Progressives Should Give War a Chance

The letter advocating a negotiated solution to the war in Ukraine that members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus sent this week to U.S. President Joe Biden—and then abruptly withdrew—reveals a great deal about left-wing thinking on foreign policy. Some of it is admirable; much is not.

The 30 signatories, who include not only leading progressives like Reps. Pramila Jayapal and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez but also non-fire-breathing Reps. Jamie Raskin and Peter DeFazio, write out of a profound horror of the consequences of war. “A war that is allowed to grind on for years,” they observe, “threatens to displace, kill, and immiserate far more Ukrainians while causing hunger, poverty, and death around the world.” The authors do not threaten to withhold American support—as Republican leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy has done—and do not suggest a settlement imposed on Ukraine, as many realists have proposed.

Yet the letter rests on a pernicious fantasy. The signatories urge Biden to pursue a diplomatic solution to end the war on terms amenable to both Ukraine and Russia; they look forward to the establishment of “a new European security arrangement acceptable to all parties.” There is no such diplomatic solution; there can be no such European security arrangement. In the weeks before the war, French President Emmanuel Macron called for both; he soon came to understand that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ambitions had rendered them impossible.

Some of the signatories have complained that the letter was drafted in June and then released four months later with no prior warning. If that’s true, one sympathizes with their plight. But the proposal would have constituted a fantasy in June, by which time Russia had gained control over one-fifth of Ukraine’s territory in the east and south. How could diplomatic intervention then have preserved what the authors call “a free and independent Ukraine”? The answer: only if they were suggesting that Kyiv could accept a surrender of territory in exchange for security guarantees that would keep it technically “free and independent.”

Here, I think, we come to the nub of the matter. Because the parties to the war in Ukraine are major global suppliers of food and fuel, the ripples of suffering have spread around the world—including, if to a much lesser degree than elsewhere, the United States. Just how much sacrifice do the rest of us have to accept to preserve Ukraine’s boundaries? McCarthy’s statement implies that House Republicans, and presumably their constituents, have reached their limits. The United States just doesn’t have that much of a dog in that fight. The progressive view is not a selfish or isolationist one: The limits are defined by an acute awareness of global costs, including those to the United States’ ability to care for its own citizens. The unstated premise of the letter is that Biden would help the world by getting Ukrainians to see reason.

Most of the world does, in fact, think just that. Major developing countries like India or South Africa have resisted Biden’s insistent framing of the war as a local affair putting European powers against one another. The U.S. left is also extremely leery of endorsing what sounds like the Cold War Manichaeism of the 1950s, exemplified in Foreign Policy’s interview with historian Stephen Wertheim of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in August.) Progressive figures like Sen. Bernie Sanders do not hesitate to criticize China and Russia for violations of human rights, but they balk at the idea of an ideological struggle with America leading the white hats.

If what’s at stake is just territory, then Ukraine is perhaps asking too great a sacrifice from the rest of us; after all, the country effectively recognized Russian control of the Donbas in 2014 by signing the Minsk agreement. But it is clear now, if it wasn’t then, that Putin doesn’t simply wish to shift borders but to undermine a Western-led order that he regards as inimical to his project of restoring Russian greatness. He doesn’t want a home in Europe and thus cannot be contained inside a new European security architecture. It is precisely because so many people in Europe and the United States recognize the danger he poses that, at least until now, the West has held together in the face of Putin’s punishments and threats. Ordinary citizens understand the stakes.

The war in Ukraine is so unlike any other war of the last 60 years that it has disoriented thinking on all sides—but above all, on the left. The wars that have shaped liberal thinking about foreign policy in these decades are ones that the United States waged against distant threats—in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq—or against moral monsters—in the Balkans, Somalia, and Libya. We argue over whether America needed to unleash its firepower against adversaries who posed no immediate threat to its existence. On the left, where skepticism of U.S. power runs deep, the answer has usually been “no.” But the war in Ukraine is not about American power and does not pose the question of humanitarian intervention. It is an unprovoked war of territorial aggression, like then-Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait—save that Ukraine is an enormous country and a democracy. It’s not the worst war, but it is the most dangerous one since World War II.

The signatories of the Congressional Progressive Caucus letter rightly assert that “it is not America’s place to pressure Ukraine’s government regarding sovereign decisions.” Yet, they still seem to feel that the time has come to replace force with diplomacy, as if each side was making unreasonable demands. That time hasn’t come, and thinking so betrays a misunderstanding of the relationship between diplomacy and force. In the face of a ruthless aggressor, diplomacy can only begin to work after the tide of battle has decisively turned. Then-U.S. Civil War Gen. George McClellan ran against then-incumbent Abraham Lincoln in 1864 on a platform of diplomacy with the South; Lincoln insisted that the republic must first be saved. That’s Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s position.

In my lifetime, America has carried out two colossally misbegotten wars and many pointless acts of aggression (Panama, Grenada, etc.). We have learned that talking, however unsatisfactory, is almost always the wiser course than killing people. But sometimes, it isn’t; and sometimes, you have no choice but to keep killing people until the other side stops. The signatories of the letter worry about the sacrifices the world is making for Ukraine; they forget about the sacrifices Ukraine is making for the rest of us.