussions with Ukraine have been more focused on extorting mineral wealth from the country than on finding a permanent solution both sides could live with.
Trump’s extortion and general lack of concern for the rest of the world are symptoms, and not the cause, no matter how much we want to put the blame directly on him. The unraveling of the institutions built from the ashes of World War II and then retooled following the break up of the Soviet Union has been inevitable in many ways because many of these institutions were built to deal with Cold War realities.
Russia has always seen NATO as a direct threat (because it is in many ways), and each expansion of the original group has only reinforced that sense in Moscow. It sees NATO creeping closer to its borders in a way that, were it happening in with a Russian alliance in Central America, would cause us to send troops. This is not conjecture. This is what much of the Reagan presidency entailed.
We are living in a wholly different reality and have been for the last 35 years, but in many ways we have sought to recreate the mechanisms and institutions we used during the Cold War to maintain an illusory exceptionalism that has finally and fully dissipated.
Putin’s war against his neighbor has demonstrated the limits of a Western foreign policy that calls for the provision of weapons but not actual soldiers. (No, I am not advocating for “boots on the ground,” just pointing out the limits of what always has been a contradiction.)
The war — and Trump’s reaction to it — has also heightened divisions within the antiwar movement, fissures that have long existed but that now threaten our ability as peace activists to find a just ending to the bloodshed in Ukraine.
When Putin’s forced entered Ukraine, I was concerned that the war would be used to prop up military budgets and weapons sales. That has happened, as I said.
What I didn’t see coming was the shifting of alliances, and the way some on the left have gravitated to Putin’s side — trotting out an ornate set of mischaracterizations, mythologies and lies to rehabilitate Putin and undermine the Ukrainian defense efforts.
Much of this has been a social media thing, with some on the left arguing that the 2013-2014 Ukrainian crisis — known in Ukraine as the Maidan protests or the Revolutionary of Dignity — was part of a U.S. coup that topped a legitimate, if pro-Russian leader. They’ve trotted out the Ukraine=Nazi trop, one that has some historical legitimacy, but that unfairly relies on a small coterie of rightwing elements to undermine the legitimacy of Zelenskyy’s election.
Zelenskyy is not perfect, and too many in the West have developed a kind of crush on him, investing him with superhuman powers. He’s just a man, an elected politician, one who happens to be leading a war-ravaged nation that remains under assault.
But this is not about Zelenskyy. It is about legitimate suspicion of American malfeasance abroad, earned by decades of misadventures and nefarious actions by our intelligence agencies, of a realpolitik of power dressed up as virtue and all of that. I get why my left colleagues are suspicious, but I think they have been captured by their own paranoia — a phenomenon Naomi Klein describes in Doppelgänger in regard to the rightward shift and conspiracizing of so many former lefties and liberals.
This war needs to end and it needs to end quickly. But its end must not come at the expense of the Ukrainian people, which is where this seems to be going as I write this. A truce that does not include protections against future Russian incursion is not a truce at all.